WAITING FOR A SIGN FROM GOD
March 14, 2004The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
The young woman spoke clearly and firmly, but with an edge of anger in her voice: “No, I don’t believe in God,” she said. “For years I prayed to God, but God never answered. So finally I gave up.” Still, she admitted, she hoped that her young son would someday be able to believe; but she doubted he would. Ironically, she had named him Jonah, after the Biblical character who tried to hide from God.
I did not know the woman well, and it was not the time to challenge her. But I was reminded of the story of the man who is swept out to sea in a riptide, and begins to pray to God for some miracle to save him. After a bit, a man on a surfboard comes by and offers to pull him to safety. “No thanks,” says the man; “My God is going to save me,” and he continues to pray. A bit later a boat comes by, and the skipper throws the man a rope. But the man refuses, assuring the skipper that God’s going to save him. After that a helicopter hovers above and lowers a ladder for him to climb; but again, the man refuses, waiting instead for a miracle from God.
Before too long, however, the struggle becomes too much, and the man drowns. When he arrives at Heaven’s gate, he demands to talk to God immediately. “Why didn’t You save me?!” he asks the Almighty. “I put my faith in You; I prayed for a miracle, and You let me drown!”
God said to the man, “What do you mean? I sent you a surfboard, a boat, and a helicopter, but you refused them all.”
That’s what I wanted to say to the young woman who had rejected God because God gave her no answer. “Look around you,” I wanted to say. “Can you not see God’s answer in the beauty of Creation, in the love you experience every day, in the miracle of your son?”
But I said nothing; it was not my place, for one thing. But more importantly, I had not yet been able to accept God’s answers for myself; how dare I speak to someone else about them?
Ever since that day in 1964 or ‘65 when I sat on the campus of Immaculate Heart College in the hills of Los Angeles, listening to the young man I would eventually marry challenge my belief in God, I have had a rocky relationship with the Divine. Before then, I think it had never occurred to me that God didn’t exist. I thought of God as male, very powerful, and very loving. I knew He could get angry, and like any good parent, might punish me; but it was never a harsh punishment – more like making me face the “consequences of my actions!” The God I trusted was not the vengeful, jealous God spoken of in parts of the Hebrew Scripture.
I had questioned my mother from time to time, as well as the priest at our church, about why God would allow tragedy to occur; and while I didn’t find their answers very helpful, they never led me to question God’s existence!
But the conversation that day in the mid-‘60s raised questions that suddenly made sense to me. Slowly, with great reluctance and even tears, I let go of my childhood God. Nor did I replace it with any other form of God or Goddess; I simply grew into what I’ve called an “angry atheist,” hiding any children’s books about God later given to our daughter, and fuming at our UU minister whenever hymns were chosen that mentioned God.
There came a time, however – I think during Seminary – when I began to re-think this position. Perhaps it was hearing other students who I respected, as well as some professors, speak of God – even pray to God – in language that seemed to break open my heart. Most assuredly it began to change as I read theologians like Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and Mary Daly. And perhaps I even began noticing how much I was missing God – not the God of my childhood, but something different – a God that I could turn to for courage and comfort; the God of Isaiah, Jesus, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who could inspire me to do the work of justice; but also a God that made sense to me, and to whom I could still pray. And so began my journey to find some proof that such a God still existed.
One of my favorite Biblical stories is that of Jacob on his journey to meet his twin brother Esau, from whom he had been estranged for many years. One night while he’s alone in the desert, a man appears and they “wrestle until daybreak.” Jacob wins, but refuses to let the stranger go until he blesses Jacob. Afterward, the stranger says to Jacob: “No longer are you to be called Jacob, since you have shown your strength against God…and have prevailed.” Jacob realized he had “seen God face to face, and survived.”
For years now, I have felt that I was wrestling with God, struggling to see It face-to-face – to be blessed, beyond any doubt, with knowledge of It’s presence. Refusing to let go, I have prayed for some kind of sign – a clear sense of Presence – even a Voice perhaps. I know others who are no less intelligent or rational than I, who have wrestled with God just as I do – have doubted God, tossed the concept aside as irrelevant; yet at some moment God has revealed Itself to them; why not to me?
When the president of our denomination, Bill Sinkford, stood in this pulpit at my Installation and described how he had abandoned his skepticism one day and prayed at the side of his critically-ill son, and how suddenly he was filled with a loving and peaceful Presence that he called God, I wondered to myself, “Why can’t I have that kind of experience?”
I have longed for the kind of encounter with the Divine that Rosemary Bray McNatt, a UU minister in Chicago, describes, in which she actually heard the voice of God speak to her one day during a women’s conference in Wisconsin. They had been asked to “speak to the divine and listen for an answer,” and Rev. McNatt writes: “As I made a perfunctory list of my concerns, I could suddenly feel a Presence…that made itself felt in every cell of my body, and it was followed by a Voice, neither male nor female, and utterly unlike anything I had ever felt.” She says that the Voice told her not to worry, and that all her hopes and dreams would be realized. Then, she says, the Voice and Presence left her, but she was “changed forever.”
I will tell you right now: I have never heard a Voice!
I have wished to be grasped by God in the way a colleague of mine claims he was one day –suddenly, in the midst of a conversation with his Spiritual Director, causing him to fall to his knees and weep. Now, he said, everything seemed clear to him, and even more beautiful. Why can’t I have such an encounter? I have wondered.
