Excerpt from WHOLE PRAYER. Walter Wangerin Jr.

Transcription

1 Excerpt from WHOLE PRAYER

2 On the northeastern shores of Lake Michigan, about 120 miles south of the Straits of Mackinac, the lake bed rises to form a long ridge close beneath the surface of the water. Some 200 yards offshore that ridge lightens the still water into a long green smile. If one climbs the high bluffs back of the beach, one can on a calm day recognize the submerged formation as if it were the scaled, stony back of a sleeping sea-snake. But on windy days it is the white breaker that reveals where the stone lies below: it foams far offshore, it combs the bearded face of the lake and stands on one foot, then crashes down with the sound of enormous weight. Such heavings of the sea have swamped more than one sailing ship. I saw the wreckage of a nineteenth-century schooner still lying in six feet of water. It was called The Hiawatha. In the 200 yards between the offshore shallows and the beach itself, the seabed sinks again, and the lake deepens to twenty or thirty feet too deep, at any rate, for me to dive down and touch the bottom. I spent the summer of my seventeenth year working as a lifeguard several miles north of this more treacherous reach of water. But I knew the spot. It was my duty, too, to conduct daylong hikes through the denser woods inland, emerging in sunlight at the very top of the bluff that overlooked that underwater ridge-formation. A wonderful path of pure sand descended from the top to the bottom of the bluff. Imagining myself Moses, I would stand at the head of the path and send my hikers downhill, warning them neither to run nor to enter the water (never, in fact, to swim anywhere but in the designated areas where I could see to save them). In those long-ago days I was rejoicing in my own emerging freedom. I had a girlfriend of dark, enduring beauty, Barbara, who walked with me on these hikes, whose presence elevated my sense of personal importance and grandeur. When, therefore, the hikers whom I had led had all gone down, when they were safe and small on the beaches below, I would raise my Moses staff and sweep it toward the north, their last injunction from me, their final direction home. Now, I will confess that twice (but both times in the company of the dark Barbara; I was not alone; neither was I without terrible temptations, since Barbara seemed to me as beautiful as Miriam when she danced with her timbrel above the bloody sea!) twice, I say, when all my hikers had vanished toward the north, I ran. I mean: I dropped like a heavenly bolt down the sandy path, I shot out across the beach, and I fairly flew into the waters of Lake Michigan, swimming mightily a hundred yards from shore, jolted by the sudden cold on my sweating body. It was delightful. And it was then that I tried to touch the bottom, and failed. Too deep. Too deep for me. In this chapter we must begin with God's first, his broadest, his most fundamental response to all our speaking. It undergirds every particular word he may choose to say. It gives context to every individual topic he may utter. And it assures us that some answer will always be given to every prayer we pray. 2

3 God's profoundest word to us is this: LIFE. It is his desire that no one should perish but that all his children should live. He calls us from dying to living. The essence and the power of his every answer is this gift of life. Whenever God talks, those whom he addresses those who hear him are vibrantly alive in the relationship itself, whatever the immediate issue. Before we consider the various ways by which the dear Lord speaks to his children, we must first grow alert to the divine desire which motivates him always, always to communicate with us. At the same time, we must become wisely aware of the various ways we would subvert God's desire by choosing death instead of life. It is in the difference between these choices life in the Lord, or an isolating death that we will recognize what prayer is at the nexus: why God invites our speaking at all, why God answers, and what God hopes to be the consequence of every whispered petition, whether heavy or light. If we resist the laws of God, we resist God. Without God, we create for our habitation a universe whose meaning must arise from our selves (our understanding, our personal value, our successes and accomplishments, our innate goodness, our hedonistic pleasures) and if these selves cannot finally sustain meaning in the universe, if the self is too small, too weak, too failing to save us, then (without God) we are left with no meaning whatsoever. How hollow and empty the world! How helpless and lonely are we. If we lose ourselves in the endless maze of chemical dependencies; if we let certain hatreds become our bread, feeding upon them day and night as if they gave purpose to our existence; if we allow ourselves to drown in self-pity and the perpetual blaming of others for our circumstances; if, in other words, we live in lies, sundering ourselves from reality and a true recognition of our real (needful) selves, then we shall have forsaken God's good creation. We shall live imprisoned in the deep darkness and the emptiness of deception. We shall have chosen death instead of life and blessing. And death must soon trouble us with a colder, more bitter truth. Loneliness, meaninglessness, helplessness, darkness, despair dying must horrify us. And then the prayer we pray shall not be elaborate. Indeed, the more elemental our cry, the fewer the words! Help me, O God! The fundamental prayer of the Hebrews which we have carried into our liturgies as a single word Hosanna! means "Save us, we beg you!" In the matters of life and death our whole being becomes the prayer. A yearning to live, reduced to a single spontaneous communication, begins the process. And then it ought to be with our whole beings that we listen for the third part of praying. God's response. As our speaking was simple and short, so shall his speaking be. He may say no more than a name. 3

