A Still Life

To round out this week’s thoughts on hate and love, I give the last word to Frederick Buechner. I often turn to his words first and find he always says things just right. From Wishful Thinking:

To say that love is God is romantic idealism. To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as easily produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus’ terms, we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.

When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn’t say, “There, there. Everthing’s going to be all right.” He said, “You brood of vipers! how can you speak good when you are evil!” (Matthew 12:34). And he said that to them because he loved them.

This does not mean that liking may not be a part of loving, only that it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes liking follows on the heels of loving. It is hard to work for people’s well-being very long without coming in the end to rather like them too.

Amen.

It was just a few months ago that I wrote of feeling settled and ready for some new thing in my life. But here I am, middle of December, and feeling that fidget again. We all say things like God laughs when we make plans or that life really is all about interruptions. My hope for Autumn had been to write this lovely study on Isaiah (finally done and mailed, thank you very much) as well as creating some fantastic retreat  resources for churches to purchase right above this post at “Retreats”, and in the midst of all that I might have a few moments to sit alone and be quiet.

But starting in mid-September and running right into this week, our home has been invaded by germs. We’ve had a couple of ear infections, the obnoxious trip to the pediatrician that costs $25 only to be told it’s a virus, a foolish knee injury, and just smashed plan after smashed plan. I am not a pretty person in my own chaos. I can handle other people’s chaos, but I desire a bit more order and predictability for my own life. It seems cruel for someone to then say, “Ah, you know God laughs when we make plans.” Boo.

So this point right here, where the fidgeting turns into spinning, is a good place for that deep breath and slow exhale. It’s a good place to practice the waiting of Advent and the coming of peace, joy, love, and hope. It’s a good place to remember what I was feeling a few months back and ask for direction on how to return. Oh, I’m no good at waiting, and I’m very good at worrying. Deep breath and slow exhale. The Holy Fidget is not just about my own restlessness but about some sense that God is real, God is present, God has gifted me for a purpose, and that some new thing is still waiting to come. 

Frederick Buechner says that Advent is like sitting in a theatre just before a great performance begins. The house lights have gone down and the curtain is about to rise. In that brief moment, when we are still sitting in darkness and waiting for this thing of majesty to begin, that is the essence of our Advent waiting. I feel it in me. I’m still waiting, and I just know within me that it will be worth it.

I am currently creating and editing a devotional classics project for a church’s Fall small group series. I turned to Frederick Buechner (after Henri Nouwen) and savored these words this morning:

I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living…opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day’s work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly.

If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Even when I try to choose other words, I hear myself returning again and again to the language of presence. I seek to be present to moments and movements, and I guess that’s what these words from Buechner trigger in me. If I am too busy, too hurried, too distracted, then I miss it all.