This was a sentiment I heard often while I was studying theology in college. It has a distinctly hands in the air, Praise Jesus feeling about it does it not? Like you can imagine a generically good-looking, earnest young man saying it into the microphone right before he starts into a God Pop power ballad. Wearing jeans. In a Mega Church.
Believe it or not, I didn't hang out with the God Pop power ballad contingent while studying theology, although they were certainly around. The closest my friends in the department got were a few social justice oriented, wanna-be youth minister types, who would listen to the music because "it connects with the youth." My crowd was the intellectual bunch, shocking, I'm sure. But what I found even more shocking was that the Future-Theologians-of-America crowd also shared this sentiment. They still proclaimed a desire to "rest in God."
As far as I could tell "resting in God" meant learning to be content, working to be fully present to life in the moment.
It was, frankly, a sentiment that puzzled me. Both because it was the one thing that my orthopraxis and orthodoxy friends could agree on and because it was just a sentiment I didn't understand. I was rarely concerned with the Here and Now, preferring to think about the Soon to Be and Already Was. I wasn't sure how resting in God--someone so ethereal and disconnected--could make me more present.
***
One of the very few (very few) good things about living hundreds of miles from your friends is that whenever you're in town, there's an excuse for a get-together. When I'm in the North Country I can spend so much time alone that I forget how much I love and enjoy spending time with friends and a few glasses of wine. There is a certain kind of holiness that comes when you share a meal with people you love dearly. And the amount of laughter that I manage to wring from a few days with good friends is unmatched in the rest of my life.
We always spend a few moments catching up. Hi, how are you's, how's work or law school or your mortgage or whatever. We spent the first hour of my birthday party talking about or 401(k)s. Retirement accounts at a birthday party, I ask you. Four years ago it would have been tequila shots and bawdy jokes. But after the seriousness, after the quick catch-ups with the details of one another's lives, we settle in to talking about movies or comics or books or politics or sex, as you do with people who know and love you.
Over the weekend I saw some of these friends. They live on the East Coast now, and if we're lucky we see one another once a year. But they kept me sane through my first year of graduate school and I love and care about them as if we were family. We went to a local restaurant ate pancakes, drank coffee, and caught up. I told them about what was going on in my life. They told me about their lives on the East Coast. The catching-up took less time than I had supposed. Then we talked politics and religion and laughed. Sweet merciful Jesus, did we laugh.
The entire time we were together I didn't check my cell phone. I didn't think about the pile of work and equally large pile of dishes waiting for me at home. I sat at a table with my friends. I ate pancakes. I drank coffee. I talked about politics and religion.When I got out of the car for goodbye hugs I realized how rejuvenated I felt.
I struggle every single day with mindfulness, with perspective. More than that, I struggle to remind myself that while I am not perfect, and that it is dangerous to always strive for perfection, I am still worthy of love, respect, and care from other people. I realized that when I'm with this couple, when I'm with good friends in the Cities or Central Minnesota, all of those doubts take a back seat. To pancakes and coffee. Babies and MPR. Dance parties and conversations about comic books. In those moments I am content to be loved and to love the people that I am with.
And that's the damnedest thing about trying to live an authentic, spiritually fulfilled life. I try so damn hard to rest in God by discovering Her through systematic theology and scriptural analysis, meditation and renunciation of a material life. In my off time, I've been toasting to years past with a tequila shot, making dinners, arguing about postmodernism and secularism, all the while discounting these actions as less-than-spiritual because they were things I enjoyed doing.
Much to my chagrin, I am coming to understand (ten years after the fact) that these relationships I've been building slowly are not what I do in my spare time but are part of my spiritual life in and of themselves. These men and women are not Bodhisattvas or Catholic saints. They are good, loving people who open their homes and their families to me. Through these small actions, these little graces, they teach me again and again that resting in God, or mindfulness, or inner peace, or whatever it is that I'm searching for is called, need not be something ethereal, something preached in a Mega Church by a man in blue jeans. It may be as simple as pouring a second cup of coffee, asking about someone's work or children, and sliding a second stack of pancakes onto their plate.
I struggle every single day with mindfulness, with perspective. More than that, I struggle to remind myself that while I am not perfect, and that it is dangerous to always strive for perfection, I am still worthy of love, respect, and care from other people. I realized that when I'm with this couple, when I'm with good friends in the Cities or Central Minnesota, all of those doubts take a back seat. To pancakes and coffee. Babies and MPR. Dance parties and conversations about comic books. In those moments I am content to be loved and to love the people that I am with.
And that's the damnedest thing about trying to live an authentic, spiritually fulfilled life. I try so damn hard to rest in God by discovering Her through systematic theology and scriptural analysis, meditation and renunciation of a material life. In my off time, I've been toasting to years past with a tequila shot, making dinners, arguing about postmodernism and secularism, all the while discounting these actions as less-than-spiritual because they were things I enjoyed doing.
Much to my chagrin, I am coming to understand (ten years after the fact) that these relationships I've been building slowly are not what I do in my spare time but are part of my spiritual life in and of themselves. These men and women are not Bodhisattvas or Catholic saints. They are good, loving people who open their homes and their families to me. Through these small actions, these little graces, they teach me again and again that resting in God, or mindfulness, or inner peace, or whatever it is that I'm searching for is called, need not be something ethereal, something preached in a Mega Church by a man in blue jeans. It may be as simple as pouring a second cup of coffee, asking about someone's work or children, and sliding a second stack of pancakes onto their plate.
Amazing, KMP. That final paragraph? PFFFT. Well done.
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