Still, Lauren f. Winner

#1: Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in the world; I keep living in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze. 

#2: But there is one desert teaching that always stops me. At the center of this teaching is a young man who has gone into the desert to pursue the holy life. After a year or two of fasting praying, and meditating on the Word, he begins to feel that his rule of life is not rigorous enough, so he goes to his teacher and asks for a more stringent discipline. The teacher replies, "Simply do this: go back to your cave, pray as you usually pray, fast as you usually fast, sleep when you are tired." The student, disappointed by this less than scrupulous response, goes to a second teacher and again asks for a more stringent rule. The second teacher says, "Go back to your cave, pray as you usually pray, eat when you are hungry, drink when you are thirsty, sleep when you are tired." Frustrated, the young man goes to a third teacher, who tells him, "Just go back to your cave." The point, I think, is that you can't simply pursue God in the desert; you must also begin to pursue yourself. You cannot fast if you have not first noticed that you are hungry; your hunger is what the cave can teach. 

#3: I happen to feel differently. I find the loneliness of no one knowing if you plane lands on time, of no one to call if you lock yourself out of your house or your alternator dies--I find that loneliness worse. The loneliness of the everyday, more than the loneliness of estrangement. 

#4: "I thought about sloth, about how slothful I've been.""Ridiculous. You've worked hard. I know you have, Charlie."    "There's no real contradiction. Slothful people work the hardest...Some think that sloth, one of the capital sins, means ordinary laziness..But sloth has to cover a great deal of despair. Sloth is a really busy condition, hyperactive. This activity drives off the wonderful rest or balance without which there can be no poetry or art or thought...These slothful sinners are not able to acquiesce in their own being, as the philosophers say, They labor because rest terrifies them."-Saul Bellow 

#5: Thomas Merton, the twentieth-century Trappist monk, wrote that what we are attempting to escape when we try to flee boredom is only ourselves. Perhaps boredom is not unlike loneliness: the best response may be not to run from it, but to give yourself to it, to see it as an invitation to attend more carefully to the very thing that seems boring. One of Merton's biographers, Monica Furlong, put the matter like this: "Gradually...a sense of order overtakes that wretchedness of boredom, there is a movement towards stillness, and in the stillness we find God, and in God, our true identity."   Boredom is, indeed, a restless state. I am, I hope, inching towards stillness. 

#6: I think of a story my friend Julian told me. She was twelve, and she was preparing to be confirmed. A few days before the confirmation service, she told her father--the pastor of the church--that she wasn't sure she could go through with it. She didn't know that she really believed everything she was supposed to believe, and she didn't know that she should proclaim in front of the church that she was ready to believe it forever. "What you promise when you are confirmed," said Julian's father, "is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever." 

#7: Perhaps middle tint is the palette of faithfulness. Middle tint is going to church each week, opening the prayer book each day. This is rote, unshowy behavior, and you would not notice it if you weren't looking for it, but it is necessary; it is most of the canvas; it is the palette that makes possible the gashes of white, the outlines of black; it is indeed that by which the painting will succeed or fail. "Upon the strength of the middle tint depends, in a great measure, the general look of the picture," says one nineteenth-century handbook for aspiring artists. "The management of light and shade, as relates to a whole, ought to be always present in the student's mind, as it is from inattention to this alone that a work is often destroyed in its progress."   Maybe now in the middle, after the conversion, after ten years, on into twenty years, faithfulness is about recognizing that most of my hours will be devoted to painting the middle tint, the sky, the hillside on which no one will comment, the hillside that no one, really, will see. Maybe this is prayer most of the time, for most of my life; I will barely notice it; you will barely notice it; against this landscape of subtle grays, occasionally I will speak in tongues, occasionally I will hear an annunciation. 

#8: And I have heard that some people eventually leave the middle and arrive at an end. I have heard that this end is a place of wisdom, of beatitude. I have heard it is a place of unself-consciousness. I have heard that there is a lot of give in the fabric there.   There is a woman I know in Arkansas. She is a minister's wife, and a minister in her own right, and she has a yoga studio in her backyard, and a piano decoupaged with old sheet music, and in her house is a door from every house she's ever lived in, and when she prays, I believe her, and she is the kind of Christian I hope one day to become. It is like the gospel and Jesus are so much in her that she doesn't have to worry about being a Christian anymore, she doesn't have to worry about it, she is just in that story and it is in her. At least, that's how it looks to me, from the outside. I'm sure she'd tell it differently, but that is how it looks to me.   I expect it takes a long time to get there. 

#9: The Christian tradition is thick with metaphors for the journey to God. The journey is like walking through a castle. Inside the castle are seven rooms, some rooms simple and spare, others full of alcoves and secret passageways. In the first room, people are making a beginning of humbly devoting themselves to God, but they are still vulnerable, still very much at risk of being pulled away. People in the second room are increasingly able to hear God--through holy conversation and holy reading, through prayer. In the fourth room, you may begin to hear God's voice directly. All the rooms are madeo f crystal, and they become more and more suffused with light as you move closer to the seventh room, which sits at the very centre of the castle. In this seventh room, all is light; in the seventh room is God.   Or the journey is like a two-rung ladder of love. On the first rung the pursuer is sick with love, faint with love for God; on the third step the pursuer engages unfailingly in religious performances, in prayer, in acts of charity; by the seventh step her pursuit is characterized by her ardor, her boldness; on the tenth rung her soul is intertwined perfectly with God.   Or again, there is a mountain, swathed in darkness. The mountain is God, and the mountain is your movement toward God. This is what it is like to ascent to God: you are standing at the edge of an abyss, at the foot of a mountain that seems impassable.   All is soaked in darkness. You are fearful. Yet you want to go on.