Discerning when we are hearing from God and when we aren’t (i.e. when we’re making it up ourselves or when it is actually Satan is speaking to us) is one of the central dilemmas that has brought my faith crashing down.
I was in a Bible study a year or two ago where we were discussing God’s leading, and the process of discernment therein. I think I was probably that annoying person in the group who raises the questions that people don’t really want to talk about in the middle of a study on I John. But I dove in anyway: “But how do you really know it’s God speaking to you? Is it a warm, fuzzy feeling? Is it a sense of peace about something that you haven’t had up until that moment? Do you know it’s God if it’s a leading to do kind, loving things? Can it be God if it’s a leading to do bad things – like kill your kids?”
One of the women in my Bible study said, flat out, that if God told her to kill someone, she would do it. It would be wrong to hold that person as more important than God, to make an idol out of that person or their right to life over God’s commandment to end their life. Like Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac, we have to be willing to follow God wherever he leads, even if it is unpopular, illegal or even (to our limited, mortal eyes) immoral.
Which threw the rest of us in a frenzy: Whoa! Jesus is about love and forgiveness, not murder. How would you be sure it’s God telling you to do that? What about all the wackos out there who have murdered in the name of God? Do you believe God actually told them to do that?
In my memory, this woman’s response was something less than satisfying – she was reluctant to condemn their actions, shrugging and saying that it was possible God had in fact spoken to them in that way. In her own case, she would just know if it was from God because she’s been in a close relationship with Jesus for many years and she knows his voice. She didn’t say whether God’s still, small voice would manifest in her as a warm fuzzy feeling, a set of thoughts that keep coming back even after trying to dismiss them, an explicit and audible voice, and/or some set of external signs or coincidences that seem to confirm the individual message. I wondered about that later.
But that day was the start of the end for me in simply accepting, prima facie, that we can discern God’s voice – or that God speaks to us at all. As I noted in an early blog entry, I had a very difficult prayer experience a few years ago in which I was convinced God had led me to pray in a certain direction. (I should note that, like the woman from Bible study, I had been in a close relationship with Jesus for a long time, and I was pretty sure I knew God's voice.) But when it didn’t go as expected, I had to question whether I had really heard God or just made it up. Either way left very troubling implications for how we relate to God, and made me question the much bigger idea of why God speaks so quietly in the first place. Why is this quietness a virtue? Why does he make it so hard to find him, to hear him, to know whether it’s him at all?
Showing posts with label Prayer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prayer. Show all posts
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Suffering: Why Them? Why Not Me?
I've mentioned my foray into Catholicism a few times now. As part of that exploration, I decided one summer to take some time off of work and go to India. My boyfriend at the time had some Catholic friends who were going to work in Mother Teresa's homes in Calcutta for a couple of weeks, so I decided to join them.
Now, to be clear, I have traveled a lot. At that point in my life, I had seen poverty in the border towns of Mexico (thanks to high school missions trips); I had backpacked solo in Europe for 6 weeks; I had traveled to Iran for crying out loud. I was no travel virgin; I'd seen a lot of crazy stuff.
Still, I am hard pressed to describe the intensity of my trip to India. Anyone who has been there can probably relate to the sheer overwhelming-ness of the place. Every sense of mine was assaulted from the moment the plane touched down in Calcutta. The stench! Seriously, I have never smelled anything so awful, before or since. It's a horrible combination of human and animal waste, exacerbated by the humidity and constant dampness of typhoon season. The masses! The population density is unbelievable in Calcutta. I've never seen anything like it. The streets! Cars, trucks, buses, rickshaws, motorcycles, pedestrians, and cows all vying for real estate. Only in Iran have I feared for my life on the streets as much as I did in Calcutta - I kept looking the wrong way to cross the street, only to have an angry rickshaw driver shout something at me in Hindi as he barreled past.
