When God Comes Slant

Mark 1:9-15

 I used to hate Lent. It seemed to last forever. It seemed to focus only on how bad we were, and because we were so bad, it took Jesus’s torture and death on the cross to make God not hate us anymore. 

So, this week, on another edition of “Real House-monks of Dormont, Pennsylvania,” it was my goal to find God’s presence and more fully witness and experience God’s love for me. I needed to know more viscerally that God forgives me, that God wants good things for me, that, heck, God might even like me. So, while the dishes were still dirty in the sink, while the cat box was overflowing, and Dan was trying to wrestle the kids into pairs of clean underwear for the first time this week, I settled in to my little prayer corner. I put on my pajamas. Pulled up the covers in my bed and got comfortable. Because, I mean, I’m still a baby monk, not one of those who can meditate for days while standing on top of a pillar, or while walking on hot coals, or been given the ability to levitate. No. I can’t even concentrate if I my hands are dry or when I get a text message or if my jeans are too itchy. Anyway. I opened up my prayer journal. I got my favorite inky pen. I cracked my knuckles and got to work. “Dear God,” I wrote. “Help me to feel your love. Show yourself to me. Let me know you’re real.” And then I started paying attention to my breath and doing that body-scan relaxation thing, I repeated a mantra, and I waited… 

No? 

Ok. How about I read some stories about when Jesus saves the man on the cross next to him, or when he resurrects Lazarus, or forgives the woman accused of adultery. Those stories will help, right? 

Hmm. 

No? 

Nothing? 

Ok. Ok. Well. Maybe I need to sit up a little straighter. Maybe if I opened my lungs a little wider, breathed a little deeper. 

And so I waited some more. I waited and waited for the clouds to part and the heavens to rip open and the dove to descend and to finally hear the voice of God saying to me, “This is my daughter. My beloved. In her I am well pleased.” 

I tried this every day. Same thing. Get comfortable. Breathe deeply. Listen hard. Come back to the breath. Listen some more. 

Still. 

No dove. No voice from on high, no tangible, concrete experience of the divine. Just that fuzzy silence you hear when you’re in a quiet room trying to hear…something, anything. 

When I met with my spiritual director for the week, and I gave her my report of my spiritual escapades, I told her, “Well. Not much happened. I watched this cool documentary about how we only use a tiny percentage of our brain. And Dan and I randomly heard the song we danced to at our wedding from a free concert over the internet while we were chopping vegetables and browning the sausage. And we got this really good orange in our produce delivery. And our dog ate four raisins and that freaked us out but it turned out that she was ok. And I’m kind of wondering if I might be any good as a therapist or spiritual director, but how can I if I suck so bad at listening to God? So I asked and I asked and I asked. But I didn’t hear God. God didn’t speak to me. I tried. I really tried. I’ve tried before. For years, I’ve tried. And all I get, again and again, is a whole bunch of silence.” And my spiritual director, who is worth every tiny penny I send her, said, “God is speaking to you, Jenn. God is just speaking to you…slant.” 

God’s coming at me, I think, in these everyday, simple, concrete, basic, tangible ways. And I’m missing it because I’m expecting the heavens to part and the voice of God to come down and announce, in the voice of Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones, that “This is my daughter. The beloved. In her I am well pleased!” 

But you know what? I don’t get doves. They don’t land gracefully on my shoulders. I don’t hear God’s voice or see visions or feel the warm hand of God on my back. I’ve never been awoken in the middle of the night to God calling my name, and I’ve never walked on water or seen the lame walk or the blind see. God is truly real to some folks in this way. And I envy them. They emerge from their baptismal waters without doubts or fears or questions or anything other than a solid and sure identity in their new life in Christ. It’s all so real for them, even when they immediately get sent out into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. Sometimes, it makes me feel like I’m truly missing something. That there’s something wrong with me. That I’m not doing something right or trying hard enough or concentrating or being disciplined enough. Or maybe that just happens to the smarter people? Stronger people? Kinder people? What am I missing? Do they just have better imaginations? Are they holier? How can they always be so gosh darn sure? Or maybe, just maybe, I’m not loved like they are. Maybe I really am right. Maybe God’s grace covers everyone else but me. Maybe I’ve done too many horrible things, thought too many horrible thoughts, failed to do too many good things that ended up with too many horrible consequences. Everyone else deserves the doves. But not me.

