What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course, it is the cross.
Flannery O’Connor, with thanks to Inward/Outward
I was talking the other day with a friend, trying to explain how I was feeling about prayer and love. It came to me as I tried to find words for things I don't really have words for, that I am just becoming increasingly vulnerable to my own imagination. Now, I don't mean imagination in the sense of making things up. I don't even mean what many people mean when they (far too loosely for my liking) speak of the "creative imagination". The thing I'm looking for is much closer to what I understand John Keats to have meant by his theory of negative capability.
I find myself increasingly unable to read news accounts, for instance, without entering into that condition of "intentional openmindedness" that Keats described; incapable of defending myself, or at least refusing to defend myself, against my own imaginative reconstruction of whatever tragedy or inhumanity I've encountered. It also involves an acute, concrete even, awareness that my own humanity is born of this broken world that holds such things; and that this world is only broken through the fallenness of people just like me.
At its worst, this becomes a kind of a waking nightmare. It certainly leads to sleep continually punctuated by what I can only describe as empathetic nightmares, dreams of horrors of which I am not the victim, but where I must observe, unable to intervene or participate or rescue.
At one point I found myself saying to my friend, "I think my nightmares are becoming the ground of my praying." Were it not for this, I think I might go mad. And yet... if I were to be offered the opportunity "to anaesthetise the gnawing pain in the pit of [my] soul that is a resonance of the pain of the human condition" (Maggie Ross) I don't think I would take it. And that has to be the love of Christ working in my heart through the Holy Spirit - because, I suppose, I am after all praying - for my natural self would leap up and grasp whatever anodyne was going, believe me!
4 comments:
Wow, them's beautiful prayers to get to pray (how beautiful the fabric will look from the other side) ... but ouch!
Your commitment to do this awes and humbles me. Thank you for being true to your vocation of praying for the world.
Don't be awed by anything that I do here, Ruth, truly. It honestly doesn't feel like I anything I can take credit for, since, as I tried to say, I'm actually far more likely to take avoiding action left to myself. I just can't get away from this stuff, somehow, and that's nothing for me to proud of, in any sense.
Yes, Sue - I love the tapestry analogy myself - a great comfort when you look at all the tangles and loose ends this side!
Oh Mike... this just pushes me back in my chair and opens me up.
For a minute anyway.
Thank you as always, for your words and your prayers.
Know that prayers come on your behalf as well... thank God we have our online community to go with all the others.
His invitation is so constant, is it not?
Post a Comment