Still, all of that paled in comparison to the work I did with poor, sick, and diseased women and orphans. Our first day there we worked at Kalighat, the home for the dying and I believe Mother Teresa's first home/center in Calcutta. The place is separated into a men's wing and a women's wing. In the women's wing, the patients are in two different rows of beds: on the lower row are women who are expected to eventually recover. On the upper row? Women who were dying and for whom there is no hope of a medical cure. Most of Kalighat's residents were found on the street, the dying destitute who were often kicked out of their homes and shunned by their families when it was learned that they had, for example, leprosy.
I can't quite put into words what the experience was like. The Missionaries of Charity nuns were these amazing examples of love. They saw their job as being present to these dying men and women, literally becoming Jesus' hands, demonstrating Jesus' love to people who were denied that love from their own families. The nuns knew they couldn't save many of these men and women, and they didn't try.
I realized later in the day that I couldn't handle working at Kalighat: the other woman in our foursome had assisted the doctor on duty with cleaning a new patient's leg wound, which was filled with maggots; the two men in our foursome had already been pressed into service carrying the bodies of dead men to the crematory. I had gotten off relatively easy, but this was way more than I could handle.
So I decided to work at one of the orphanages also run by the Missionaries of Charity. The particular orphanage I worked at had a "healthy" ward of children and a "sick" ward. The healthy ward was woefully understaffed, and we spent all of our time trying to play with and love toddlers who were in constant need of diaper changes, food, and drink. These poor kids were so starved for attention that if you sat on the floor to play with one child, four more would try to climb in your lap. It was challenging, but nothing like working in the sick ward, where there was this unspoken assumption that these kids would never be adopted and would likely live out their entire lives in the orphanage. Working on this side absolutely broke my heart.
Two kids stand out in my memory on the sick side: one girl who must have been 7 or 8 years old, with spina bifida. Her spine was so crooked that she she was effectively immobile. She laid on her side in a bed near the second floor entrance and followed you with her eyes - the only part of her body she could really move.
Like on the healthy side of the orphanage, the sick ward was understaffed and so this poor girl was often overlooked in favor of the mobile kids who were shouting for attention. When I did sit with her, or feed her some gruel, I felt there wasn't much else I could do to comfort her or show her love. She couldn't understand me, and couldn't speak to me. Apart from such small gestures as feeding her or holding her hand, I felt incredibly helpless and totally heartbroken. Spina bifida is correctible with surgery, but of course it was too late for surgery for her, and given the lack of resources in India and with the Missionaries of Charity, she would likely never benefit from other medical treatments either.
The other child I remember vividly from the sick ward had had some kind of operation - a colonoscopy? - in which she had to have one of those bags attached to her intestines to evacuate her bowels. She must have been 3 or 4 years old. Well. Somehow in her crib the bag had gotten disconnected from her body, and she was positively covered from head to foot in her own waste. I think it was meal time or something, as everyone else was preoccupied. I must have been the first person to notice what had happened to her. If memory serves, I cleaned her up as best I could, and then found a nurse because clearly she needed medical attention.
So much more stuff happened on that trip, but hopefully I've painted enough of a picture to explain why the experience shook me to the core, and led to a debilitating depression that lasted for over a year once I went back home.
Now, to be clear, I have traveled a lot. At that point in my life, I had seen poverty in the border towns of Mexico (thanks to high school missions trips); I had backpacked solo in Europe for 6 weeks; I had traveled to Iran for crying out loud. I was no travel virgin; I'd seen a lot of crazy stuff.
Still, I am hard pressed to describe the intensity of my trip to India. Anyone who has been there can probably relate to the sheer overwhelming-ness of the place. Every sense of mine was assaulted from the moment the plane touched down in Calcutta. The stench! Seriously, I have never smelled anything so awful, before or since. It's a horrible combination of human and animal waste, exacerbated by the humidity and constant dampness of typhoon season. The masses! The population density is unbelievable in Calcutta. I've never seen anything like it. The streets! Cars, trucks, buses, rickshaws, motorcycles, pedestrians, and cows all vying for real estate. Only in Iran have I feared for my life on the streets as much as I did in Calcutta - I kept looking the wrong way to cross the street, only to have an angry rickshaw driver shout something at me in Hindi as he barreled past.
