Thank God

"Prayer erupts in the heart at the sight of either the impossibly beautiful or the unbearably difficult." ~ Joan Chittister

We thank God when we are grateful, when things go right, when we believe our prayers have been answered. And yet, we are discouraged from believing that our prayers are a Christmas wish list to a magic Jesus. I am taught not to curse or doubt God when things go wrong, out of order, away from my control. God has a plan, I am told, and I must have faith. I am also reminded of free will. And I am told that God is not an intervening God. That's why bad things happen to good people and why it didn't pay for Job to make sacrifices just in case his children sinned. Such offerings to God didn't do him any good in the end. Nor is God, I'm told, a distant God who just spun the earth into motion and then sat back in a lazyboy to watch the show. God is an enigma, a mystery, that much I know. So if God does not intervene in the unbearably difficult times of our lives, then why do we feel the need to give credit to God for the goodness in our lives? We can't have it both ways, can we? Why don't we thank God for suffering, for taking us through darkness so we may truly experience light? Well, some of us do, I suppose. Why don't we curse God when things go our way? For then we are only lulled into an unrealistic complacency.

Sometimes, when my friends and neighbors say they are praying for me, I can't help but roll my eyes and think, "Like that's going to do any good." All the people praying for peace, I'm waiting! I've put much of my faith in the natural order of things, the cause and effect cycles of nature. I want to believe that if I vote for the better candidate, if I canvas for intelligence, compassion, and reason, then the better "man" will win. Hmmm, I'm waiting. Sometimes the pears just don't appear on the tree, no matter how much care and tending and praying I do. Sometimes tsunamis destroy entire villages. Hurricanes happen. Sometimes babies die no matter how much money we contribute to medical research. Sometimes my sweet affectionate cat kills the treasured humming bird who has been thrumbing joyously around my honeysuckle, breeding new blossoms, new life, all summer. Sometimes we are crucified, no matter how good we are, no matter how hard we try. That is the natural order, unpredictable, inescapable, and basically out of our control. Out of God's control, too? Ineffable God?

So do we give up on God because we don't get it, because it doesn't make sense? Do we cling to religious cliches and platitudes, godly small talk to assuage our pain? Or do we pray to call God in to companionship beyond an impersonal, intellectual intimacy, to a side by side knowing, a shared grief with a welcome happiness. The Message states, "...The ironic fact of the matter is that more often than not, people do not suffer less when they are committed to following God, but more."

Crap, now what? What's the point? Why bother?
The resurrection, that's why. The transformation, the ecstatic beauty of transcendence when I have been to the depths, surfaced, and am able to see, really see the cobalt blue mayfly circling the rumbling river rock, when I stop long enough to be entranced by the flicking "S" of the fly fisherman's line and know that I have witnessed God and these moments, as much as our moments of suffering are the point of living. That the companionship through the inexplicable nature of living is all I pray for.