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Reflection for May 8th 2005

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Two weeks ago I spent a day and overnight at a lodge near Boonville with the several ministers (all retired now) with whom I meet every Thursday morning to discuss Scripture. I and Peadar Dalton carry the Catholic end of the discussions among our Methodist, Congregational, Episcopal, Lutheran and Dutch Reformed brethren. The full day get-together gave us a chance to break out of our "intellectual" routine and just socialize, play cards, enjoy a camp-style supper and in the case of some (not me!) enjoy the experience of a sauna and plunge into the icy shallows of the Navarro River. Still, we allowed some time for discussion and the topic chosen was prayer. It was a pretty free wheeling exchange and despite our different backgrounds we seemed to arrive at a consensus regarding prayer's influence on our lives - so that if I rehearse here what I had to say, I trust it reflects the gist of everyone's contribution.

My experience of prayer has been that of a dialogue between me and God - an ongoing conversation triggered by complaints, questions, thoughts that arise in my mind and are tossed out there into the seeming Silence of God whence I wait for a response. And responses come sooner or later by way of subtle or major changes in the circumstances and direction of my life or in the shape of people I meet or mistakes I've made. Or then there's that sudden staleness of an idea I once prized that's been made obsolete by a new idea - which turns out to be the old idea experienced as more profound and truer than ever before! Or often God's response seems to emerge from the space between the lines of whatever I'm reading, be it Scripture, a poem, a novel, a billboard, or even something I myself am writing - as though even while I'm saying something it occurs to me that Someone's saying something to me in what I just said! Figure that out.

And you know the more you think about it, the more you realize your whole life has been a prayer, a dialogue whereby God calls, moves, insinuates, plants thoughts, illuminates experiences, crosses your path in such a way that in response to his interventions you advance from a biased mind to a kinder one, from being a know it all to becoming a learner. Each of our lives, meandering from childhood on, are nothing less than a prayer, a quest, a conversation with the Holy Spirit who is caring and versatile enough to confront us even down paths we take to avoid his seductions.

And that being the case, my minister friends and I were so very glad to be old men at last! Because from our aged vantage point we could now see how in each of our lives God had been constantly responsive to our situations, enticing us toward a realm of peace and grace we never quite knew when we were young. And I suddenly recalled a quote from some mystic who said, We are born old but if we live right we die infants. In other words, we're no sooner born into this world than we're given an ancestor's name and taught to speak languages burdened with racism, belligerence, polarizations and gripes. And so we're doomed to live our lives, unless at some point we begin to live right, to pick up the signals of the Holy Spirit trying to engage us in prayer, in dialogue amid the din, from which point on the din begins to quiet down and we emerge (perhaps at 70) as infants again, unable to speak (which is what infans means in Latin).

In other words we emerge free of the racism, belligerence, polarizations, gripes of our old way of talking and living and ready - within a pregnant silence - to speak words of sincere love to everyone we meet. Which means, of course, that our lifelong dialogue with God has at last become so intimate that we have become God's own voice ourselves, God's word made flesh.

*Poem by Anne Porter in An Altogether Different Language

-- Geoff Wood