4 Our names, you see, the word by which the Shepherd leads; by which he establishes relationships and grants people a personal value; by which ("Lazarus! Come forth!") Jesus has raised the dead. Listen for the simplest, most essential word in the mouth of the God whose nature it is to speak. Listen for your name. And so be raised to life again. I don't recall the immediate reason for my wandering away from the camp community alone. At one point that summer John Blackstone took Barbara Witzke to a secluded spot at night, then returned to boast of prowess and conquests. Perhaps I was moping. In the warm dark of an overcast night, in the still of a windless night, I walked south along the beach a mile, two miles. I lost myself in the languid thoughts of melancholy youth. I sank down and sat in the sand, suffering an exquisite loneliness, the sweet sorrow of an artist abandoned. And then, on a whim, I stripped and waded into the water. The bluff behind me was swallowed up in darkness. Invisible. Nevertheless it seemed to push me forward. Sand turned stony beneath my feet. I dived seaward and swam. How long did I swim? I don't know. Slow strokes, slow strokes, I took a grim pleasure in solitude. Lo, how I have become my world! Surely, Moses, abused by his own people, must have achieved an emotional self-sufficiency. The surface water was warm, but currents from the deeps ran ribbons of chill across my skin. I could hear only the little waves lapping at my ears. I rolled left and right in a slow Australian crawl, and I swam. Then nothing in particular happened. But suddenly I woke to the nothingness surrounding me and another sort of cold ran fingers into the core of my body. I stopped and sank and turned upright, treading water. I turned and turned, looking everywhere in blackness, seeing nothing, absolutely nothing! There were no stars that night. No lights, no glow above the horizon no horizon! No shore that I could see. And if the bluff was shadow in shadow, so was the air piled over the western extent of the lake only a heavier shadow. I could not distinguish one from the other. The black was perfectly still. No wind, no waves, no slap of the waters. How could I decide directions without sound? The only break of water was the circle around my neck. I was my horizon. And my continent. Nothing near me to grab, nothing to stand on, nothing hard or stable or secure. I was in a nowhere, and I began to panic. Everywhere was the same where. Which way should I swim? And how could I be sure that I was swimming in a straight line? Anywhere could be the wrong where and disastrous. I tried to dive down to the bottom. No luck. Down and down, the dark grew cold. So I struck out and swam a certain direction, hard, for five minutes, and then I dived down again. Colder. Out of the depths have I cried unto you, O LORD! 4

5 I sought to swim in the same direction again. Did I? I don't know. Turning and turning in a running world, I could not know. But I swam. And I dived again. And I touched the bottom. It was stony, great smooth stones sunken in a sea-slime. I dived again and again and began to perceive an angle, a rising up. That, therefore, is the direction in which I swam. I swam with strong sweeps of my arms and a churning kick, almost as it were with my last energy, but with a tight anticipation: the beaches, and sand, and the land! Then it occurred to me that I could, in fact, be swimming away from land, out toward the underwater formation which rose up 200 yards offshore! And all at once my limbs began to tremble like rubber. Oh, I was so tired. I felt like crying. How did I know that I was not swimming out toward my death instead of home again? O Lord, hear my voice. I said, "Help." I swallowed water. I could not shout. I hung like a larva upon the surface of the sea, and I said, "Please help me." Almost immediately a soft voice came out of the night uttering a single word as if it were a question: "Wally?" I snapped alert. I turned in the water. Suddenly the world had focus and a direction. "Wally, is that you?" "Yes," I spluttered. "Yes, it's me!" Well, it was me, and at that calling of my name I came to be again, yes. Yes: I am! And I am here. "What are you doing out there?" It was a woman's disembodied voice. It was Barbara Witzke ashore, calling me back from the sea. No, but it was also my Savior calling me from death to life again. It was the third part of prayer, God's speaking in powerful language the word of his love, the word of my re-creation: Wally, he said, exactly as Jesus said Mary to his dear Magdalene the day of his resurrection, and hers. Even so does the Savior answer the desperate, spontaneous prayers of many who are perishing, whose universe has become dark, unstable, forsaken and empty. Through the voices of those who love and forgive (Oh, the divinity in those acts!) God speaks. Professional counselors may be the speech of the healing Heavenly Father. Family members who are able to declare the truth in the face of self-deceptions; pastors, friends, neighbors, spouses, parents and children who can be a moral compass for the person who has literally lost his way these are the instruments of God. 5

6 And they are the spoken communication of the Creator to the one who, dying, has cried out, "Help!" from the depths of his soul: "Please help me! Hosanna!" "Yes," saith the Lord. And then, in the voices of his angels, your helpers, he calls you by your name. And that, still, is prayer. Copyright 1998 Walter Wangerin, Jr. Used by permission. May not be duplicated without permission. 6