No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

by Greg Garrett

Well, we pray for the departed because we think their essence is changed, not obliterated. Death is not final—that is the Christian belief. Our prayers for them make this a living reality in our lives together in this part of the kingdom. Our prayers for the departed say again that we believe in the Cloud of Witnesses of which they are now a part, praying with us, in their new part of the kingdom.

in my tradition, saints are not sneakily placed birdies set to chirp on your behalf into the ear of God. But they do dwell with Him now as we hope someday to dwell with Him, and the lives and works they left behind are intended to be examples of faithful Christian life, examples well worth our study and emulation. It makes sense to me because as I look at the people who have shaped my life—and my faith—I have no trouble thinking of them, living or dead, as saints.

He inspired me to love God, to love others, but never to lose my sense of humor like so many joyless Christians I’ve run across over the years. He taught me that you can talk about Jesus all day long—and he did love Jesus—but that how you act is the greatest test of—and witness to—your belief.

Anselm who proposed the stirring “proof” of God’s existence—“God is that than which nothing greater can be imagined. If I can think of something so great, then it must exist, since reality is by definition even greater than imagination.”4

fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.” (If we hope to understand the things of God, we begin not with the mind, but with the love of God, and faith [and reason, faithfully applied] will lead us toward a deeper knowledge of God.)

His belief that we could understand more readily if we began with faith has proven true in my own life; years of skeptical thinking, reading, and reasoning brought me no closer to understanding God or my place in God’s world. But once I rested my faith in God and began the search from that angle, I began to find what I was searching for.

The life of faith and the life of the mind are both ongoing journeys, and it would be good for us to remember that.

In ordination, we are told that people undergo an ontological change—under the anointing to do God’s work for the sake of the church, they are literally not the same beings they were before someone laid hands on them and prayed for their transformation.

“Martyr” comes from the Greek marturion, which means “witness,” and deaths such as that of St. Thomas Becket testify to a faith that sustains, a faith in a God worth dying for.

Few of us will ever face death on account of our beliefs. No knights will ride up to our front doors, and demand we recant our beliefs, nor is someone likely to try to strike us down inside our own churches. But we are asked to live for our faith, a substantial witness that in some ways is harder than dying.

And we are called to live. We are called to a life of service, faith, and selflessness, countercultural values even in this so-called Christian nation. While I have found my greatest joy in such a life, it is still—even with the help of Christian community and a faithful God—a life that challenges me daily, for I am, deep down, a selfish and lazy creature.

But the truth is eventually I will always fail, for Jesus was God and I am not.

Like Augustine, I have wrestled with the challenge of leaving the familiar simply on faith; like Anselm, I have struggled to understand who God is and how that should shape our lives; like Thomas, I have been attracted like a moth to the flame of power and fame before, I pray, discovering more lasting values.

posole, and then a plate of carne adovada,

In great art, tension and discord knock you on your heels. It looks like they can never be resolved. And then—only then—can the hoped for resolution give you aesthetic pleasure.

for four hours this morning, I wasn’t reading about beauty, or looking at pictures of the outdoors on my computer. I was in this great, good creation of God, experiencing it—and Him—directly. I was afraid—and grateful. I saw, felt, heard things I would never otherwise have experienced.

Water is the surest and most beautiful of our sacramental elements, life-giving in itself and as a symbol, and here at Ghost Ranch I felt closest to understanding its importance to the great faiths that arose in the desert.

I am, as you know if you have read this far, a writer, a creator with a small c, if you will, and I have long felt that we participate powerfully in God’s life when we ourselves are part of the act of creation. When you paint a picture, write a song, deliver a baby into this world, even—those are holy moments, and they are most holy for us because they are set in the physical world, in things we can actually see, hear, touch, love.

First, we need an incarnational theology that accepts not only that God has entered into creation in the process of forming and shaping it (and us), but also that God thought so highly of the physical world that He was willing to walk through it as a human being, that in that guise He was willing to die for it.

Second, we need a sacramental understanding, one that is hard to find in a lot of contemporary Christian settings. Simply put, and moving from my first argument, a sacramental theology accepts that reality is charged with hidden meaning, that the divine is mediated for us through physical things (as in the sacramental wine and bread), God moving from His realm into ours, and doing it like a breeze on a summer’s day, into the physical through the physical.

When something is beautifully made, when something is true, then it is good. And where the true, the beautiful, and the good are gathered together, can God be far away?

I have been reading Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s remarkably beautiful novel about a dying pastor who is writing a series of letters to be left for his young son. The story itself is full of profundity, and the book resounds with the theological themes of repentance, forgiveness, grace, and love. But perhaps more important than any of those things, in my reading, I was stunned again and again by the sheer beauty of the writing—a phrase polished and turned like a fine gem, a conversational exchange that was pitch perfect, an image that reached across boundaries to connect separate worlds.

knowing how God has manifested and moved in our world, I am encouraged to think that God deserves our best and most beautiful, and that those of us who consciously make art, write songs, tell stories, build, paint, create are called to offer up works of beauty and strength and reality as the greatest possible gift to each other and to God.

“Doing justice to the physical world,” he writes in Grace and Necessity, “is reflecting the love of God for it, the fact that this world is worth dying for in God’s eyes.”2

Their stories and struggles, their pull toward God or fall away from Him are genuine pieces of experience and must be presented as well as the airbrushed beauty or the simplified experience found inside the walls of the ark.

