We're all waiting to be met

Ironically, as I sat down to write for the third part of this series on the album Sanctuary, I was brought into the challenge of the reality of this week’s song, Waiting to Be Met, by having to stop writing and spend 24 hours tending to my sick children. 

Both of my children caught some sort of stomach flu and I was up all night doing laundry, rocking them, and dealing with fevers. They are both doing better now, and I am able to sit down for a moment to reflect on this song. I am mostly grateful, as they are rarely ever that kind of sick, and for the practices I have, to bear witness to the moments that are so challenging. I’ve begun a simple morning and evening Qigong practice that has been incredibly helpful, and the body trauma is not being so first in line to be in charge.

Life is the teacher, as they say. And, with this song, Waiting to Be Met, there are these lines,


what if I hide
and you don’t seek?
what if I show myself
and you look right through me?
how can I trust the mystery?
when that’s just what it is,
a mystery


My children love to play hide and seek. They also adore being really seen, especially when they share a part of their day. These words about hiding and being sought, and showing ourselves to someone, are about that childlike part of all of us. And James Finley says, “that’s where God meets us”.


I always marvel at how, when I climb into bed to hold one (or both) of my fevered children and become conscious of my own breathing, I can hear their little racing heartbeat begin to slow to a more normal rhythm, and I can somehow sense when their bodies have reached homeostasis.


We’re all waiting to be met.


I recently saw a video with Charles Eisenstein talking about what he might say or do if he were to have a conversation with Donald Trump. He first asks the question: “what makes somebody into a narcissist?” And answers, “I think it originates in not being seen for who you really are. So you become addicted to making yourself seen. Making yourself the center of attention.” He goes on to say that he “would go into it with the intention of seeing him as he really is, of seeing him at the soul level”. Or as Rev William Barber said this week as he preached on Trump and Psalm 139, “I mourn for Trump,” and he goes on to speak of the dangers of how, “You can become your enemy.”


And, like that flicker of light left in the creature Gollum, Psalms 139 also says, “if I ascend to heaven you are there O God, and if I make my bed in Hell still you are with me”, "where can I go from your Spirit O God?". In other words, there is nowhere, where God isn’t. Or as Cynthia Bourgeault said in her essay from the anthology How I Found God in Everyone and Everything, “I am not a space in which God does not occupy”.


First of all, I want to be clear, in the way that James Finley is clear, later on in Sanctuary (in the track There is a Peace), that “we should never romanticize trauma with spiritual sayings. It matters that you get as free from it as you possibly can. But you can go through that evolving process in such a way, that it becomes a very mysterious place. Namely, the place in which your inner peace is no longer dependent on the outcome.”


This is radical thinking. And at first glance, it appears very dangerous to those of us who are working through trauma, and have spent much of our lives scanning our surroundings, looking for danger. (Last week’s recommendation comes to mind… be countercultural and move slowly.)


And, we also must confess that as a society, we’ve often believed and respected the perpetrators, and been more concerned about them, and are quick to come to their rescue, when events are twisted to look like an attack on them.


This is why, in the film Mary Magdalene, when the woman speaks to Jesus about the rape of one of her friends, she is challenged by Jesus with two things: that she must attempt to be free from the unforgiveness holding her in bondage, but also… and this is key… obey God over and above, obeying men. He was saying, “follow me/follow this path” even though your husbands, or fathers won’t let you. But forgive also, so you might be free. (And I will say here, that I believe that is exactly one of the things Jesus was doing.)


I hear this song today, at the more simple level, of really meeting my children in the demands of the day (which as many of you know, is not as simple as it sounds!)


But I also hear this song at a wider, radical level. So radical that it begs the question of what restorative justice could look like, if not over-simplified, in one direction or the other.


For instance, what I know of restorative justice is that it must always make sure the survivor is safe, and has the resources, and support to heal. And the survivor doesn't need to be in the room with the perpetrator. And sometimes, forgiveness needs to happen from a great distance, without making contact with the other person. But, restorative justice is also about the right people being with someone who has done a a wrong, sometimes a terrible wrong, in the hope that they too, might find their way back to homeostasis. 


*And*, as many people of colour will attest, restorative justice can often be romanticized, and over-simplified, when a person of colour forgives a white person. It doesn’t mean the forgiveness shouldn’t have occurred. It means people should not fetishize forgiveness. Forgiveness should never be pornographic… but it seems sometimes that, perhaps in order to distance ourselves from the painful tenderness of the forgivenesses tapping us on the shoulder, we plaster someone else’s forgiveness story on our newsfeed, a little too freely.


This all comes back to our own need for being met. It is a delicate dance. Learning how to share. As James Finley says, “that vulnerable moment, when someone comes out from behind the curtain”.


I say all this because, at the very risk of sounding like a cheap grace evangelist, I will not rule out any being on this planet in their need to be met. Hear it at that level if you have to, but what I’m really doing is teasing out the frequency at the edge of all sermons on grace, that hums, in spite of all rah, rah, Liminoid conversions, and also in spite of a very tired, often very mean, deconstructing cynicism.


“It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand.”