Still, all of that paled in comparison to the work I did with poor, sick, and diseased women and orphans. Our first day there we worked at Kalighat, the home for the dying and I believe Mother Teresa's first home/center in Calcutta. The place is separated into a men's wing and a women's wing. In the women's wing, the patients are in two different rows of beds: on the lower row are women who are expected to eventually recover. On the upper row? Women who were dying and for whom there is no hope of a medical cure. Most of Kalighat's residents were found on the street, the dying destitute who were often kicked out of their homes and shunned by their families when it was learned that they had, for example, leprosy.
I can't quite put into words what the experience was like. The Missionaries of Charity nuns were these amazing examples of love. They saw their job as being present to these dying men and women, literally becoming Jesus' hands, demonstrating Jesus' love to people who were denied that love from their own families. The nuns knew they couldn't save many of these men and women, and they didn't try.
I realized later in the day that I couldn't handle working at Kalighat: the other woman in our foursome had assisted the doctor on duty with cleaning a new patient's leg wound, which was filled with maggots; the two men in our foursome had already been pressed into service carrying the bodies of dead men to the crematory. I had gotten off relatively easy, but this was way more than I could handle.
So I decided to work at one of the orphanages also run by the Missionaries of Charity. The particular orphanage I worked at had a "healthy" ward of children and a "sick" ward. The healthy ward was woefully understaffed, and we spent all of our time trying to play with and love toddlers who were in constant need of diaper changes, food, and drink. These poor kids were so starved for attention that if you sat on the floor to play with one child, four more would try to climb in your lap. It was challenging, but nothing like working in the sick ward, where there was this unspoken assumption that these kids would never be adopted and would likely live out their entire lives in the orphanage. Working on this side absolutely broke my heart.
Two kids stand out in my memory on the sick side: one girl who must have been 7 or 8 years old, with spina bifida. Her spine was so crooked that she she was effectively immobile. She laid on her side in a bed near the second floor entrance and followed you with her eyes - the only part of her body she could really move.
Like on the healthy side of the orphanage, the sick ward was understaffed and so this poor girl was often overlooked in favor of the mobile kids who were shouting for attention. When I did sit with her, or feed her some gruel, I felt there wasn't much else I could do to comfort her or show her love. She couldn't understand me, and couldn't speak to me. Apart from such small gestures as feeding her or holding her hand, I felt incredibly helpless and totally heartbroken. Spina bifida is correctible with surgery, but of course it was too late for surgery for her, and given the lack of resources in India and with the Missionaries of Charity, she would likely never benefit from other medical treatments either.
The other child I remember vividly from the sick ward had had some kind of operation - a colonoscopy? - in which she had to have one of those bags attached to her intestines to evacuate her bowels. She must have been 3 or 4 years old. Well. Somehow in her crib the bag had gotten disconnected from her body, and she was positively covered from head to foot in her own waste. I think it was meal time or something, as everyone else was preoccupied. I must have been the first person to notice what had happened to her. If memory serves, I cleaned her up as best I could, and then found a nurse because clearly she needed medical attention.
So much more stuff happened on that trip, but hopefully I've painted enough of a picture to explain why the experience shook me to the core, and led to a debilitating depression that lasted for over a year once I went back home.
While I was thrilled to be back home and able to wash my clothes in a real washing machine, I was also immediately overwhelmed by a sense of guilt. Why did I get to have such luxuries at my fingertips? Why are all of my basic human needs more than adequately met? Why did I have almost no obstacles or barriers to pursuing my life dreams? Why was I was born into an affluent, full-of-opportunity, white family in the United States?
