Accepting Your Life

On paper, summer represents a downshift in life’s grind. And yet, hurry and worry are, it turns out, year-round companions. Which means you will be asked the (dreadful) question: “So…what are your summer plans?” I find myself returning to the Psalms during the summer. Endlessly honest and, particularly this summer, I am struck by the unhurried engagement the Psalms require. A posture of reading that carries over into living a life with a looser grip.

A life of listening. Listening is vital to being whole, both individually and communally. Our neurotic, fidgety hearts and minds, along with the hurry and digital distractions of our days, make listening feel impossible. Impossible to listen; and impossible to be listened to.

A young Wendell Berry

Listening is embodied curiosity. The failure to listen to God or to others, I am convinced, is the result of our addiction to control. What is maturity, being fully human, if not the relinquishment of control? What if happiness is the refusal to control your life and those within it? Misery is control; listening is a sort of sabbath of the soul, stopping to experience things as they truly are.

Which makes me think of my favorite poem from Wendell Berry:

To sit and look at light-filled leaves
May let us see, or seem to see,
Far backward as through clearer eyes
To what unsighted hope believes:
The blessed conviviality
That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise,

Time when the Maker’s radiant sight
Made radiant every thing He saw,
And every thing He saw was filled
With perfect joy and life and light.
His perfect pleasure was sole law;
No pleasure had become self-willed.

For all His creatures were His pleasures
And their whole pleasure was to be
What He made them; they sought no gain
Or growth beyond their proper measures,
Nor longed for change or novelty.
The only new thing could be pain.

If control kills listening, curiosity is the engine of listening: childlike hope that believes that your life, the people within it, the God who loves you, are worth paying attention to. A curious heart is comfortable with providential ambiguities, patiently attentive to the mystery and beauty of God’s activity. A curious soul sits in disappointment instead of attempting to scroll away its pain; it doesn’t seek to understand one’s own grief but rather looks for its hidden gifts. Instead of resenting your life, in the words of the late novelist and pastor Frederick Buechner, you can “listen to your life.”

One of the anchoring theological convictions at play here is that our lives, its mundane details, twists and turns, are gifts. No need to rush through it. Like lifting one’s hands at the end of a worship service, God invites us to receive the gifts of our days like a benediction.

What if the church were a predictable place and community of curiosity instead of an engine for control? That church would be a people who listen — folks who insist on the reality that God’s words are more fundamental than our words, God’s actions more vital to wholeness than our actions. This would be a church, to use the quite overused phrase, that is non-anxious. It would be a church that refuses to be a neurotic affinity group but rather quirky, faithful friends who take you by the hand, willing to hold your heart like the Savior does.

Ever attentive to and focused on the Father’s plan, Christ lived a life of genuine interest and compassionate attunement, often toward the “difficult/struggling” people of his day. Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well had to be the most dignifying experience of her life to date; Christ shows us that in the kingdom of God, no one is a waste of time.

One of my favorite literary characters is Charity Lang from Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, a story about the power of friendship between two couples: Larry and Sally Morgan, and Sid and Charity Lang. Charity is energetic, opinionated, and just alive. She also is generationally wealthy, sophisticated, and cultured. And yet Charity’s charm is in her ferocious interest in others. Charity’s listening, her curiosity, is selfless, using energy to highlight the beauty and gifts of others. Her generosity makes her every conversation charged with possibility, disarmed of pretense, devoid of cynicism. After Sally and Larry meet Charity, Larry writes:

We filled the basement with our laugher and discovered our common concern … In a lamenting voice, she cried, “Look what I’ve done! I came over to get to know you, and all we’ve done is talk about Sid and me. I want to know all about you. You’re both from California. Tell me about it. What did you do there? How did you meet?”

Charity was very interested, like someone peeking through a microscope at a bunch of paramecia. Fascinating, all those cilia and pulsating vacuoles.

I lost my security, [Sally] never had any. Both of us were peculiarly susceptible to friendship. When the Langs opened their house and their hearts to us, we crept gratefully in.

Crept? Rushed. Coming from meagerness and low expectations, we felt their friendship as freezing travelers feel a dry room and a fire. Crowded in, rubbing our hands with satisfaction, and were never the same thereafter. Thought better of ourselves, thought better of the world.

As a pastor, much of my time spent with congregants is spent processing various childhood wounds. Many of them involve a childhood of being ignored or overlooked. The message was made clear: “You are not worth attention.” Our wounds are healed, over time, through God bringing the Charity Langs of the world to our lives — someone who we experience as having all the time in the world for our issues, our interests, our quirks. The miracle is that in the mundane act of listening, God rewrites the scripts of our souls: no longer ignored but seen; no longer alone but helped. We realize that there is no need to get God’s attention. As his children, he already lives in us, and the daily texture of real lives is his redemptive terrain; the suffering of our hearts is where he abides; his long-game, patient care is steady and sure, even for hurried control freaks.

When your life is “hidden with Christ in God,” then you can listen to your life, maybe even enjoy it. Better yet, you can listen to God, and hear him sing over you in love.