From a certain point of view, it’s amazing that it’s been so long since I was in the damp haze of such a melancholy confusion. On the other hand, now I’m used to a certain degree of comfort, clarity and brightness; shadow is disconcerting, to say the least. What scares me the most about those periods is the way the joy and wisdom and love I think I possess seem to be shaken off of me like leaves off a tree in late autumn. It’s very, agonizingly humbling.
Suddenly, I feel quite small and frail. My faith is fragile, my good works conditional, my love tentative.
So, somewhere in all this, I’ve been trying to think about God. This might seem elementary. You might think I should think about God all the livelong day. Au contraire: sadly, but not surprisingly, I am a self-absorbed human like most, and I would conjecture that I spend 98% of my thought on myself, 1.5% on others, and .5% on God. Maybe. The more I think of myself, the worse things get for me, the more confused and unhappy I become. Isn’t that odd?
A fellow named Brother Lawrence, a French monk in the 17th century, wrote a series of letters in which he advocates for the “Practice of the Presence of God.” These come today compiled in a paperback about a quarter of an inch thick, and the first several times I attempted to read them, I thought the guy was a total simpleton and the book a waste of time. The main idea, and Brother Lawrence’s solution for everything, is to think about God at all times. It’s like Windex to the dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding: apply it to fix any ailment.
Maybe your experience is different, but I find truly thinking about God to be excruciating. It makes my mind stretch beyond all limits. The image of a robot that has short-circuited comes to mind—you know, the head starts spinning super-fast, smoke comes out the cracks, and then sparks, and eventually the whole thing explodes.
Come on, try it. Think about God: self-sufficient, created by none and the sustainer of all that is created, three in one, the force that is ever expanding the universe and yet is in each particle of the invisible atom… Ouch, right? What is He thinking, being so far beyond what the mind He created can understand? I don’t understand. I’ll never understand. This is hard for me: the surrender of understanding, the embrace of mind-boggling, and the acceptance of even the possibility that a more important reality lays beneath the visible, comprehensible surface of life.
Ugh. And…awesome! Don’t we really hope that that’s the truth? That there’s more to all of this than meets our own meager comprehension? Does it not produce a bit of awe in us? Is not that alone a good jumping-off point for some kind of worship?
I’m certainly no guru. These are the kinds of dialogues I have with God, in the context of trust built on the way He’s been true to me in the past and what the Bible says about His character as good, loving, faithful. Sometimes I fear that because he’s let me off the leash, I’ll roam too far in my thoughts and wander off a cliff, so to speak. But the Bible also says that what He begins in us, he is faithful to complete. That’s a good thing to cling onto when the fears come a’chasin’.
