Preparing to Meet God . . . Always and Everywhere

Sometimes, I see a message from God written out in big letters across the sky, and other times it comes as a gentle nudge. This time, it came in large print on a billboard along the highway. “Prepare to meet God,” the sign said.

It sounded ominous, threatening, and not a bit invitational. I cringed a bit as I drove past, and wanted to duck. Part of it was embarrassment, I suppose, and the fleeting thankfulness that I didn’t have any “God-stickers” on the bumper of my car that would link me to the billboard.

But there was another part of me that realized the person or group behind these words actually thought they were doing the community a service, and that by their act of buying this space on the billboard – on God’s behalf, no doubt – they, too, were preparing themselves to meet God.

For several miles, I thought about my internal reaction to the billboard. The words play on the theme of God as “Judge.” But in this sense, God is little more than a Scorekeeper or an Eternal Accountant who tallies a ledger. I acknowledged to myself a different understanding of God. I tend to experience God as endlessly generous, and in this generosity God broadcasts mercy, peace, and love into the world . . . whether I acknowledge and receive that generosity or not.

Also, as I drove on, I realized that “prepare to meet God” implies some future meeting, some moment – after death? – when we stand in front of God and “give an account.” But it totally misses the day-by-day, moment-by-moment meeting with God that is possible in every nano-second of our lives.

Every moment is a moment of meeting God. Every place is a place of meeting God.

But our language betrays us sometimes. We say, “God was really present there,” or “God showed up in this,” or “God is still working (or not working) in this situation.” I understand the sentiment, but actually God is always there, always present, always at work. God does not merely show up at the end of life for accounting time, nor does God make periodic appearances in our world in those rare moments when our spine tingles. God is . . . always (in time) and everywhere (in place).

So to the person – or the billboard – that says to me, “Prepare to meet God,” I would say, “I have met God . . . and you have, too, whether you know it or not. In every moment and in every place, God is there, endlessly generous toward you, me, and everything God has made. Don’t miss out on life because you are waiting for death to have that meeting!”

A Poem about Change and the Spiritual Life

The storms lumbered
across the landscape
shifted your shape
as they beat
upon your house

Those who followed
who knew you
and embraced you
looked for you
in the usual places

They could not find you

you were not where
they last
set you down

you were not where
they last
saw you

you were not where
they last
loved you

Where the storm
blew you
they had never gone

They could only look
in all the usual places

This life is brutal
and expensive
when you are invisible
to those
who love you

The cost of this life
is appallingly high
and the road is littered
with those
who don’t make it
to the end



[Jerry Webber, June 16, 2012]

Praying with Psalm 137: Reflections in a Foreign Land

A few weeks ago, I found myself in touch with the dark and angry spirit of Psalm 137. I was surprised at what came out of me . . . and grateful for the honesty with which I could offer my real life in prayer.

Psalm 137 Psalm-Prayer
praying from a foreign land

I sat in a foreign land and wept
among those of strange tongue
among those who hated me
among those who wanted me gone
I remembered You
remembered the thought of You

My songs and instruments
hung in a closet
stored away
no longer needed or useful
I was
who they said
I was

No longer was there dialogue
give-and-take
now there was one way
their way
the tone of taunt in every exchange
“Why can’t you sing your song?
We’ll play the music . . .
you just sing along.”

The song You’ve given buried deep
I don’t want to sing their song
I’ll do anything to keep from singing
a pseudo-song

God, don’t ever let me be too far away
to forget Your song
burn it upon my heart
weave it into my soul

And for them, these pretenders
who take their delight in my despair
who have won the struggle
to steer the ship
who said,
“Damn you! Damn you!”

Oh, the warrior in me wants to fight to the death,
to take them down
and stand over their plot
And the diplomat in me wants to run far
to get out of their sight
and reach
and make a new life somewhere else
And the poet in me – at this moment –
just wants to sing my song
to spill out the verse from within
no vengeance or vindication
just song

so that the cycle stops
and all the little ones
saved

When I Die: A Poem

When I die
read nothing that rhymes
and tastes like sugar

read some Rilke
something fierce
and raw

something that
shapes the awe
and cloud

that compels us
toward the mystery
of what has not yet
appeared.

