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Solviture ambulando, wrote Augustine of Hippo, one of the early theologians of the Christian church. “It is solved by walking.” What is “it”? If you want to find out, then you will have to do your own walking.
The resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God.
The spiritual practice of walking has a long history in the world’s great wisdom traditions.
I am not speaking literally here, although literal lostness is a good place to begin since the skills are the same: managing your panic, marshalling your resources, taking a good look around to see where you are and what this unexpected development might have to offer you.
The Bible is a great help to me in this practice, since it reminds me that God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.
Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.
Walk joyfully on the earth and respond to that of God in every human being.
At the very least, most of us need someone to tell our stories to. At a deeper level, most of us need someone to help us forget ourselves, a little or a lot.
The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.
Like the Desert Fathers, they know that if you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always got.
“If you have a chest full of clothing, and leave it for a long time, the clothing will rot inside it. It is the same with the thoughts in our heart. If we do not carry them out by physical action, after a long while they will spoil and turn bad.” 5
In biblical tradition, the practice of encounter shows up most often as the practice of hospitality, or philoxenia. Take the word apart and you get philo, from one of the four Greek words for love, and xenia, for stranger.
According to Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of Great Britain, “the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to ‘love the stranger.’” 6
“The supreme religious challenge,” says Rabbi Sacks, “is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image,
WHAT WE HAVE most in common is not religion but humanity. I learned this from my religion, which also teaches me that encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get—in the eye-to-eye thing, the person-to-person thing—which is where God’s Beloved has promised to show up.
at least one person is willing to treat it as holy, capitalizing the “You” as well as the “
Call me a romantic, but I think most people want to be good for something. I think they want to do something that matters, to be part of something bigger than themselves, to give themselves to something that is meaningful instead of meaningless.
Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity.
Resting every seventh day, God’s people remember their divine creation. That is what the first Sabbath candle announces: made in God’s image, you too shall rest.
Resting every seventh day, God’s people remember their divine liberation. That is what the second Sabbath candle announces: made in God’s image, you too are free.
According to the rabbis, those who observe Sabbath observe all the other commandments. Practicing it over and over again they become accomplished at saying no, which is how they gradually become able to resist the culture’s killing rhythms of drivenness and depletion, compulsion and collapse.
According to Job, his pain is like being pierced by poisonous arrows.3 It is like being crushed by a tempest,4 like being broken in two, like being seized by the neck and dashed to pieces.5 God has slashed open his kidneys and poured his gall on the ground.6 Job’s skin turns black and falls off his body; his bones burn with heat.7 But this is no more than the approximation of his pain. Job’s suffering surpasses it, as he asks God to explain what has happened to him and receives no answer.
“Why me?” That is all Job wants to know. His physical pain is beyond words. The losses he has suffered are unspeakable. Yet Job will not shut up. With nothing else to do and nothing left to protect, he uses every verbal tool he has to pound on
God’s door: curses, tears, insolence, sarcasm, humility, indignation, reason. What has happened to him has so assaulted his sense of himself before God that he is no longer sure who he is. Job can make no meaning of it. He is furthermore unable to force God to make meaning of it either. Here, then, is another feature of pain, including the pain of suffering. At its worst, it can erase most of what you thought you knew about yourself. People who live with chronic pain usually know more about this than those who may reasonably look forward to feeling better soon. To live with pain on a daily
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Thus Job suffers from God’s silence, which hurts him worse than his boils, worse than his poverty, worse even than the death of his children. Without an answer, his life is meaningless. How does meaninglessness feel? It is like falling through outer space without an oxygen mask on. It is like being tied to your bed by a thousand cobwebs. It is like walking through a crowded shopping mall without ever touching anyone or being touched in return.
Job turns from his friends, who in any case are more invested in defending God than they are in defending him. He will not heed their pious counsel, any more than he will follow his wife’s advice to curse God and die. Job will deal with God or he will deal with no one. If God will not answer him, then he will fill the air with his own furious poetry. This is how faith looks, sometimes: a blunt refusal to stop speaking into the divine silence.
Why do the elderly spend so much time cataloguing the list of things that hurt? Because these deep aches and stinging pains are their constant companions, taking up so much space and requiring so much attention, it is often difficult for another living human being to break through their closed circle and find a seat.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, Job is satisfied with this answer. He
The only reliable wisdom about pain comes from the mouths of those who suffer it, which is why it is so important to listen to them.
The next time you are in real pain, see how you feel about television shows, new appliances, a clean house, or your resumé. Chances are that none of these will do anything for you. All that will do anything for you is some cool water, held out by someone who has stopped everything else in order to look after you. An extra blanket might also help, a dry pillow, the simple knowledge that there is someone in the house who might hear you if you cried.
Still, there are some predictable crises along the way. For instance, I do not know anyone who prays very long without running into the wall of God’s apparent nonresponsiveness.
“If you ask anything in my name, I will do it,” Jesus says in the gospel of John, leaving a lot of us wondering what it is about “in my name” that we do not understand.
“You want to know whether I really believe God will intervene like that?” I think he asked me. “You wonder if I am really that naïve?” Then he told me something that I once knew but had long forgotten, although thanks to him I am not likely to forget again. “Honestly,” he said, “I don’t think it through, not now. I tell God what I want. I’m not smart enough or strong enough to do anything else, and besides, there’s no time. So I tell God what I want and I trust God to sort it out.
I do not know any way to talk about answered prayer without sounding like a huckster or a honeymooner.
The problem, I think, is that divine response to prayer is one of those beauties that remain in the eye of the beholder.
The meaning we give to what happens in our lives is our final, inviolable freedom. Only you can say whether God answered you. If
If uncertainties like these are the sort that move people to pray, then that is because they are the ones that remind us how little real sway we have.
We are players, but we do not direct the play.
Even the decisions we make for ourselves seldom take us where we meant to go.
they have shown me what is really real. They have made me tell the truth. They have quashed all my illusions of control, leaving me with no alternative but to receive my life as an unmitigated gift.
My hope is that if I can practice saying thank you now, when I still approve of most of what is happening to me, then perhaps that practice will have become habit by the time I do not like much of anything that is happening to me. The plan is to replace approval with gratitude. The plan is to take what is as God’s ongoing answer to me.
Within that widened frame, I stay curious about all the different ways there are to pray set prayers, since those particular practices strike me as the stitches that keep the quilt of prayer in place.
All of these visits have aided my sense that there are real things I can do, both in my body and in my mind, to put myself in the presence of God.
The longer I practice prayer, the more I think it is something that is always happening,
HROUGH THE CENTURIES, people practiced at pronouncing blessings have come to some common wisdom, which they have laid down for the rest of us following along behind them. The first piece of wisdom is that a blessing does not confer holiness. The holiness is already there, embedded in the very givenness of the thing.
A blessing will have more power to transform the blessee, although transformation is not required. There is no impressive logic behind this reasoning. The only logic is that all life comes from God, and for that reason alone we may call it blessed, leaving the rest to God.
This last piece of wisdom may be only for those who are very advanced at blessing prayers, but what most of them say is that pronouncing a blessing puts you as close to God as you can get.
To pronounce a blessing on something is to see it from the divine perspective.
That we are able to bless one another at all is evidence that we have been blessed, whether we can remember when or not.
