The message I received from myself (through a character in a story - a creation of my own mind) has been rewinding and repeating in my head as I sit in the Chicago Midway terminal. My metaphorical manifestation of God – the Ocean – echos to me like repetitive waves pounding at the shores of my mind. “My sand castles are way better than yours, but I love sharing them with you.”
Over and over, I tell myself, “God has a plan, what is it? Pray harder, listen for God’s voice to tell you what his plan is!” Isn’t that what we’re conditioned to do in Christianity? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to desire – to find God’s plan? Since I first started attending church in the last year of high school, I have been trying to follow what God wants for me. Time and time when I thought He was telling me to do something, work somewhere, attend some school, go to some church, I have been disappointed. “I still don’t see the plan, God. Where is this going.” Then again, I feel a tug for me to go in another direction, leave what He just asked me to start. And again, a series of signs tells me a new direction. Over and over and over I change direction. So often my direction changes, that my compass is confused. If I had a GPS, it just fried its own brains out. I imagine a GPS with God’s voice instead of that annoying lady, “In one mile, turn right.” Then you turn right and it says, “In 100 yards, make a u-turn.”
God creates man, man creates GPS. Shouldn’t God be better at directions than the GPS? Or am I not using it right? Is my faith not strong enough for Him? Am I not trying hard enough to hear him? I envy anyone who says they know God’s plan for them. Does anyone really know God’s plan for them, or do they make their own plans and make it look like God? Were all those directions just my own voice processed through a computer to sound like God?
As I get on my flight to Philadelphia, I reach for the book I am reading, Beautiful Boy, I pull it out along with my notepad/journal thing. I flip open my journal on accident to a page that is empty except for one line in my chicken scratch writing:
Dialogues With Silence, page 75 – Why is it so dark?
The plane hasn’t completely boarded yet, so I jump over the guy in the aisle seat and quickly shuffle through the overhead compartment, where I find my backpack nestled in the back under a jacket, a pillow and someone’s computer bag. I don’t need to look in it because I can feel the rough edges of a book that the publishers decided to produce with torn ridges, which I can only assume was to help the reader fully understand the brokenness of the author. I only know that the book has rough edges because I stole the book off of my friend James’ bookshelf just yesterday (well actually we concluded that it was my book in the first place, but I left it from when we had lived together). I flip through Thomas Merton’s book and find the page:
God, my God, God whom I meet in darkness, with you it is always the same thing! Always the same question that nobody knows how to answer!
I have prayed to you in the daytime with thoughts and reasons, and in the nighttime you have confronted me, scattering thought and reason. I have come to you in the morning light and with desire, and you have descended upon me with great gentleness, with most forbearing silence in this inexplicable night, dispersing light, defeating all desire. I have explained to you a hundred times my motives for entering the monastery, and you have listened and said nothing, and I have turned away and wept with shame.
Is it true that my motives have meant nothing? Is it true that all my desires were an illusion?
While I am asking questions that you do not answer, you ask me a question that is so simple that I cannot answer it. I do not even understand the question.
I feel like I could have written this - myself, today, frustrated. Instead a man who had given up his life to join a monastery and live in silence asked this question probably at least ten years ago. I think he wondered if God had led him astray. I wonder the same things, “do my motives mean nothing?” I feel like I try very hard. I feel like I want to do what’s right every day. Likewise, I feel that my questions are un answered. But I love how Merton says the last line, “While I am asking questions that you do not answer, you ask me a question that is so simple that I cannot answer it. I do not even understand the question.”
Didn’t we learn well enough from Jesus that when you ask God a question, he likes to mess with our heads and ask us a question back instead? Have you ever seen the TV show, “Whose line is it anyway?” Its an improve game show and they play this great game, where you can only speak in questions. God would rock the pants off of Drew Cary in that game!
What is the question? What is the question he asks back. Why can’t I answer it, why can’t I understand it?
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