Off-center

 Off-center 

I was sitting at my desk. The phone rang. It woke me up.

     I let it ring twice more. Humming. I was humming, because that’s supposed to clear your voice. I looked at the clock; it wasn’t even ten yet – the morning wasn’t half done. “Ted Riich,” I said.

     “Ted?” I waited. “Axel.” I waited. “I just quit,” he said. I waited some more. “Aren’t you going to ask what?”

     “What?” I said. “What did you quit?”

     “Prayer.” I waited. “Centering prayer.”

     “Hmmm.”

     “There’s something wrong with it – it isn’t just me.”

     “Of course not.” I tried to put an edge in my voice, but who knows? It still felt half-asleep, raspy, not at all clear.

The young Luther practicing de-centering prayer.

     “You know I’ve been going, right?” I did, to a “course” at the Episcopal Church a block from his own.* He’d been trying to get me to go with him.

     “Yes,” I said.

     “Not the course,” he went on. “I haven’t quit the course.” He paused. “Yet!” I waited. “I may do that, too. You don’t want to come to the next session with me, do you?”

     “I don’t think so.”

     “No. You wouldn’t. Not the course anyway, I didn’t quit the course; but I did quit this morning. The prayer.”

     “I gathered.”

Then, he told me what he’d been thinking. He was being pushed through the silence, this way and that and swimming back toward his center with his magic word. The word was vanitas, the first word in Ecclesiastes in the Vulgate. (Trust Axel to pick a magic word that way.) Then, he couldn’t get back – to the center - because it occurred to him:

     “It occurred to me – very strongly – that the practice throws away, like so much trash, the doctrine of irresistible grace.”**

     “Hmmm,” I said again.

     “You see, right? The practice suggests – very strongly – it holds that we normally resist God’s grace, so we have to make a place for it – light a candle, straighten our back, clear our mind. Or, it suggests – no, again, it holds – that we normally wouldn’t recognize God’s grace if it hit us over the head, we have to make our heads right. In the first place, it short-changes God – if we don’t answer the door when he knocks, he can’t get in? It doesn’t just short-change him, it demeans him. In the second case, it’s a form of Gnosticism.”

     “Explain that again.”

     “What? You don’t get it?”

     “No. Gnosticism. Explain that.”

     “It’s just what I just said. Our heads have to be right. We have to know certain things – especially how to do certain things, and do them the right way – or else God is beyond us.”

     “Isn’t God beyond us?”

     “No. Dammit, no.”

There was someone on the other line. I told Axel I had to answer it – in case it was “the Holy One in our midst,” I said.

     He said, “Very funny.”

_______________

  * More about Axel Sundstrøm, my Lutheran pastor friend, here, all the links fit to print from the time he showed up at a wake and had to be driven home to the review of at least one sermon and mockeries of our various conversations.

** For the even less initiated than I, here is Van Harvey’s definition: “the grace that cannot be resisted by the will of man.” If I do get it, it goes something like this: If God is God and we are we, we can’t put him off. (Or her.) God comes to us when God comes to us. We can zip our Bibles shut, wrap them in swaddling clothes, lay them in a manger, seal the whole package, Bible, swaddling clothes, and manger, in a plastic bag, and throw the whole kit and kaboodle (like centering prayer does irresistible grace) down a well; the Holy Spirit is like Houdini and will show back up wherever and whenever it wishes.

11.11.16