Messages

I loved the sound of the purple martin colony, the birds gurgling and chirping as they flew in great circles overhead, the conversations and arguments that took place as the birds arrived back at their nests with insects for the babies. I knew I would miss the martins when they left for their winter homes in South America. And I knew they would be leaving soon. The end of July was approaching, and the week before Yearly Meeting, I had seen them gathering all together as a flock and making huge sweeping flights through the air. So the morning of Yearly Meeting, I set a tape recorder and microphone at the base of the colony, and left it there while I puttered around. When I had put everything in the car, including my map and my cup of coffee, I went across the yard to pick up my tape recorder, throw it in the back, and trundle off to Yearly Meeting. That was when I discovered the little martin, lying on its back about two feet from the tape recorder . . . [Truth in advertising: the thumbnail picture is of barn swallows, not purple martins.]

I mentioned to a friend that Samson had been ramming the water tank to get water. And she said, and I quote, “Use this the next time you feel the need to preach on the woman at the well or her Old Testament forebears. Come to the fountain, horns down, blunt head ready to crack the ice. Get the living water any way you can.” . . . if we know we need water, the living water, God’s water, sometimes we do, in fact, need to be like Samson. We need to storm the tank and batter the ice.

To be very crass, if you have never smelled cow manure, you do not know what cow manure smells like. You can become educated about the smell of cow manure by visiting a dairy farm, but if you have been cut off from the idea that you can have a regular on-going experience of God, it might be as difficult to come across the experience of God as it is to hear 14 vowels when you only grew up with 5. I know people who have been so damaged by the rigid forms in which God was packaged for them that their capacity to actually have an experience of God—as opposed to an idea or belief about God—has been well nigh severed from their body. That’s a harsh assessment, a painful assessment – and yet true, which is why bad theology and spiritual indifference both make me so very angry. Because they both harm people in the vital sensory function of perceiving God. Luckily, God continues to seek us even when we have lost our capacity for seeking God. When some wall has come between my heart and God, God has infused an opening into that wall. God creates a back door and finds an empty room to dwell in.

To quote Marjorie Suchocki: “It’s not just that we need to pray—it’s that God needs us to do the praying. Our prayers actually make a difference to what God can do...God works with the world as it is. Quite simply, prayer changes the “isness” of the world. A world where there is this specific praying going on is not the same as a world where this praying is not going on.”

If we can become those authentic friends, through our worship and our study and our conversations, then our roots become woven together in the places where we are at our best and deepest. And that matters because it keeps us stable. It matters because when we sustain injury or damage, the roots to which we’re tied give us strength.