It seemed unfair that I had such an easy life, while the adults and children I worked with in India led such excruciating, painful, lonely, suffering lives. And yet, if I believed what the Bible said, it was actually no accident of fate that I was born into my circumstances and they into theirs. I mean, God has numbered the hairs on my head, and is supposedly in control of everything, right?
So if God is in control of everything, and he has given me so much, then obviously he expects much from me. But what, exactly? Should I sell all my possessions and live like a pauper? Should I become a full-time missionary? Should I move into the inner city and live in solidarity with the poor?
I prayed, and prayed, and prayed for direction. But what I got back wasn't really direction. I started to feel a weight of obligation descend upon me. I couldn't discern whether the obligation was God's leading, or if it was me getting legalistic and thinking I had to make either a radical change or none at all. I started to feel guilty and selfish and, no matter what I decided to do, not good enough. I felt like I would fail God no matter what because I knew I still carried around a lot of selfishness.
I also felt confused at how God could allow such suffering to exist. It was all well and good for the nuns to be Jesus' hands and show Jesus' love to dying people... but I had to wonder: is that all there is? Is that all Jesus can offer these people? The cynic in me wondered why Jesus said that the poor would always be with us: is that because God had already decided not to help them out? That God knows we're going to fail miserably at it too? That, no matter how much we as individual sacrifice of ourselves to try to better someone else's life, that it's still only going to be a drop in the bucket?
During this period someone said to me that what I was going through was actually really good: that I was learning to be heartbroken by the things that broke Jesus' heart. I remember eventually thinking - screw that! I'm heartbroken because I can't actually solve these huge problems. But Jesus can, can't he? So why the hell doesn't he?
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Easter Lies and Old Boyfriends
I told a lie on Easter, of all days. I might as well have poked the risen triumphant Jesus in the eye. I was in a foreign country for work. Friends living there invited me to go to church with them. I am a Christian and therefore of course I wanted to go. It is what Christians do on Easter Sunday: we go to church and we celebrate Jesus. I have been a Christian for almost thirty years. That is saying a lot because I am only 32.
The 100-minute Easter service featured a 30-minute CCM-inspired musical tribute to the passion of Christ, clips from the “Jesus Film” in which our Savior was, naturally, white (did I mention I was in east Asia at the time?), and a 20-minute altar call during which an unfortunately timed movement of my head made the pastor think I had just accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I hardly breathed for the rest of the altar call for fear that the pastor would invite me onstage to share my newfound joy in the Lord.
It was when my friend asked what I thought of the white-Jesus Easter service in Asia that the lie spilled across my lips: “I liked it,” I said brightly. “Just like at home.”
Obviously I hated it (and on reflection, she probably knew that). Every pore of my body was screaming to get out of that oversize auditorium with oversize banners and oversize preacher personalities making oversize statements about the boundless joy, everlasting hope, and unquenchable life that Jesus rising from the dead gives us.
It’s not just that this was a supremely cheesy Easter service (though it was). This is the deal: I don't have boundless joy or everlasting hope; I am tired and disappointed and unsure of who the Alpha and Omega is. For me this is a very unsettling thing to say because until about two years ago, I had problems, sure, but God himself was never really in question. And now he/she/it is. And we know God is really in question because I just now went back and added the “slash-she-slash-it” to the pronoun he in that last sentence and I used to be very traditional and comfortable just calling God “he”.
But you can’t really say any of this serious doubting stuff to people, or at least not the people in my church/faith/religion community. If you do, you immediately set off marathon prayer sessions, friends ask if they can lay hands on you, people suggest seeing a Christian counselor (God forbid you should go see a secular counselor) and above all, they gaze at you with concern in their eyes and wonder what you’ve done (read: sin) to create distance between yourself and God. I am reminded here of a joke that goes like this: an old married couple is driving down the road in an old truck with one of those bench seats that extends all the way across the cab. The wife looks at her husband and says: “Earl, how come we sit so far apart in the truck these days? We didn’t used to. We used to cuddle up!” Earl responds: “I don’t know, Edith…but I’m not the one who moved.” This is how most (conservative) Christians view other Christians who are having a hard time with God: it’s always the Christian’s fault because, as we all know, God doesn’t change.
