Are You There God, It’s Me Peggy
There’s a coming of age book you may know written by Judy Blume called Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret. Margaret, a 12 or 13 year old girl talks to god like you might a good friend, always starting with the title line, “Are you there, God, it’s me Margaret?”
“Are you there,” I suspect, is the beginning of many prayers. Maybe not spoken, just thought or hoped for, almost like pre-game prep. People get on their knees, or stand and bow, or light candles, hoping someone is there, hoping someone can see and hear us in our need. It’s an articulation, with or without words, of our desire to be taken care of, to be safe, protected, to feel like there is order in the chaos we experience. Are you there? Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Whether the petition is to heal a sick loved one or to find a parking spot, people often call into the darkness in some fashion hoping someone is listening.
I was a college chaplain interviewing student ministers to work in our campus department when we asked a young man who god was to him. He looked a little confused by the question, although why a person looking to be a student minister at a Catholic college hadn’t anticipated that question is unclear, but the way he expressed his confusion was in a baffled facial expression and a finger pointed at the sky. I laughed, which might have been rude, but I was struck by the clarity of his desire for us to explain which he asked without a word spoken. Pointing up is somehow a universal symbol for god.
That moment has stuck in my head because god has never seemed to me to be above, although his gesture was completely legible. You mean…(point up)?
So many of us begin the spiritual journey thinking god is elsewhere – up, above, transcendent – and think the spiritual response is to also transcend this world to find him/her/them. So much of worship, of spiritual seeking or direction focuses on how to go up. Often in history we declare the most extreme examples as the most spiritual. Those who transcend physicality, who deny the body and Earth, are closer to god. This leads people to give up sex in some traditions, to deny themselves food, to limit clothing to one uniform or robe, to accept poverty not as a way to confront the burdens and inequity of capitalism but as a way to separate from materiality to prioritize the spiritual, having accepted a divide or incompatibility between them. There have always been contemplatives in every tradition, people who leave their lives and, ostensibly the world, behind to find or to be worthy of god. The Jain monks who wander the streets naked. The Hindu ascetics who cover their bodies in human ashes. There were desert fathers in the ancient church who lived their whole lives in trees hoping the sacrifice and self-denial would get them ever closer to that god above. Beneath these acts, well-motivated as they might be, is a theology of the spirit that devalues the body, and sees god as elsewhere.
And while most of us don’t go to those extremes, it’s still not uncommon to pray with our attention above or away from us. Are you there? If I pray hard, or right, if I call out loudly, will god hear me? I speak my prayer and I wait. I hope it’s my turn to be heard. I listen for an answer. One doesn’t come, maybe no one is listening. Some pray with more gusto or maybe some promises in negotiation; some stop altogether, never to return.
This process has always struck me as the makings of a dysfunctional relationship. Hello? I’m talking! Why can’t I hear you? Feel you? Why is nothing happening?
Most often when people come to me to talk about prayer, it’s in response to this experience. God, as they understand god, is a many-eyed, many-brained, many-armed parental figure who often seems absent, leaving us to feel abandoned, or possibly alone by virtue of the non-existence of such an entity.
Are you there? Hello?
People often pray with eyes directed upwards, and in the process, we miss the god located directly before us. It’s the genius of the Christian tradition where god’s big leap in Jesus is to come “down here”, to share in the human experience, to walk with us. God in the Christian story is forever overcoming the gap, making spiritual growth less about climbing, denying or performing and more about descending, letting go, grounding. The invitation the Jesus tradition offers is that of shifting the spiritual life toward authentic humanness, wounds and all.
The idea of ascending, of leaving behind our humanity, of not embracing our brokenness, but of self denial as spiritual practice is not mirrored in the story of Jesus, a man who was very much of this world, who
suffered, and loved, and drank wine and shared meals with friends. The rejection of that world in an attempt to be closer to god, to be more spiritual, more worthy, is misguided or out of sync with the story, and too often sponsored by ego. It is, many times, a practice seeking perceived perfection, coddled in arrogance, even as humility is touted by both practitioner and onlooker.
Earth-centered pagan traditions are brilliant in their rootedness. The Celtic, Wiccan and Druidic gods are embedded in the trees, the birds, the wolves, and in each other. God isn’t above, but within and around. Praying up or otherwise trying to transcend is to bypass the spiritual richness of the world we inhabit.
When we do that, we miss the god located here, in sight, to be touched and heard. GK Chesterton once wrote: “Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of. Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation …of God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look…”
We keep trying to talk to god, sitting quietly, waiting for a reply, not realizing that we didn’t start this conversation, and our sitting still or getting small, is limiting our ability to participate in it. This whole world is Revelation, and our prayer is the response. If it is, in fact, a dysfunctional relationship with communication issues, we’re the perpetrators. We’re the ones keeping silent while the world, while the god or gods of this world, are begging for our attention in the extravagance of all that surrounds us.
Richard Rohr once said: “Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it has largely contributed to… the “practical atheism” that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries today. The God we’ve been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.”
This is the invitation of Universalism. Maybe even more than an invitation – maybe it’s a charge. A directive. A demand. The demand of Universalism is to know god to be so big, so generous, so wildly inclusive as to have saved every single one of us. To love us all so well, so excessively, so generously, as to have brought us at birth to the Center where Love Lives, to have embraced us from our first breath, never once to let us go. That is the Love that claims us, the Love to which we belong.
And that is the Love that surrounds us, enchanting the wind blowing past us, the rain soaking us, the leaves on the trees captivating us with their reds, yellows and oranges.
Maybe the question isn’t “are you there”, but “are we here”? Are we here, paying attention, leaning into the beauty we were born into? And that’s not limited to the natural world in it’s first form, but to what Salle McFague calls Second Nature. Second Nature like stone houses, like wooden pews, like stained glass. The life of the spirit isn’t limited. It is all embracing.
And it’s invitational. It’s a provocation, enticing us to notice. Yes, god is here. No, you don’t have to sit still or look up or deny your body or your reason or your personhood in any way. You have to lean into those things, accept your humanness, your earthliness, your body as stardust, sacred and holy.
This living god comes to us in the form of our lives, in the form of all life. We have only to notice, only to respond to the gift of this life. We can fall to our knees in gratitude, raise our arms in praise, sing the joy of this Love, pray with our hands preparing food for someone who is truly hungry, march for justice on any city street, breathe deeply the air that gives us life, and we can call out, knowing we are heard, knowing the conversation started long before we arrived and will continue through the end of time. Call out like you just arrived home, swung open the door, can smell dinner all ready for you, in this world that welcomes you home again and again, and howl in delight: Are you there god, it’s me!