Judgment Day 2011, part 2

It's 10:07 p.m.

Where is everybody?

A Window into My World

Last week someone shared a short book review with me about a new book of poetry by Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry journal. I read the review and added the book -- Every Riven Thing -- to my wishlist.

Tuesday, my poet/English teacher/soul-friend son in Arkansas sent me a magazine article from Poets & Writers magazine about Christian Wiman. Turns out he has the same form of “incurable cancer of the blood” that I have . . . Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia. I placed the order for his book of poetry that day.

Yesterday I read an online essay Wiman wrote about 4 years ago in which he wrote eloquently and passionately about his faith, life and the disease that lives in his blood. This is the link:

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/gazing-into-the-abyss/

In the article he writes about love, disease and a faith reclaimed with words like these:

I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called “hope toward God.”

Today his poetry book came. I opened it randomly and read the first two poems I came to. They were intense, containing familiar images I recognized from our common disease, real with pain and real with hope. I had to put the book down after those two poems -- painful to read -- yet I cannot wait to pick up the book again.

Most often I don't know what to say about the disease I live with. People who love me want to know how I'm doing. But generally, most folks really don't want to hear that much about the disease. In my silences and alone-moments, it can be depressing enough for me. Surely it must be so for others as well.

Often, people will ask in kindness how I'm doing, but I'm never sure how much to say, how much they really want to know.

Two lines in one of Wiman's poems:

"How are you?" Pity soaks the moment like wet bread.
Do I spit it out, or must I gum this unguent down?

It's difficult to put my inner landscape into words. Sometimes when I try to find language for the shape of my inner world, it just feels cheap.

I shared these Wiman articles with colleagues this afternoon. I'm writing this out tonight in this space because the two articles and the book of poetry provides as much of a window into “my life and world” as anything I’ve read. I suppose I would say, "Here. Read this article. Read this poem and that poem. This is how I feel. This is what it feels like to be me. These are my doubts and these are my hopes. Here are my dreams and there is my dream-impotence. This is something of the shape of my inner world."

Certainly his experience is different from my experience, but many of the questions and struggles are similar. His vocabulary is familiar. He says eloquently what I struggle to put into words in my own existence about my life and the cancer within me. It feels like I'm getting a glimpse into my own soul from a fresh angle.

So I share it with you.

A Psalm for All Saints Day

I gave Psalm 145 my own voice several years ago. I wrote the psalm-prayer to tip my hat toward those persons who had blazed the trail, inviting you and me to follow. While I found their lives to be a source of courage and strength, I also sensed that we are each called to live uniquely for God in our own time. I cannot live the life of Benedict of Nursia or Ignatius of Loyola or Henri Nouwen. I can only live my life in my world. Thus, I did not write the psalm-prayer specifically for All Saints, but the psalm fits the spirit of the day. I offer it here.

PSALM 145:4 – 13 Prayer
A psalm celebrating God’s work through the ages

From age to age Your works live large in our world.
Your mercies are new every morning;
Yet, they stretch out as a consistent thread,
woven through the centuries.

Each generation finds its own way to manifest Your Love,
to embody Your Presence in the world.

I may not be called to the harsh asceticism of Abba Anthony,
to the visionary path of Francis of Assisi,
to the mystical prayer of Julian of Norwich,
to the swashbuckling surrender of Ignatius of Loyola,
to the radical discipleship of Menno Simons,
to the sacrificial compassion of Teresa of Calcutta,
to the anonymous service of Alphonsus Rodriguez,
to the just cause of Nelson Mandela,

But I – and my generation – are called to follow You
in our life-world
as these were called to follow You in theirs.

We find our own way,
by Your Spirit,
into asceticism and vision,
prayer and surrender,
discipleship and compassion,
service and justice,
in ways that are appropriate
and life-giving
and God-anointed
for our times.