In my younger, more zealous and certain Christian days I prayed fervently that I would never become what I think I am becoming: a doubting, unsure, frustrated, person who is disillusioned with what life handed her and is blaming God for it. Apparently I have changed.
I know I sound like a bad after-school special, or just very cliché. But I have been carrying around a load, a burden, about the size of a house on my back for some time now. I’d like to thank my ex-ex-heartbreaker-boyfriend (not the gay one – a later one) for helping me notice it. We dated for 7 months before he unexpectedly dumped me, and I have finally found the perfect way to describe our relationship: he was like Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Willoughby courts Maryann like mad and it’s magical and happy and the chemistry is palpable and nobody sees it coming when Willoughby breaks things off. Maryann almost dies of heartache. In Jane Austin’s story it of course comes to light that Willoughby is a shallow bastard who knocked up some other girl and marries rich in order to pay child support. I am still waiting for confirmation that my ex-ex-boyfriend has done the same thing, but I draw a certain comfort from the otherwise strong parallel to my relationship.
Anyhoo: Heartbreaker helped me notice the house on my back because for a long time after we broke up I prayed that we would get back together. And I swear that God himself was telling me to pray for that, and he was sending all these weird signs to confirm that that’s what he wanted me to pray for. And, duh, we didn’t get back together. The guy never spoke to me again, in fact. So I got all disillusioned with my prayer life, and how I must have only imagined that God wanted me to pray all that stuff, but then I thought that that doesn’t make any sense because it felt exactly like other times when I’ve been convinced God wanted me to pray a certain way (and that the things came to pass afterward that I had prayed for) and so how could I retroactively say that God must not have been leading me in that way, and how could I tell the difference anyway, and what kind of God would be so cruel as to make one of his Children all hopeful and then crush the hope in a big fell swoop? And what’s with this God that had His Old Testament People smite all their enemies, killing women and children and basically committing genocide, when now good Christians say that’s wrong and terrible and we should stop Rwanda and Sudan? Who the crap is this God?
And this is the load I've been carrying around: I've been assuming that, by following the "rules" (oh, but we're not legalistic around here, are we?) and being an exceptional example of the (Accomplished) Good Girl, that God would do his part and give me what I want. Probably, this is very obviously not true to most readers, and it even sounds ridiculous when I say it because theologically of course it's not true, we're not promised anything like that in any version of Conservative Christianity except for the Prosperity Gospel people who have that whole "name it and claim it" idea, which almost everybody else within Conservative Christianity recognizes as a load of hooey.
But there you have it: that idea has been wired into my subconscious for many, many years, and only now am I pulling it out of its dark little place in my brain to turn it around, play with it, figure out how it got there, and decide what to do with it now.
The 100-minute Easter service featured a 30-minute CCM-inspired musical tribute to the passion of Christ, clips from the “Jesus Film” in which our Savior was, naturally, white (did I mention I was in east Asia at the time?), and a 20-minute altar call during which an unfortunately timed movement of my head made the pastor think I had just accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I hardly breathed for the rest of the altar call for fear that the pastor would invite me onstage to share my newfound joy in the Lord.
It was when my friend asked what I thought of the white-Jesus Easter service in Asia that the lie spilled across my lips: “I liked it,” I said brightly. “Just like at home.”
Obviously I hated it (and on reflection, she probably knew that). Every pore of my body was screaming to get out of that oversize auditorium with oversize banners and oversize preacher personalities making oversize statements about the boundless joy, everlasting hope, and unquenchable life that Jesus rising from the dead gives us.
