God's will

When someone is sick, people start talking about God's will.

Thy will be done. What does it mean? I've heard it used several ways:

1. "Thy will be done" as a magical prayer.
   
   It's easy to fall into the belief that if I say this special prayer before a frightening, uncertain event, then the outcome is God's will—even if the outcome is terrible.
   
   I knew a woman who broke her neck in an accident. Just before the accident she had prayed for God's will to be done, and so she believed that it was God's will for her to break her neck. She lost her faith over it. This interpretation of "Thy will be done" imagines us having a lot more power than we do. If I say the magic words, then everything will happen exactly according to God's will? No. My words and thoughts do not control the universe.
   
   
2. "Thy will be done" as an existential statement.
   
   To some people, "Thy will be done" isn't a request, but an observation about life's great events being beyond our control. It's like saying, "Que sera, sera." The dice will land how they will, and we must accept our mortality and our limits. I can see truth in this, certainly. But it's not really a prayer; it's more of a philosophy.
   
   
3. "Thy will be done" as an affirmation of my willingness to see God in all outcomes.
   
   This prayer takes courage, for sure. The outcome might be painful; it takes great faith to open up your hands and say, "Okay God, I believe you're with me in this, and I'm with you in this, no matter what."
   
   This is subtly different from saying that a terrible outcome would be the will of God. It's saying that no matter what happens, I will look, hope, and pray for God's will to come out of it. Which is related to....
   
   
4. "Thy will be done" as an ardent, passionate request for what is good.
   
   This prayer assumes that wholeness, peace, love, hope, life, and freedom are God's will, whoever or whatever God is. It's a request for God to bring those things about. "Please, God, may your kindom*, in which there is peace and perfect health and unity of spirit, come to pass here, now, on Earth, in this situation! May your greatest hope be fulfilled."

I gravitate most naturally to number 4 when I pray, though I'm thinking that incorporating more of number 3 would be a good thing too....

* not a typo

Redemptive sadness

(My blog has moved to SleepOnTheHearth.com. Please visit!)

I spent three nights last month at Mercy Center in Burlingame, California. The Mercy Center has several walking paths that were created years ago by Father Thomas Hand, S.J. One of the paths, called the Water Way, leads you down a slope and into an area shadowed by trees, then alongside a dark creek that is criss-crossed with fallen branches and tree trunks.

This depiction of the Tenth Station of the Cross is nailed to a post at one end of the Water Way. At this point in the story, Christ's clothes are taken from him: one last humiliation before death.

I am struck by the sadness in each man's face, and by the way in which Christ is clasping the man's hand. I don't believe that redemptive violence is part of the Christian story.* Instead, I believe that God willingly entered into our suffering to be with us, because of love for us. It is a different story.


* Shout-out to Shawn Anthony at Lo-Fi Tribe.

No, it's not about comfort.

John 11:1–45

v. 37: But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"

It's the fifth Sunday in Lent, and the first anniversary of my dad's death. The story of Lazarus's death and resurrection (or resuscitation?) was very alive to me during March of last year. Here is an excerpt from my journal.

March 15, 2007 The heading for this section in my bible is "Jesus Comforts the Sisters." I just crossed it out. I don't think your deepest intention and hope for them here is that they be comforted. Comfort is so little compared to whatever it is you're really driving at in your interactions with them. No, you are not bringing COMFORT to the sisters—COMFORT would have been showing up a week earlier and sparing them Lazarus's death scene, embalming, burial, and their own grieving, doubting, and loss of faith in...

in what?

They probably forever lost their faith in their COMFORT being your highest priority for them. After this scene, they knew that you were willing to let them suffer—though you did eventually suffer with them.

Jesus, if you were not in my dad's room during this last year, then you were not anywhere. Again and again, therefore, I chose to believe you were there—the silent God who brought no happy affect or felt sense of presence. Now that is a durable God. The existence of so much suffering on Earth is not a data point for atheism if God is like that: so very unmotivated to always relieve suffering, but always suffering alongside, so deeply, and seeing more deeply into suffering than we could ever imagine doing—living all the way in the forest of it when I'm only brave enough to visit the outermost trees.

Looking for someone else

John 20:14

At this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

Jesus, I don't want this to be you. I would guess that Mary saw only two options: Jesus was either dead, or he was alive. She had seen him die and knew he was dead. Then he came back to "life," and maybe she assumed that if Jesus was "alive" again, he would go back to being how he was before.

For me, it's easy to imagine these two options (and only these two options) for God: (1) God is dead, dead meaning DEAD, and therefore powerless and uncaring; or (2) God is alive, meaning active and powerful. This would be a never-fading, never-dying God who prevented suffering and death from happening in the first place.

But what have we got? In John 11:1–44, Jesus allows Lazarus to die, joins the sisters in their grief, cries with them, ... and then raises Lazarus from the dead. Jesus is not dead (powerless and uncaring), and he's not "alive" the way I would want him to be (preventing suffering before it occurs).

Jesus,
Like Mary, I'm having trouble recognizing you. What can I expect of you? I guess I can expect you to be present in my suffering and in the suffering of others, and I can expect an ultimate redemption—justice and relief. But I can't expect you always to ward off suffering before it happens.

The implication is that to follow you, I need to be present to suffering, willing to suffer alongside those who suffer, not necessarily ever able to take away the suffering altogether. I'm scared that I can't do this—I'm not sure I'm willing. Or able.

All the suffering on earth is like a forest, and you traverse the dark paths through the trees night and day, searching for and staying with those who are lost and in pain.

How can you stand it?

With your help, holding your hand, I've timidly touched the outermost trees. Give me the compassion and the courage to follow you wherever you want me to go, even if it's right into the darkness with you.

Staying with Jesus

John 19:38–42

[My paraphrase...] Two wealthy men who've been pretending not to be Jesus' disciples come forward to claim his dead body, prepare it for burial, and lay it in a tomb.

I've been working my way through the gospel of John, and for round about a year I've been mired in the crucifixion. Jesus' willingness to suffer astonishes and puzzles me something awful, because the implications are really frightening. Back in March or April I wrote the following question on the bookmark that I keep in my breviary:

Christ is not driven by a need to avoid suffering. What does life look like, knowing this?

What did going forward with life look like for these two men who had just watched Jesus willingly endure suffering?

For one thing, they stayed with him, tolerating the discomfort of a sight, sound, smell, and touch that just about everyone else wanted to get the hell away from.

I'm struck by the tenderness of the scene. It must have taken them hours. They probably washed blood and sweat off of Jesus' body. Was what they did women's work? It was intimate in the extreme. They stayed with Jesus.