February 21, 2007

Glynn Cardy

Ash Wednesday

The story goes that an absent-minded professor was running late. He jumped into a taxi and shouted, “Hurry! At top speed!”

As the taxi sped along he realized he hadn't told the driver where to go, so he shouted, “Do you know where I want to go?”

“No, sir” came the reply, “but I'm driving as fast as I can.”

The Gospel writer Matthew warns us about conspicuous giving and piety, and this little tale could warn us about conspicuous speed. The fast that God is requiring of us may be to go slow. Yet the story questions not only haste, but also direction. It asks: “Where are we going?”

First and foremost Lent is a time of prayer. It is a time to sense the nonsensical ways of God. It is a time to be in God's time, beyond the dictates of the watch and deadline. It is a time to stand waiting for the God who comes in strange guises.

Lenten prayer is different from other prayer. It's prayer that moves us away from the surety of well-known roads and signs, in order to reorientate us in God. It's prayer that takes us off road in order to question deeply the roads we've been on and the signs we've been following. 'Wilderness' sounds wonderful to our urban ears, but it was in Scripture a place of fear.

Forty days is a metaphorical time span used in biblical literature since the horrific tale of Noah to indicate disorientation. Whether your experience is of 40 days, 40 hours, or 40 minutes, it matters not… Being disoriented in God is a once-felt-never-forgotten experience. 'Disoriented' is a nice way of saying 'lost'. Most of us are frightened of being lost.

I have a regular visitor to my office who has God in a bottle. Rub the bottle and out pops this wonderful, I'm-here-to-please, genie God. My visitor tells me I'm wrong about the wilderness. Genie God will always be with us, holding our hand, and leading us in the right direction. Yeah, right. Tell that to Moses or Job. I listen, and try to understand my visitor.

Why do we pray?

I have a good friend, Shirley, who likes to bake. God is in her kitchen. They are friends. Together they whip up all sorts of goodies to share with any who pass by. She knows she has reduced the wonder and expanse of God into a very anthropomorphic and domestic image. She is not theologically ignorant. It's a choice about prayer.

“Glynn,” she says as the cheese scones come out, “I don't pray any more because I have to. I don't pray because my mother or my priest tells me I must. I'm too old for that. I don't pray in order to be dependent upon God. I'm not a little child. Rather, like two old friends who have shared many years together, I trust God and God trusts me. And together we bake.”

Shirley uses the word bake instead of pray. “Pray seems to imply talking”, she tells me. “Baking is more like being together, making a mess, and cooking up something for others.” Prayer for her is about friendship with God.

I'm reminded of Professor Roberta Bondi, an authority on the Early Desert Fathers and Mothers, who when asked about prayer advised those students who were afraid of God, who had grown up hearing about God's bigness and their wormlikeness to find something that didn't occupy their minds but was pleasant to do, like handiwork, or a doing a crossword, or even reading a light novel, and to just sit in God's presence. Roberta encouraged them to spend time with God as they would spend time with a friend without talking.

Once I asked Shirley about wilderness, about being lost, and not having her friend beside her. “Sometimes the kitchen can be a very lonely place,” she confided. “I just keep on baking, keep on giving food away, and keep on hoping that God will come back. And then unexpectedly, like the smell of thick broth on a frosty morning, my friend returns.”

I have another mate, Max, who does it differently. He ditched the anthropomorphic God who allegedly had the whole world in His hands back in university days. I guess he had a sort of genie God and when the bottle didn't work he threw them both away.

Sometime a couple of decades later his understanding of physics met his understanding of theology and they started courting.

“God,” he says, gesturing expansively as we walk along, “is a transformative energy. 'God is light', 'God is love' – what do these mean if not energy?”

When I ask him about the purpose of prayer he uses phrases like 'recharging the batteries' and 'getting the rhythm right.' Prayer is not about a friendship with a human-like deity, but about being still and letting the power of God move in and through his life.

Max prays mostly as he walks. It involves his breathing, listening to what's happening within himself as well as in the world around, and tending his dog. I walk with him some days.

I asked him about being lost in the wilderness.

“Let me tell you a story,” he says. “A rich, powerful guy came to a priest to learn about prayer. 'Why do you want to pray?' asked the priest. 'I want to be in harmony with God and learn to control my passions.' 'Good,' said the priest, 'but I must warn you that in time you will discover that what you seek is achieved not through control but through surrender.'”

Max too has experienced the absence of the theologically familiar and the disorientation that the unfamiliar brings. Control and surrender are ongoing themes in his life.

Some days I meet Shirley's God and we do some creative cooking. Some days I meet Max's God as my heart walks to a different beat. The God of Christians is not confined to any one form or metaphor.

Indeed when it seems God is being confined by our need to control and make sense of the world, then danger is in the air. Christians can begin to take sides and say God is like this and not like that. One group takes Shirley's personable God, promotes that God as ideal, and then uses that ideal to judge others. Another group takes Max's God and does the same thing. Both groups know they are on the right road, and others aren't. They even have scripture to prove it.

Lent invites us to get off the road – to get off all our roads, whether we're travelling swiftly or slowly, and to venture into uncertainty. To disconnect us from the usual and familiar in order to later see them in a new light. I think it's no accident that in all the accounts of Jesus' wilderness experience the familiar God is absent.

1. P.4 of Roberta C. Bondi interview. http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=302