try me and know my restless thoughts.
--From Psalm 139
I've had several memories pop up in my head of late-- little unexpected mushrooms peeping through the woodpile, bright against the humdrum and daily detritus. Each one is related to being a little girl in church-- three, four, or five years old. It was a time in my life that God was present and unquestioned.
I don't know why it's only been recently that these things have come to mind. I do know that I have spent lots of time in my adult life thinking about the ways I turned down, shied away from, closed out and refused God, even when it was obvious he had something to say to me. Why forget a time when I loved to listen?
Sometimes now, when I discipline Eva-- when I lean down and touch her face and tell her to look at me, to look in my eyes, because no it is not OK to hit her brother / run out into the street / speak to me that way / speak to others that way, her eyes slide into mine and then slide away in instant self-protection from the fire in my face. It's not fury she sees there-- well, most of the time-- but love turned up a few degrees, made all the more intense by anger, yes, but also a desire that she connect with me in the moment. I have something to say, and I need to see her seeing me say it. I need to command all her senses just for a minute, even though it makes her uncomfortable. Come to think of it, it's the exact same posture I use when she does something wonderful, although those times our eyes are stuck together like Velcro. She never wants to look away and I don't want to, either. Same intensity, same love, but more pleasant circumstances.
These days, God get to me both ways in prayer. And he tried his best to get through during the years I refused to give in, refused to meet his eyes or hear his words or sit still long enough to speak the dizzying confusion that he no doubt wanted to help me sort out. The love was too intense, and I couldn't stand it.
But once upon a time, things weren't so complicated. It's like those long, hard days with new babies, which are utterly exhausting but tempered by an innocent sweetness. There's not yet any drive to differentiate, to complicate, to participate in all those maddening experiments that are so crucial to healthy separation. There's just this beautiful window before children become, in essence, little shits. They're also just an extension of their parents at that point and have virtually no personality of their own, but there's something so amazing and fundamental in their unquestioned love. It's part of the mortar that glues parent and baby together, and-- with luck-- it's something gentleness and love will only strengthen with age.
God had a few years like that with me. When I was very little, Sunday School was just the bricking up of facts over a love I already knew to be foundational and perfect and irresistible.
Every single one of these early memories about God can be kicked sideways like an empty coffee can-- insignificant, hollow and done-- but in the midst of these days of teasing out the wherefores and whys of what I feel God might be asking me, I'd rather just sit with them. The particulars of these recollections are fuzzy, but my feelings come through loud and clear.
They're nice, these memories. They are surprising and sweet. I was a child of God before I ever realized that to be true. And though what gets to me about those lines up there from the Psalm is the restlessness-- the acknowledgement of the knots and tangles and complications of a mature mind reaching for a mature faith-- this is also the Psalm from which we are given the following:
Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb;
all of them were written in your book;
they were fashioned day by day,
when as yet there was none of them.
Far back before the beginning of the beginning of each and every one of us, God was there, writing and rewriting and creating. And then we are born, and we blossom. We are pricked and hurt and strengthened, each of us in varying degrees, each of us encountering a spectrum of conditions that either aide or hinder our growth. There are bright spots and there are dark spots, and we grow through each of them. Some of us mature in sunnier climes, and we learn to trust the light. Sometimes childhood is complicated by trauma, and the dark can bleed into the brightness and dull the whole picture.
It can be easy, sometimes, to forget what started out as pure and true and foundational.
People can make much of memory. Perceptions of patterns or early proclivities in life can make present choices seem inevitable. This surgeon has always been good with his hands. That lawyer could talk the bark off a tree. Those over here and these over there have been yearning for, working toward, seeking out the very thing that they've become since before they could even think or move.
On the one hand, I think this: hindsight is always 20/20.
On the other hand, yes-- I think we are born with our natures, and talents, and gifts. Maybe early memories do tell us something about ourselves. Maybe what seems sharp or bright or shining should be things we pay attention to.
What are we hoping for when we, like the Psalmist, ask God to search us out? What if we joined him in that endeavor and peek into lost corners, peer into knots in the tree?
What if the Holy Spirit is like a magpie, reaching deep into our restlessness to remind us of the shiny things we've stored up but forgotten?
What might we do, or build, or become if we allow ourselves to be reminded of the places love shone out so brightly before we learned to close our eyes to the glare?
No comments:
Post a Comment