Or, Jenn. Maybe. Maybe, God just comes at you slant. 

And. Maybe I’m not alone. Maybe there are others out there for whom God comes at them slant. Maybe there are others out there who get the pigeon, and not the dove?

For some of us, it’s all wilderness, all the time.

For some of us, it’s all Lent, all the time.

But that doesn’t mean that God’s not there. That doesn’t mean that God loves us any less. God speaks to us in the wilderness. God speaks to us in the Lent. God just sort of speaks kind of slant.

I remember once, maybe I was in fourth grade or something, and being a good Catholic girl, we would forgo eating meat on Fridays during Lent. Well, I went to a slumber party one Friday night, and I ate a piece of pepperoni pizza. I was mortified. I was so ashamed. Christ had given up so much for me, Christ had died on the cross to save me for my sins, and I couldn’t even appreciate it enough to remember to pick the pepperoni off first? And I still get dreams, at least once a week, where I’m back in high school, or I’ve had to go back to high school even though I’m in my forties now, and I have to take a test I haven’t studied for, or I’m failing I class I didn’t know I was registered for, or I have to not only find my locker in a maze of post-graduation building reconstruction, but I also have to remember my combination from twenty five years ago. Every day I make a list of things I need to accomplish, and every day I am super disappointed in myself that I don’t get it all done. I have mountains of books I haven’t read, piles of emails I haven’t responded to, protest marches I haven’t participated in, and you all know about my kids’ screen-time-addiction anxiety. I’m like one of those people who ask for money on the side of the road. Except I’m not holding a cardboard sign that says, “Will work for food,” or “any spare change will help,” but rather I’m holding signs that say “will work for acceptance,” or “please! Like me! A little bit helps!” Or, “Insecure. Hungry for acceptance. Looking for peace.” I never seem to have enough. I’m constantly running a sort of acceptance deficit. 

But you know what, if we are looking for a place where we don’t belong, we will find it. If we are listening to hear that we aren’t loved, we will hear it. If we are thinking the thoughts that we will never be good enough, we will never be it. If we are looking and listening and thinking in all the wrong ways, we’ll miss what God is really showing us, right here, right now, in this world, in the messiness of our actual lives.

What if God is still speaking to us, not just right before we’re sent out into the wilderness, but while we’re actually in the wilderness? What if our forty days of Lent are not just about being tempted by Satan to eat that piece of pepperoni pizza or indulge in that piece of chocolate or keep a perfect meditative discipline? But what if it’s about hearing God in all the things? What if it’s seeing that God comes to us in all the things? We focus on the temptations of Satan, and we forget the wild animals. We forget the angels that attend to us. We forget the fresh air and the quiet solitude and the unknown adventure of it all. What if, sure, for some of us, we get to hear God’s love for us straight from God’s mouth directly into our ears and it permeates our hearts in such a way that we will never doubt again. But what if God comes to us as pigeons in our own wildernesses, too? 

But if we demand doves, and insist on doves, and only count the doves, we will miss it. We will miss the presence of God in our midst. We will fail to hear the words we so long to hear: “This is my child. The beloved. In whom I am well pleased.” 

Some of us may not get the doves, but there are pigeons everywhere.

And here’s a cool thing. The Ancient Hebrew word for “dove” is “Yonah.” And the modern Hebrew word for pigeon is…”Yonah.” They're worth the same amount when it comes to Hebrew sacrifices. Doves and pigeons are the same breed of bird - of the family Columbidae. Doves were just pigeons bred to be white in color, and because of its association with the Holy Spirit, they became symbols of purity and grace. But essentially, they’re pigeons. A city nuisance. “Rats with wings.” Scavengers who poop all over our statues and monuments and crowd around trashcans and trip us up at the bus stops and steal our fries. They’re the ones who dive bomb into the dumpsters behind our apartment buildings for leftover pizza crust.

So maybe what I’m trying to say is that it’s all the same thing. For some of us, the clouds are rent and the sky opens up and God speaks directly to us from on high. And for others of us, God comes at us slant, in the roundabout form of an extra fifteen minutes of sleep or a quiet snowfall or a sweet juicy slice of orange in the middle of February. 