The means may change;
the One at the end, however,
remains steady through the times:
kind to those in need
and compassionate toward the broken ones;
not motivated by twisted anger,
but by a generous love that never comes to an end;
sustaining the created world moment by moment
and re-creating us continually
from the inside-out.

All creation – oceans, winds,
hills, trees and humans –
offer their praise, God.
And those deepening life in You,
repeat the blessing passed down through the ages,
speaking Your Name,
stretching hands toward neighbors,
sacrificing for the greater good,
surrendering their lives for Love’s sake.

It has been that way in past generations.
God, that it would continue so today
and on into the boundless future.

Alleluia! Amen.

To Look Good or To Feel Good?

The old Saturday Night Live sketch had Billy Crystal playing "Fernando," a celebrity interviewer in "Fernando's Hideaway." Fernando wore a pretentious ascot as he interviewed various luminaries and repeated in a thick Latin accent, "You look mah-velous!"

This is going to sound strange at first, but I thought of Fernando in recent days as I've started another cycle of chemotherapy. Stay with me for a minute.

One of Fernando's tag lines, after proclaiming to his guests, "You look mah-velous," was to tell them, "You know, it is better to look good than to feel good."

That line popped into my head several times over the last couple of weeks. Over those days I saw many people who know that I'm currently in treatment for lymphoma. So as I moved toward the treatments this week, several times people said to me things like, "You really look good!" Or, "You seem to be feeling good!" I felt like a guest on Fernando's Hideaway.

The truth was that I probably did look pretty good, or at least better than the last time they saw me!

And further, I probably did feel pretty good, or at least better than a few days before!

So I received the kind words of my friends, grateful for the encouragement they offered.

But I also wondered if those were the only two options. While how I look and how I feel may be some indicator of what is going on within me -- in my blood and in my bone marrow and with all the counts that determine my body's physical health -- my "looks" and my body's "feel" are not the final measure of my physical health.

The reality that is most crucial to me is not how I look or even how I feel -- though obviously I'd rather feel good than not. I'm most concerned about the actual state of my body. I wouldn't mind looking terrible if the cancer within me were eradicated. I've even gotten used to feeling rotten periodically -- thanks to the chemotherapy, steroids, and other meds that I take for my "health" -- for the benefit of knocking down the cancer.

So in my experience, Fernando didn't have it exactly right. Looking good and feeling good are not the only options.

Sorry Fernando. There is another reality beneath what I look like and feel like. That's the one I'm interested in tending these days.

Too Many Callings

Too many callings
have come
and gone.

Now you are oblivious
to any voice but
your own.

Only a Sojourner

For I am only a sojourner with you,
a nomad as all my ancestors were. (Psa. 39:14)

Something in a name gives it permanence. The act of naming (or writing) engraves a thing, representing where that person is at a given moment in time. The permanence of the name is balanced by the realization that what is typed or labeled represents only a single moment in which certain things seemed true.

When I'm asked to name a series of reflections (in this case, blogs), it seems rather flippant to attach a name to something based on where I am today. It feels like attaching a permanent label on a place in life that may be very fleeting.

At this moment, in this time, I've chosen to call these reflections, "Only a Sojourner." The heading serves as an indication of the meandering nature of my personal journey. A sojourner travels everywhere, wanders all over the map, sometimes with the realization of where he/she is, and sometimes completely and utterly lost.

In my own wanderings, though, I've learned that lost is a place, too . . . a place from which the next journey of exploration begins. So I imagine that these reflections will be all over the map, that some will appear quite "lost."

At least with the idea of sojourning in the title, I'll give myself permission to do that wandering. I won't be tied down to a particular way of thinking or writing or being. I'll explore. I'll journey. And as a heading for what may (or may not) be a fairly regular series of reflections, "Only a Sojourner" is probably the best I can do today. That heading fits the place I find myself at this moment and matches what I intend for these reflections over time.