“The plausibility of a work of fiction dealing with humanity’s relation to God is inseparable from its refusal to make easy or tidy up the data of a world that is recognizable to anyone not sharing the writer’s [faith] commitments.”3

So in O’Connor’s beautiful and difficult work, in Gilead, in, I hope, my own fiction, what makes it Christian art is not the desire to glorify God or to avoid challenging anyone’s beliefs. These are works written to be true, honest, beautiful. They do not claim to have the answers, and they do not shrink from offense, if someone chooses to take it. And that’s the sort of beauty that art should aspire to; theology attempts to answer questions, while art is often mysterious and open-ended.

The beauty that the Christian artist offers up should not be a work of idealized or sentimentalized beauty, nor should it be a work of dogma disguised as art. It should be, simply, the truest, most authentic work the artist can create. It should shout for joy, weep from fear. It may depict a loving family or a lonely drunk. But because it contains in some greater or lesser sense the essence of its Christian creator, it will be informed by the knowledge of the indwelling of God in creation, the truth that, as Williams writes, “God is possible … in the most grotesque and empty and cruel situations.”4

That’s the challenge, ever and always: to do the work, to do it well, without shortcuts or sellouts, to do it without pandering either to the secular world or to the Christian market, to honor God with work that is challenging and realistic and mysterious— And beautiful. And when we do that, I believe with all my heart that God is there, and that the Spirit can blow through the work, bound to God knows where.

And this is exactly what I believe faith is about, or should be about—bringing a cool glass of water, holding a hand, saying a word, standing alongside those who suffer.

That’s exactly what happens when we’re scared badly enough—we hurt ourselves. We make bad decisions—or perhaps more accurately, we make decisions out of a bad place—and we forget about what we’re called to do, how we’re supposed to act, what’s supposed to matter.

Let’s just leave it at this: When we are afraid, we make bad choices—or at least, as we said, we make choices from a place of anxiety and apprehension, rather than from a place of faith and assurance.

Be present, Spirit of God, Within us, your dwelling place and home, That this house may be one where All darkness is penetrated by your light, All troubles calmed by your peace, All evil redeemed by your love, All pain transformed in your suffering, And all dying glorified in your risen life.

Don’t be so afraid. You don’t need to be afraid. Fear not.

As Diana Butler Bass writes, we have great hopes for church: “Church is the sacred space where saints and sinners gather to hear God’s word, engage practices of prayer and service, and be transformed.”1

If we gain our souls and lose our brothers, we have done ill, he says. We need one another. But we cannot live in relationship, whether in a church or in a shared flat, unless we are willing to forgive each other.

So if I have hurt you, I am sorry, and I beg your forgiveness. And if you have hurt me, I will do my utmost to forgive you. We may have to agree to be and think and even believe differently. But there is lots of room at the foot of the cross, and we can stand in different places, yet still have the same thing in sight.

Only I didn’t succeed, and the thing that seems to keep coming up is that alone many of us not only fail but flounder, and it becomes painfully obvious that we need fellow travelers. Ubuntu. As Desmond Tutu says, this is “what it means to be truly human, to know that you are bound up with others in the bundle of life.”1

If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. (Matt. 18:15–20)

So how are we supposed to live together, given the selfishness of our human nature, the imperfection of our needs and desires? How do we deal with the worst-case scenario, those among us who deal the body of believers a grievous hurt? Well, judging from the Scripture—and from U2—we are to call one another to better behavior, to be our best selves. Approach them privately—so as not to embarrass them—and tell them how their behavior has hurt you, so that they can have a chance to fix things.

Hippo actually expected us to put aside our hurt and think most about our brother or sister when we spoke with them about what he or she had done: “You do this not for yourself,” Augustine said, “but for him. For the harm he has done is not primarily to you, but to himself.”

We are to commit ourselves to the common work we have taken on, to the journey we are making together, to the recognition that every individual matters, but that it as a part of the ecclesia—the gathering of Christ followers—that we are the people God calls us to be. This is how we are supposed to live together. We need one another. I can’t be me without you. And when we live in this way, Christ is with us, in the midst of us.

I believe prayer is an important part of figuring out what we are supposed to be doing.

If God is not a vending machine, then what is my relationship to God? How do I pray? What is prayer, anyway?

Phyllis suggested that when we work, then stop to pray at regular intervals, as monks and nuns have always done when they follow fixed-hour prayer, both sides of our brains are exercised and both activities become richer and more successful.

Movement—running, walking, biking, labyrinth walking—may be prayer for you. Music—singing it, listening to it—may bring God closer; Augustine was a great lover of music and was the first person to argue that when we sing, we pray twice.

Being in the natural world is a powerful form of prayer for me, particularly when I am awake to the spiritual dimension of what I’m experiencing. Meditation, contemplative prayer, fasting, reading the Bible or spiritual works with reverence, journaling—all of these can be prayer, although not everyone realizes it.

Whatever it is, if it connects us to God or brings us to a greater awareness of His presence, I think we can call it prayer.

Prayer often includes—and perhaps should always include—invocation, which is the invitation for God to be present, to hear us, to make God’s self known to us.

Prayer also often includes confession, which is our acknowledgment of our faults, of those things that have separated us from God, separated us from other people, separated us from our best selves, those selves that God is calling us to be.