God spoke to Jesus, clearly and openly, and the Spirit of God landed upon him in the form of a dove. And then that same Spirit, that same dove, kicks him out into the wilderness where temptation makes it awfully hard to hear the clear, unobscured voice of God. But God was still there. In the wildness of the animals. In the serving presence of the angels. In the every day realities of hunger and thirst and trees and soil and the rising and setting sun. Maybe even in persistent doubt and insecurities and uncertainties and even in those of us who are spiritually hearing impaired. God comes to us in the wildernesses of our lives, too. In our messes. In the snowstorms that still persist in late February, and in the COVID vaccine waiting lines, and in the seemingly fruitless meditations of an undisciplined, impatient, and demanding girl who insists that God speaks to her only in one very specific, very tangible, and very loud way. God can land on us like a dove. But most of the time, God comes to me like a pigeon, on the dirty, distracted sidewalk, telling me to pay attention, pay attention to the burger wrappers in the gutters, the cigarette butts in the streets, the wads of gum that have turned black and tar-y on the asphalt. It’s all still God. It’s all still “I love you”s and “you’re good enough”s and “I’m here”s. God still comes to us, even when God comes to us slant.

This Lent, let’s look for God in the wilderness. In the temptations. In the wild animals. In the small moments when angels attend to us. Let’s find God in the pigeons.

Emily Dickinson says it better and much more succinctly:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –

Thanks be to God.

Riding the Backwards Bicycle

 The Transfiguration! Mark 9:2-9

Remember when you were a kid, and it suddenly dawned on you, “Whoa. What if my green, is really your blue, and my blue is really your green?” Did that happen to you? Or maybe it was just me. I think this happened to me when I was learning about color blindness. And this strange idea of differing perceptions entered my brain. What if we just name our realities the same thing, but really, all of our realities are totally different? What if your “green” is my “blue” and vice versa. Well, as an eight year old, it totally blew my mind. 

And then we learned about how the light hits the eye in just a certain way, and the light gets sort of bent, and what we see as different colors are actually different spectrums of light, different ways the light gets bent, and so that’s how we can differentiate between red and yellow, blue and orange, green and violet. These light receptors within our eyes transmit messages to the brain and that’s how we get color. Ok. So, not so mind-blowing after all. Green is green, because our eyes basically all see in the same “way” and our brains basically process that color similarly. 

But if we go deeper, if we think further, we’ll come to realize that all of our reality is in our brains.  Everything we experience, all of our sensations, emotions, questions and confusions, it’s all happening in our brains. How do I know that my green is the same as yours? Maybe my eight year old self wasn’t that far off after all.

So. Yeah. Dan and I just watched episode 1 of “The Brain” on PBS. It’s this series written and by David Eagleman who is a neuroscientist who is fascinated by this grey, jello-like three pound wrinkly blob that we carry around inside our sculls. So basically, this means, that I am now a neuroscience expert. Ask me anything. I figured it all out from one fifty-five minute episode on PBS. 

But really, in this first episode, Eagleman explores the concept of “reality.” What’s really “real,” and how do we know what’s real? How many times do we perceive something to be the case, and then later, find out that it was totally not true? 

Or, how many times have we been able to see two different realities of the seemingly same object? There’s a new one on the internet these days. Have you seen it? It’s the one of either a dog or a man running through the snowy woods. If you stare at it long enough, you can trick your mind into seeing both. Or there was the shoe one, where you’d see either the pink or the blue shoe? Or the dress one way back years ago. Was it gold and white, or blue and black? That one caused all kinds of arguments for weeks after. 

And as a teacher and a pastor, I can’t tell you how often it has happened when someone has come up to me to say that they either loved or hated my sermon, that it really spoke to them, or they absolutely disagreed with it, and then, when they go to describe how it impacted them, when they go to explain their experience to me, I wonder if we were actually in the same room, let alone listening to the same sermon. 

