Rummaging For God In A Stuff-Filled Drawer
Almost exactly five months ago, we gathered in a lamp-lit living room, my husband and me and four of our friends. Sometimes we sing, sometimes we sit and sometimes it’s silence that hushes our day. But there’s only one rule we promised to keep, and it’s that together we’ll eat and together we’ll pray. This night, we prayed St. Ignatius’s Examen Prayer. You should know that when I use the language of prayer, I often mean equally ‘to partake’ – to take part, to join in. Actively acknowledging God’s presence, which is richer than solemn requests or expressions of thanks. For example, when we partake in communion, we partake also in prayer: “In remembrance of You, I eat and I drink. I love you above what my small mind can think.” Prayer is partaking in a multifaceted Kingdom, one that involves our full, embodied selves, our eating and our drinking as well as just our thinking. Here is a really good resource that serves as an invitation to this reality. The artist says, “We often confuse the mechanics of prayer with the essence of prayer.” And we come to know that the essence of prayer is just the Love of God. It’s in this knowing that we stop coming to him, ceaselessly hoping he hears, but perhaps we rest easy that he’s come to us and, rather, can we hear. Can we see. Can we taste. Can we pray even to feel.
The Examen is a prayerful reflection of the events of a day. What happened to me and was God there? Since we know Spirit cannot be separated from today, then how did I notice and was I okay? It’s an experiential prayer, which is, for me, still too many words. For if our experience teaches us anything about the Love of God, then it is not an experiential prayer, it is only a prayer. Father Dennis Hamm likens this examination of consciousness to a rummaging through our stuff-filled drawers, inevitably finding God in them. He tells us that “if we are to listen for the God who creates and sustains us, we need to take seriously and prayerfully the meeting between the creatures we are and all else that God holds lovingly in existence. This interface is the felt experience of my day. It deserves prayerful attention. It is a big part of how we know and respond to God.”
This is one version of the five-step examination. Get quiet and think about the twenty-four hours past. Then,
1. Pray for light. The hours might be a jumble, but ask God to bring clarity and understanding. May He illuminate from all the confusion of a day.
2. Review the day in thanksgiving. Focus on the day’s gifts, its joys and delights. God is in the details, so from place to place and from task to task, locate the seemingly small moments where gratitude can bloom.
3. Pay attention to your emotions. Review the feelings that surface in the replay of the day, the painful and the pleasing. St. Ignatius considered that we detect the presence of Spirit in the movements of our emotions.
4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it. Choose the remembered feeling that most caught your attention. It could be a conversation or encounter or a moment of insight. Look at it and allow the prayer to arise spontaneously.
5. Look toward tomorrow. Anticipate the gamut of tomorrow’s challenges and pray for hope, wisdom, and healing. End with The Lord’s Prayer.
When I partook in this prayer five months back, circumstances were different. Days didn’t look how they look now. I was thankful that day to have seen the spirit guiding me, not apart from me but a part of me. I reviewed my emotions and that day had brought me fun. Fun isn’t an emotion I feel all the time. But after careful examination, I was still so anxious, so sick with fear. Then the next question came: What’s causing me to worry? And I bent over my lap and cried. This was the only one of the steps I could not answer. I left it blank. Wracked with all this worry and what’s the cause? Maybe you don’t know this either. With not an answer in sight, we moved along: In his being human, how can Jesus relate to me today? Without a pause, I wrote that he, too, was bearing the burdens of an unhealed people. His felt experience here on earth was the exact same as ours is now. And though my worry hung suspended in the thick, humid air, I could look toward tomorrow with comfort that whatever it is was not mine to bear.
I brought my Bible to bed this morning, presumably to thumb through a Psalm or two. I lifted a chunk of pages to get there and stared straight onto Lamentations. This was not the time for a frivolous game of Bible roulette, dissecting every good reason why my fingers had magically opened the book to here. But chapter 1, verse 1: How deserted lies the city, once so full of people! I directed my gaze to the window whose frame mimicked the steel bars to a cell. My vision went out of focus, and then I read on. Verse 11: All her people groan as they search for bread. Bread and other things. How eerily familiar are these words. Verse 16: This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears. No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit. No one is near because no one can be near. The streets are empty and the store shelves ravaged. Isolation, despair, we have felt that well. The destruction of Jerusalem and desolation of Judah, no, but still a deep, communal loss we’re all attempting to grieve. Our families are sick, we’re stuck home alone, and without our jobs we can’t pay rent. How must a people pray in a time like this? We know no other way but collective lament.
Verse 21: Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”
Our hope is that we are not consumed. Because of prayer, we get to partake in this same great love, which is not ‘out there’ waiting on us to come. It’s here when we’re sick, it’s here when we’re poor, it’s here when all we can do is cry on the floor. We’re an unhealed people whose burdens seem too much and unfair. We’ll rummage our drawers for something of God, and it’s no surprise when we find him there. When we don’t even know what’s causing us fear, Jesus felt that too, and his spirit is near. How sweet it is to trust in Jesus, just from sin and self to cease; Just from Jesus simply taking life and rest and joy and peace.
I finished up my reading this morning with a meditation on this Puritan prayer. I hope it blesses you as it did me. Without many answers or solutions in sight, let’s look on toward tomorrow, let Him be our respite. Resting on God from The Valley of Vision, translated below:
God most high, most glorious,
The thought of your infinite serenity brings me joy,
For I am toiling and moiling, troubled and distressed,
But you are for-ever at perfect peace.
Your designs cause you no fear or care of unfulfillment,
They stand fast as the eternal hills.
Your power knows no bond, your goodness no limit.
You bring order out of confusion, and my defeats are like victories to you:
The omnipotent Lord still reigns.
I come to you as a sinner with cares and sorrows,
to leave every concern entirely to you,
every sin calling for Christ’s precious blood;
Revive deep spirituality in my heart;
Let me live near to the great Shepherd,
hear his voice, know its tones, follow its calls.
Keep me from deception by causing me to abide in the truth,
from harm by helping me walk in the power of the Spirit.
Give me intenser faith in the things of Truth,
burning into me by experience the things I know;
Let me never be ashamed of the truth of the gospel,
that I may bear its reproach, vindicate it,
see Jesus as its essence, know in it the power of the Spirit.
Lord, help me, for I am often lukewarm and chill;
unbelief ruins my confidence, sin makes me forget you.
Let the weeds that grow in my soul be cut at their roots;
Grant me to know that I truly live only when I live to you,
that all else is unimportant.
Your presence alone can make me holy, devout, strong and happy.
Abide in me, gracious God.
. . .
You are as close to us as any drink we could drink, and we love you above what our small minds can think.