It’s not just that this was a supremely cheesy Easter service (though it was). This is the deal: I don't have boundless joy or everlasting hope; I am tired and disappointed and unsure of who the Alpha and Omega is. For me this is a very unsettling thing to say because until about two years ago, I had problems, sure, but God himself was never really in question. And now he/she/it is. And we know God is really in question because I just now went back and added the “slash-she-slash-it” to the pronoun he in that last sentence and I used to be very traditional and comfortable just calling God “he”.
But you can’t really say any of this serious doubting stuff to people, or at least not the people in my church/faith/religion community. If you do, you immediately set off marathon prayer sessions, friends ask if they can lay hands on you, people suggest seeing a Christian counselor (God forbid you should go see a secular counselor) and above all, they gaze at you with concern in their eyes and wonder what you’ve done (read: sin) to create distance between yourself and God. I am reminded here of a joke that goes like this: an old married couple is driving down the road in an old truck with one of those bench seats that extends all the way across the cab. The wife looks at her husband and says: “Earl, how come we sit so far apart in the truck these days? We didn’t used to. We used to cuddle up!” Earl responds: “I don’t know, Edith…but I’m not the one who moved.” This is how most (conservative) Christians view other Christians who are having a hard time with God: it’s always the Christian’s fault because, as we all know, God doesn’t change.
In my younger, more zealous and certain Christian days I prayed fervently that I would never become what I think I am becoming: a doubting, unsure, frustrated, person who is disillusioned with what life handed her and is blaming God for it. Apparently I have changed.
I know I sound like a bad after-school special, or just very cliché. But I have been carrying around a load, a burden, about the size of a house on my back for some time now. I’d like to thank my ex-ex-heartbreaker-boyfriend (not the gay one – a later one) for helping me notice it. We dated for 7 months before he unexpectedly dumped me, and I have finally found the perfect way to describe our relationship: he was like Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Willoughby courts Maryann like mad and it’s magical and happy and the chemistry is palpable and nobody sees it coming when Willoughby breaks things off. Maryann almost dies of heartache. In Jane Austin’s story it of course comes to light that Willoughby is a shallow bastard who knocked up some other girl and marries rich in order to pay child support. I am still waiting for confirmation that my ex-ex-boyfriend has done the same thing, but I draw a certain comfort from the otherwise strong parallel to my relationship.
Anyhoo: Heartbreaker helped me notice the house on my back because for a long time after we broke up I prayed that we would get back together. And I swear that God himself was telling me to pray for that, and he was sending all these weird signs to confirm that that’s what he wanted me to pray for. And, duh, we didn’t get back together. The guy never spoke to me again, in fact. So I got all disillusioned with my prayer life, and how I must have only imagined that God wanted me to pray all that stuff, but then I thought that that doesn’t make any sense because it felt exactly like other times when I’ve been convinced God wanted me to pray a certain way (and that the things came to pass afterward that I had prayed for) and so how could I retroactively say that God must not have been leading me in that way, and how could I tell the difference anyway, and what kind of God would be so cruel as to make one of his Children all hopeful and then crush the hope in a big fell swoop? And what’s with this God that had His Old Testament People smite all their enemies, killing women and children and basically committing genocide, when now good Christians say that’s wrong and terrible and we should stop Rwanda and Sudan? Who the crap is this God?
And this is the load I've been carrying around: I've been assuming that, by following the "rules" (oh, but we're not legalistic around here, are we?) and being an exceptional example of the (Accomplished) Good Girl, that God would do his part and give me what I want. Probably, this is very obviously not true to most readers, and it even sounds ridiculous when I say it because theologically of course it's not true, we're not promised anything like that in any version of Conservative Christianity except for the Prosperity Gospel people who have that whole "name it and claim it" idea, which almost everybody else within Conservative Christianity recognizes as a load of hooey.
But there you have it: that idea has been wired into my subconscious for many, many years, and only now am I pulling it out of its dark little place in my brain to turn it around, play with it, figure out how it got there, and decide what to do with it now.
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