So anyway, back to this documentary. It turns out that our brain is tricking us all the time. We are constantly weeding through a massive amount of information and our brain is sifting through it all and deciding which things are worth focusing on. It’s going on all the time, all day, every day. We are taking in a ridiculous amount of sensory information and our brains are picking and choosing what is worth emphasizing. We get so used to these patterns of picking and choosing, these algorithms, that they just run on autopilot. We do things automatically without even thinking about them. How often have you gotten in your car and then suddenly arrived at work or at the grocery store, and you can’t really remember how you “got” there? Or, for me, when I was a kid, if I slowed down and really thought about it as I recited the Our Father, I couldn’t get through it, but if I sped through it, I knew all the words by heart? Turns out, that even though we don’t remember it, we even had to form algorithms for how to see. Even if we were born with perfectly functioning corneas, we still didn’t know how to see. That’s something we had to learn.

So there was this guy, Mike May, who went blind after an accident at the age of three. Fifty years later, because of developments in science and technology, he was given a cornea transplant. Amazing, right?! This guy is healed. So they take off the bandages after the transplant, and he opens his eyes, and now that the mechanics are all fixed up, he should be able to see, right? Well, no. He’d gone so long not seeing that his brain adapted, he formed new ways of “seeing” through his other senses, and getting his sight back was a lot more difficult than just getting new eyes. He would look at his two sons and not know who was whom. Once a Paralympic skier, able to navigate between trees and people and other obstacles going twenty miles an hour through the use of his other senses, now that he could technically “see,” he could no longer tell the difference between shadows and holes and a forty foot spruce right in his way. Turns out, it was really difficult for him to re-adapt to seeing again. He needed to create a totally new algorithm. When he lost his sight, he had to retrain his brain to see a different way. And now that he can technically “see” again, he has to re-retrain his brain. And it hasn’t been easy. Years after his transplant, he’s still struggling. When he was young, his brain was so elastic that he could adapt fairly easily, even to the point where when he talks about the accident today, he doesn’t recall it as being a big deal at all. His other faculties took over and so his capacity for seeing was displaced by the super-functioning of his other senses. But now. Now he has to function under an entirely different set of neurological relationships, and I wonder, if sometimes, he doesn’t just close his eyes or choose to wear a blindfold just so he can go back to the way things were before, when he didn’t have vision, but when he could still see.

***

So David Eagleman decided to check in on this experiment. A bunch of grad students were wearing these special glasses during 100% of their waking hours. These glasses had special prisms that basically switched what was seen into a mirror image of itself. So, essentially, what was “actually” on the right side was “seen” on the left side. And what was actually on the left side was “seen” on the right. You’d reach for an apple with your left hand, but you’d miss it, because it was actually on your right. So Eagleman decides to try on these glasses for himself. I mean, how hard can it be? He just has to adapt, right? Make the calculation in his brain that the wine bottle he sees on his left is on his right, and the glass he sees on his right is actually on his left. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make that calculation. It wasn’t a logical decision he could make. His brain had been “seeing” the world in such a way for so long that he couldn’t figure out how to pour the bottle of wine into the cup. In fact, it made him nauseous after just a short time, and he had to take the glasses off. But. Here’s the good news. One of the grad students was there who had been wearing these special glasses for the last two weeks. And, at the beginning, he’d had a similar experience - the expectation that he could account for the change, the failure to account for the change, the clumsiness, the mess, the frustration. But after about a week, things started to change. His brain started to adapt. New pathways were being written. The brain was “talking” to itself in different ways, and after two weeks, it was no big deal to pour that bottle of wine into that glass. He could travel through a maze just fine. How’d he do it? He’d gained more sensory experience, he’d made mistakes, adjusted, and tried again. He’d spilled a lot of wine. He broke a lot of glasses. He walked into a lot of walls. But every time he did, he’d get information from his other senses that would help him adapt to this new way of “seeing” the world. He couldn’t rationalize his way out of this situation. There was no logical way out of this. He had to live in to it in order to solve it. And that’s messy. And hard. And damn inconvenient. It required that he slow things down. That he do things differently. That he try things and fail. And then that he try them again.

