Aftermath of a Conversation*

After conversation with Lizzy last night that wound it's way through our thoughts and confusions about God, I realized that a lot of questions I had thought were resolved had been unearthed. So this morning, I went through my book collection to find some of the books that have changed my life over the years. Some have done it in big, earthshaking ways, some have moved me in small, gentle, and sometimes almost imperceptible ways. I ended up grabbing two of the latter kind.


Ann Lamott has to be one of my favorite authors (and no, it's not just because she's one of the most progressive Christians I've read to date). Her wild stories, earthy humor (and language), and the fact that she'll gladly admit she's quite mad have caused me to fall unabashedly and wildly in love with her.

Her book,Traveling Mercies was the first I grabbed off the shelf, and as I skimmed through the chapters, reveling in her words, I stumbled onto a poem she placed between chapters.

Shore and Ground
Keep Walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances. That's not
for human beings.
Move within, but don't move the way fear makes
you move.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and
frightened.
Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical
instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the
ground.
(RUMI)

The second book I grabbed was Shusaku Endo's Silence. Talk about a far cry from Lamott's self-deprecation and humor. Endo's book is a driven, intense, and very quiet journey into the silence of God. The story centers around a Portugese priest arrested during 17th Century Japan's brutal extermination of Christians. The story holds no easy answers, nor does it make life less complicated, but there is a comfort in journeying with a man through pain and through what seems to be God's stubborn silence. C.S. Lewis mentions in A Grief Observed that sometimes when we knock, the only response we seem to hear is the bolting and double bolting of the door. Endo's priest, and Lewis for that matter, are men that keep hammering away at the door, and slowly come to some very revealing discoveries. I don't know if any of my unearthed queries have been answered; but being able to re-visit some of these journeys, to travel with these other wanderers, has made me feel safe. A strange thing to feel perhaps, in this journey, and something that again, I don't quite understand, but something that for now, I am willing to be content within. For now, I can rest in the Silence, and hear the wordless whispers of another dimension.