But it is the conversion experience of Anne Lamott that has moved me the most deeply, I think, recounted in her book, Traveling Mercies. (I would read you the passage directly, but it always makes me cry.) She had begun attending a little Presbyterian church in Marin County – not because she believed in God or Jesus – she didn’t; but because she liked the people and the minister, and it brought her some comfort. But one night as she lay in bed, she suddenly felt a presence in the corner of her bedroom that she “knew” was Jesus himself. “I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft,” she writes, “watching me with patience and love.” Appalled at the thought that she might become a believer, she turned her back to him and said out loud, “I would rather die.”
But every day after that, wherever she went, she says she felt as if she was being followed by a kitten – though of course, if she turned around, there was nothing there. The following Sunday, as she left church and headed home, she again felt that something was following her. This time, when she walked into her house, she finally gave up, and taking a deep breath, she said: “OK, I quit; you can come in.”
I keep waiting for such a sign from God that He or She or It exists. I swear that if God would gently sit beside me, or firmly grab hold of me, I would never doubt again. If the Holy Spirit would clearly speak to me, or tenaciously follow after me like some hungry kitten – I would surely stop and let It into my life. If It would just give me some sign of proof, I would “stop all the fussing,” as someone has called it, and sing God’s praises.
Karen Armstrong, the former nun and now religious scholar who has written several books on the great religious traditions, tells us of her own struggle to understand God, having long ago rejected the traditional image of God with which she was raised. She, too, longed to be able to find some way to “prove” the existence of God – or at least, to develop a “rational” approach to an understanding of the Divine.
But what she learned from her vast studies of other religions, was that “some of the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians and mystics insist that God is not an objective fact, not some unseen reality whose existence can be empirically demonstrated.” Indeed, she found that many of these great thinkers actually preferred to think of God is Nothing (with a capital “N”). The early Christian theologians who developed the concept of the Trinity did so in part, says Armstrong, because they knew that God could not be reduced to simply one entity. God was bigger than that. God was both No-thing and Everything.
And indeed, that is what the poets and mystics have told us all along; they have always known that God is more than the old white man with a beard, dispensing favors to some, and terrible punishment to others. The early Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, contended that “God is ‘is-ness.’ We apprehend God in all things….Every single creature…is a book about God,” he said. “If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature,” wrote Eckhart, “I’d never have to prepare a sermon, so full of God is every creature.”
The Rev. Barbara Pescan, both poet and mystic, wrote several years ago: “I say God and mean everything that is not me, that I do not control (and that is much.) I say God’s voice and mean speech in its broadest and most inclusive sense – flowers, trees, weather of all kinds,… dust motes in thin winter sun, cat’s tongue on my eyelid, grief, a hand on my elbow, freesia,…sudden joy – any voice that gets all the way into me and says: Stop; what you thought was all, is not all there is!”
As I was articulating my struggle with God to a friend one day recently, and describing the conversion stories of others and the lack of such a story of my own, I suddenly remembered my experience while on retreat at Pendle Hill – a Quaker retreat center – many years ago. I was sitting alone under a huge, beautiful tree behind the center, trying to meditate – trying to open myself to an experience of God.
But as I stared at the tree, emptying my mind to make room for whatever wisdom it had for me, my mind began to wander. It wandered first to a day years earlier when a man I was dating had carved our initials into the trunk of a tree in Berkeley. (At the time, the romance of the gesture had far outweighed any concern for the tree!) My mind then quickly wandered from that romantic scene to the memory of this same man several months later ending our relationship. I began to feel the anger I’d felt back then; and before long, I was thinking of all the men who had “done me wrong” – and what jerks they were! By now I was really angry – far from any thoughts of God! Indeed, in no time at all, I had moved from a quiet openness to the Divine, to a state of frenzied rage. When I realized this, despair set in; I will never learn to meditate, I thought; I’ll never develop a relationship with God.
Suddenly I felt the softness of flower pedals descending gracefully from the tree, falling on my head and all around me, gently, lovingly, as if the tree were saying, “Don’t worry, it’s alright; I’m here with you in your serenity and in your rage.”
The poet Judith Grahn writes:
They say she is veiled and a mystery.
That is one way of looking.
Another is that she is where she always has been,
Exactly in place, and it is we –
We who are mystified, we who are veiled….
Perhaps God – that “Is-ness” that breathes through the heart of all Life, and calls us to Compassion and Wholeness – perhaps It doesn’t reveal Itself to me in the more obvious, powerful gestures, because It knows I would be embarrassed by that. Perhaps instead It reveals Itself to me in more “veiled” ways – through gently-falling pedals when I need calming; through loving confrontation when I need clarity; through my grandchildren’s laughter when I need lightening-up; through long-awaited tears when I need opening.
Sometimes I have felt as if the Divine is playing Hide and Seek with me – hiding from me as I continue to seek It. But perhaps it is the other way around, as Grahn suggests: Perhaps it is I who am hiding or “veiled,” and God – the Holy Spirit of Love and All That Is – is seeking me out. Perhaps that God seeks some of you as well.
I suspect I will always be like Jacob – wrestling with God and not letting go until I can say that I have seen It face to face and felt Its Blessing. In the meantime, I can say that I have been blessed by the wonder of Life, the calling of Justice, and the Love that never lets us go. And because there is no one else to thank for those blessings, I must whisper to the Creator of it all, “Thank-you. Thank-you. And amen.”
© 2005 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
