Feeling Ourselves

“We live in what one writer has called the 'age of sensation'. We think that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured.” 

― Eugene H. Peterson, "A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society"

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Dear Kate,

"Pay attention," this is what the Spirit asked of me this morning--all mornings, but I was hardly aware most of the time.

The nights are getting longer, mornings less easy; summer doesn't linger.  It burns up your senses and before you know it you are licking wounds, salvaging memories in the holes it left behind.

What is God doing in the here and now, mine and everyone else's, as I work around the clock to work around people and make life work, make things stick, to build a world stable enough for me to say, Yes, good enough for joy?

Nothing is good enough if joy is what we are concocting.  God is notoriously apathetic to our invocation, voodoo magic no formula to summon his presence, no vaccine against our shrinking heads, dying hearts.

Happiness we could buy, from the clearance bin, with a short expiry date.  Long obedience, same direction, all very abstract; we would rather hold on to our dented cans and call them a good deal, breakfast good enough for a dying summer morning.

Last night a friend texted me, as he did many times before, that in a year he will finally be freed of his suffering (actually, a "sea" of suffering, as he put it in Chinese) when he is to retire.  Usually I would answer him with a short voice message, to make it personal, to show him that I care, even if what I was about to say could jeopardize our comradery.  Last night though, I texted back only two words in Chinese: 可能.  I am sure more than possibly you know these two characters, put together this way.

"Possible."

I didn't want my voice to be heard, as if the words weren't mine, weren't from me for my being so reluctant to enunciate them, the sound of them pains me so with their resonance in the empty chamber of our hearts.

Possible, but not likely.

He didn't text back.  It was Death speaking, and he knew I was only a sounding board.

We have many things and people to attend to, don't we, and many of them driving us crazy?  Back to school in a week or two, for the kids; back to hell for those of us attending to their going back, going forward, going sideways, going exactly where we don't want them to go.  Joy I would like them to feel, what privilege it is to have a higher education, one of the best gifts to a human being, but joy I lack in my evangelizing.  Good news all around; not good enough for any of us.

Nothing is ever good enough.  What is good enough is no "thing."

Yours, Alex