Ok. One more example, because I know this is weird stuff to explain. Destin Sandlin is an engineer who started a really popular YouTube series called “Smarter Every Day.” In one of these episodes, some fellow welders whom he works with played a trick on him. They constructed a bicycle that works the opposite of how every other bicycle works. When you turned the handlebars to the right, the bike went left. When you turned the handlebars to the left, the bike went right. He “understood” the change perfectly. He knew cognitively, rationally, what he needed to do to right that bicycle. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t ride the bicycle. He took this bicycle with him on talks and presentations all over the country and had others try it. He even offered them two hundred dollars if they could ride that bike just ten feet without falling over. And no one could do it. Everyone could “comprehend” how these changes to this bike were made, how they would impact the functioning of this bike. They “knew” what they needed to do to accommodate those changes. And yet. Nobody could ride the bike. Again, though, the good news? He figured it out, after eight months of trying every day. He could ride the backwards bike. But can you guess what happened when he tried to get back on a regular bike again? Yup. Disaster. But only for about twenty minutes or so. And then his mind just clicked, he “remembered” how to ride his bike the old way, and he was off, cycling down the road. The folks watching him saw the instant transformation from not being able to ride the bike to being able to ride the bike and they thought he’d been faking it all along. They thought he was just being silly, falling off the bike on purpose, but really, he was re-retraining his mind how to ride a bike. He had to “wake” himself up to that previous algorithm, the one he’d known all along.

This is the cognitive dissonance that goes through Peter in our story today. He thinks he sees one thing, Jesus, his buddy, the guy who makes fart jokes and spits watermelon seeds and was once caught picking his nose, is now transfigured right in front of Peter, dazzlingly white such that no one could bleach them. There’s Jesus. But it’s not Jesus. Not any Jesus that Peter nows. This Jesus doesn’t fit into his previous algorithm. And so he freaks out. He doesn’t know what to say, but still feels like he has to say something, so he says, “Uh, yeah. Let’s build some houses.” He tries to ride the bike and he falls on his ass. He’s given knew information that doesn’t fit with the old. They’ve switched his bike around, they’ve given him new glasses, his “green” is suddenly “red.” 

“This is my Son, the Beloved,” God says. “Listen to him!”

And then it’s gone. It’s over. The bike is back to the way it was before. The glasses are taken off. The green is green again. Jesus is back to himself. And they’re walking down the mountain.  Everything is back to the way it was before. And yet. Something has changed. Peter cannot undo new pathways that have been etched into his brain. Somehow he has to find a way to live in a world where Jesus is both the man he knows and loves and follows and trusts, and this other thing, this being in dazzlingly white robes, conversing with the prophets of old. He’s got to figure out the both/and. Jesus is both God and human. Jesus is both the Messiah, and the one who must suffer and die. Peter’s got to ride the backwards and the regular bikes all at the same time. He’s been given the eyes to see, but he doesn’t yet have the neurological shortcuts to back it up. Now, he has to function as both blind and able to see. 

They come down from the mountain and Jesus tells them to say nothing until the Son of Man has risen from the dead.

Why? 

Well. Maybe because they’re still processing. They’re still trying to make sense of this both-God-and-Man algorithm. And it’s not going to make sense until they see Jesus rise from the dead on the third day. That’s when the neurological or spiritual pathways will be complete. That’s when the switch will be flipped - when they can ride both bikes, see both colors, wear and not-wear the glasses at the same time. 

In other words, we can train our minds to see the gold/white and the blue/black dresses. We can see both the dog and the hiker. Maybe, even, we can see the God and the man in Jesus Christ. We can see the one who will suffer and die and the one who will be raised again on the third day. Maybe we can’t see them both at the same time, but we can move between the two with a kind of neural elasticity that’s actually really common among young kids. Maybe we can have faith like a child - an ability to go back and forth between two differing languages or two differing realities and it’s no big deal. A sort of spiritual plasticity or elasticity.

We still have some theological and spiritual elasticity. We can still see the both/and. We can still see that Jesus is both things. But learning how to do that is going to be messy. We’re going to bump into walls and spill a lot of wine and mistake shadows for trees. We are going to fall off our bikes. We are going to insist that the shoes are pink while others swear they’re blue. It’s going to take experimenting and trial and error and mistakes and letting go of our old ways of doing things. It’s going to take time. And trust. And lots and lots of paying attention. 

What do you see? Green or Red? Man? Or God? 

Yes. 

Maybe.
Sometimes.

Thanks be to God.