A Curious Girl: The Silence

I went with one of my housemates to a Quaker meeting Sunday morning. It's really amazing what your mind can come up with to think about during the silence. I was listening to the birds and church bells outside and wondering if I could compose a piece of music mimicking the sounds. Only more tunefully.

I for some reason got a Vineyard song in my head.

In the secret in the quiet place
In the stillness You are there
In the secret in the quiet hour
I wait only for You
’Cause I want to know You more

I want to know You
I want to hear Your voice
I want to know You more
I want to touch You
I want to see Your face
I want to know You more

I have a friend who pretty much hates all songs that a) sound like they were written by Evangelicals and b) talk about a personal relationship with God. Matt Redman can leave now.

Thinking about this song I could sort of understand the feeling. It reminded me of disappointments, prophecies not answered, Faith Camp, and a time of certainty. I remember how someone on a teenagers' Church weekend-away told me that I was going to have a "fast work of maturity" done in me. Someone at Faith Camp reckoned I was going to "walk tall in Jesus". I'm still waiting. I tried to pray in the silence ("in the secret, in the quiet place...").

I had trouble praying. I thought guiltily on when I might have last read my Bible. I remembered a friend's testimony in which he asked, rhetorically, how you can have a relationship with someone you never spend any time with. I feel like a bad Christian, probably because by any standards I am one, but I really am trying. It's just that I've ceased to trust so-called prophecies and fuzzy experiences. And, of course, I can't see the sense in the barbaric doctrine of Hell. I'm not sure what other Christians would expect me to do about that. In my argument with a CU speaker (in the Hellish Dilemmas entry), he resorted to something along the lines of "just having faith". So I asked if a suicide bomber who personally felt killing was wrong, but was convinced it was God's will, should bomb people. He said he saw my point, which was nice.

I am not quite sure how to go about this whole relationship with God business. I realised just how easy it is to squash down questions and go on being a nice Christian girl. If I could blink at every mention of hell, find a church that never uses the phrase "militant homosexual agenda"... Actually St. Weirdo's never does, bless them... If I was quite happy to put on my Christian smile I could quite easily rejoin a "proper" church (St. Weirdo's is made up mostly of people who don't get on well with proper church). I could easily pour the coffee and smile and sing in the choir. But I don't see the point, of seeming to be a nice saved Christian girl that nice Christian mothers want to marry their nice Christian sons. Mainly because I'm not. I have questions, and the answers don't seem to make any sense. I don't feel that I can honestly be the sort of Christian I feel I'm supposed to be. Actually talking to other Christians and even with encounters with various members of the clergy I feel I'm not alone in this. It seems rather that we are all pretending to believe all the right things.

I spoke to a Catholic priest when I went to a retreat in Mirfield earlier this year (Mirfield's Community of the Resurrection is actually Anglican, but the priest used to be my uni's RC chaplain). He was a very gentle person - my friend Rachel told me that his sermons generally consisted of "God loves you". On the first night in Mirfield, he spoke to us about silence - not so much physical silence, but the spiritual silence when God doesn't seem to be saying anything. He didn't see it as a bad thing. Later on, when I spoke to him alone, I confessed that I sometimes felt that the Charismatic church (that is, those who believe in spiritual gifts such as prophecy, healing, tongues) seem to teach that you have to feel really close to God in order to be a proper Christian. Everything's about victory and intimacy and joy, but often I still feel struggle, isolation and sadness. Before I've had times when I've simply been too obsessed with my own life to focus on God. It makes sense that I would feel separation then. But sometimes it just seems to come from nowhere. Often I feel I ought to blame myself for some unknown failing when I confess it feels more like God cleared off.

Once, on another camp, someone told us all that God does not clear off, and in fact we walk away from God. There have been times when all I really wanted to do was pray and worship God, and to tell others how great God is, certain that healing was just around the corner for them too. Telling my friends that God created them to be his own beloved children, that Jesus died for their sins. I miss the intimacy I felt but it doesn't seem to be as simple as praying a prayer. I ask for the strength to continue, for some kind of light in my darkness. Can't see a thing.

Turn me tender again
Fold me into you
Turn me tender again
And mould me to new
Faith lost its promise
And bruised me deep blue
Turn me tender again
Through union with you.
-Martyn Joseph

***

I think I have more to write, or at least to think, and then maybe write.

As for now, I'd better go to bed. See you soon.

Random word for today: bequeath

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