Lord, I pray with my eyes wide open

Oh I was so wrong when I said that “Wake up in the road” was the most honest post I would ever write, this one is like vivisection but I find the act of writing to a format to be helpful in ordering my thoughts.

Since returning to the church I have been engaging with spirituality in a more structured way, while this should sound obvious I’m finding the situation quite awkward. Since I ran from the Conservative Evangelical Church I’ve been more than happy to discuss theology as far as the history of the church and the bible goes, I don’t even mind speculating about the effect of certain aspects of dogma, but describing spiritual experiences nowadays seems unbearably twee. I would imagine that part of this is a reaction to how central generic “spiritual experiences” were supposed to be in the Conservative Evangelical Church, another part of it has something to do with the fact that while I hold tight to the idea that faith is the part that cannot be explained I still think it makes me look a bit silly. And if there’s one thing we know I have a problem letting go of it is pride.

I find it uncomfortable that I have experiences for which I am unable to account, which make me look irrational or deluded or make other people doubt my judgment. But if, as I so often remind others, it is hubris to claim that you could even understand the whole of God why should I understand this? Perhaps it is good for me to have something in my life that I cannot build an argument on, which shifts under me like the sea and sometimes leaves me drowning. Perhaps it is a plan and perhaps it is a side effect and perhaps I am just mad but if prophets are schizophrenics then I am a priestess of the cracked and I can live with that. As a friend said to me the other day, it’s what you make of it that counts.

The roundabout point of this is that when I stumbled over spiritual experiences in the world it was less difficult for me than when I went looking for them.

I took part in a prayer vigil over Holy Week for rather selfish reasons; it was taking place in my church and would likely not involve interaction with other people. I sat in front of the covered crucifix surrounded by flowers and candles with the church settling around us and outside people yelling, wordless (worldless). I thought, “do we have flowers because they’re dying too?” and “oh lord, I pray with my eyes wide open” and it felt like everything dropped away. I came to an understanding of why I do, always, pray with my eyes open now. You close your eyes to shut the world away and wish for things, for me shutting everything out makes prayer dead as it must be worked through objects and actions and I remembered that one of the first real structured spiritual moments I had was in a prayer labyrinth. The vigil was not dissimilar.

Something which was brought into sharp focus for me was the doctrine of Hypostatic Union (contested by a number of proto-orthadox churches) which you may have heard described with the phrase “fully human and fully divine”. One of the things which makes Christianity interesting and I suppose appealing to me on an emotional level is the idea that God became human to suffer as we do. Now this doesn’t mean that we have to flagellate ourselves once a year about how unworthy we must have been for God to stoop so low but that the incomprehensible God of many faces, of which we are a fragment and an echo and a hope, has a profound understanding of desolation and joy. That we can touch the divine in hopelessness and despair and wonder and boredom, we can do this simply through the act of living as God surely felt that living a fully human life was a worthy act.

And while I know that churches and rituals may well have been designed to induce these sorts of experiences it is still mine. And it’s what I make of it that counts.