So what's the final step of this journey?
Before I left, I said that I wanted to make this trip about being at prayer. I failed. That's not to say I didn't pray -- I said plenty of prayers, aloud when asked, silently when not. But I'd written before we left about prayer being a disposition of the soul, an opening of the spirit to a sacramental, "binocular" vision of outward and visible things radiant with inward and spiritual lights. I'd wanted to dispose myself to such prayer as much as I could on this trip. I couldn't do it -- or at least I couldn't do it as consistently as I had hoped. Sometimes the shovelful of dirt was just a shovelful of dirt, not a finite echo of the infinite creating Word; sometimes the good meal was just body fuel, not a gift of God; sometimes the work team was just a bunch of gabby, crabby people, not a gracefully functioning limb of the Body of Christ. There were sacramental moments, to be sure: listening to Oakley and Olman conversing in Spanish as we drove to Agua Caliente, not understanding a word they said (well, maybe one or two words) but hearing so very clearly the friendship and affection and genuine joy that passed between them; watching a large rock crack under my iron bar and having the sudden feeling that I could see the whole crystal geometry of the stone revealed in a single moment; even the feeling of some genuine hunger, some real appetite, after having been sick, and recognizing it as a touch of healing grace. The trip was not without its epiphanies. But they were fewer than I'd hoped for, my vision was more occluded than I'd imagined, my soul was not so well disposed as I'd intended.
I suppose that should be no surprise. Sacramental awareness is something saints strive for years to awaken. Like Zen mindfulness or yoga suppleness, sacramental awareness is the fruit of long and regular practice; it can't just be turned on and off like a switch. And even with years of practice, as I've had in the church, sacramental awareness must still be cultivated, awakened, invited, as a matter of intention -- it's not just automatic, like a reflex, but is something to which the mind and soul and spirit must be intentionally attuned. And that attunement happens more readily -- not automatically, but more readily -- when you take time for the practices that cultivate it.
For me, one of those practices is taking time alone with my thoughts. I am very introverted, as psychologists measure these things, and I know that if I don't get a certain amount of alone-time each day I begin to get twitchy. Alone-time is not easy to find on a worksite or a bus or a double-occupancy hotel room (even when the other occupant is one's own best beloved), and when the wee hours of morning and nighttime are blanked out by exhaustion. Without quiet time just to attend to the texture of my experience, that experience tends to get away from me, I tend to become too submerged in the rapid flux of feeling, and flashes of impatience, interest, irritation, humor, annoyance, wonder, fatigue, tend to drive me more than me integrating them. I'm sure there were times on this trip when the other mission trippers felt I was being antisocial or distant or just plain ornery, when really all I was was doing was trying to get a little quiet in my soul. And for me, getting submerged in the flux of feeling is a sure way to lose sight of the sacramental dimension of things: the inward and spiritual grace can only shine through if the mind and will and appetites are not too consumed by and attached to the outward and visible things. I am reminded (again, always again) that part of my prayer practice must always be getting time alone just to rise up a bit from the flux of experience and attend to it as it flows by.
And when I can, as it were, sit on the riverbank like Hesse's Siddhartha and observe my experience flow by, something else reveals itself as well. It's that even though the surface features of experience may be jangling or discordant or mismatched -- even painful -- down deeper there is a steadiness, a coordination, a harmony, that comprehends the elements and guides them toward some wholeness. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in "God's Grandeur" -- that sacramental sonnet par excellence -- "there is the dearest freshness deep down things"; Alfred North Whitehead speaks of religion originating in the experience of "a character of permanent rightness inherent in the nature of things"; even Hamlet says "There is a power that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." I believe that to be true, and I believe that to be God. Process theology teaches that every moment of reality begins and ends with God: God initiates each moment with an aim, a hope, a call, for what that moment can become; and when each moment becomes all it can and experiences itself in full, that fullness passes back into God as an element in God's ongoing and everlasting experience of the world. From this experience of the world-as-it-is, God shapes new aims and hopes and calls for the next generation of moments for the world-as-it-can-be. In this way the moments of the world and the outpouring of God are in a kind of constant dialogue, a perpetual exchange that constitutes Creation. It's all very cosmological; but it's very personal as well. The moments of my experience, disjointed as I might find them, form a thread -- a tiny thread perhaps, but a constitutive thread nonetheless -- in God's experience of the world. God is constantly looking at the world through my eyes, feeling the world through my feelings -- and everybody and everything else's too -- and pulling it all together into one whole harmonious reality. God makes me a partner in Creation, whether I know it or not; but I can be a much better partner when I know it, when I pay attention to the quality of the thoughts and feelings and experiences that flow through me, when I am aware of the ongoing dialogue of aims and fulfillments God is having with me, and when I intentionally do what I can to hold up my part of the conversation. Some of my most vivid prayer experiences have come under the image, not of me facing God and speaking, but of me beside God, both of us looking at the outward and visible things of the world, people and oceans and rocks and churches and mountains, and God guiding me to see and respond to the inward and spiritual grace. We sometimes describe Christian service as being God's hands and feet for acting in the world; we might equally well describe Christian prayer as being God's eyes and ears for feeling the world. That is also what it means to be God's witnesses. We can either grieve or delight the Holy Spirit of God with the quality of experience we pass on; we can be inspired and empowered by the experience of God within, shaping the thread of our moments toward compassion and love and beauty and peace and right relationship. That is, for me, the essence of prayer.
And that was the focus I could not consistently maintain on this trip. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. As T.S. Eliot said, "human kind cannot bear very much reality." And I can hardly be surprised that depth of experience doesn't come when I don't do the things that allow my experience to go deep. But God works in us for compassion and justice and peace, even when we're not aware of it; and we are carried on the prayers of others, even when our own prayers aren't as consistent as we'd like them to be. God was at work on this trip, in breaking rock to build a church, in bearing witness to the contrasts between beauty and poverty and strength and weakness, in doing manual labor that the local folks could have done faster and better but couldn't do because they had jobs and lives and survival of their own to attend to, in celebrating Eucharist in a half-finished church. God was there, in my hands and eyes and heart, and in everyone else's too -- and now that we're home, God is inviting me to learn from this trip how to be more attentive to God's calling, rejoicing, always-already-there presence. God is, again, calling me to pray.
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