Or does he? Humans are untrusting and untrustworthy creatures, lacking in faith, enchained by the mundane, blindly obeying the laws of physics, of society, and of religion, even though they are blessed by choice, freedom, possibility, and hope. Humans frequently, even usually, let God down.

But Peter, grasping at last the fullness of Truth, rejecting finally his fear, breathing deeply as if for the first time, grips the boat’s gunwales and steps boldly onto water. As called.  As required. And stands, eyes wide, pulse smooth, in the impossibility of God’s grace.

This one moment, this one choice, this one decision, this eternal memory, lives in the hearts of believers forever, empowering all risk takers, rule-breakers and faith seekers for generations to come.  For the ones who speak for change, for the ones who stand for justice, for the ones who work for peace, for the ones who won’t give up – for all of them, for himself, for God – Peter walks on water.

It doesn’t last of course.  Behind him in the boat, the other disciples, the friends of Jesus, quake in fright, trembling in terror, shouting loudly that it isn’t possible, that Peter will drown, and refuse to join in and step foot out of the boat. And Peter, although he wants to believe and struggles to make the moment last by desperately clinging to his splintering faith, begins to doubt and starts to sink.

Jesus’ hand snaps forward, quickly reaching, firmly catching, and pulls Peter back from the abyss. Gasping and still wide-eyed, believing and doubting together, all at once, Peter, the repeatedly redeemed one, the frequent failure, standing for all humanity, looks not at the water, not at the boat, not at the stars, not anywhere else, but at the hand of God that holds his own.

And the question that returns ever again, that nags and persists always and forever, to each generation, to each individual, to me, is this: if God asked me to do the impossible, if God beckoned me to come to him, if God suggested that I embrace the absurd, if God required me to ignore all human wisdom, all experience, all history, all law—if God called me to walk on water—would I trust in his hand and give it a try?

*The original title is “God’s Hand.”

Reprinted from Soul Side: Articles of Faith, by Catherine Cavanagh (Gaithersburg, MD: Butternut Press, 2010) Used by permission of the author.

Photo Credit: jcrosemann/istockphoto

An experience I had in prayer fifteen years ago unearthed and solidified this fear. At a five-day silent retreat, I had an experience of the presence of God that has both scared and strengthened me spiritually ever since. I was praying for union with God when suddenly, as I felt my entire body relax, I was immediately aware of God’s presence. I felt utterly loved, protected, and safe. I understood in that instant that God had been with me. In a life review, I saw God’s loving presence at each stage of my life, even during the most difficult times, the times when I had felt most alone. In that moment, nothing else mattered, nothing else seemed of any importance but remaining in union with God.  I felt deeply loved and utterly certain of what life was about. I felt great compassion and oneness with all of humanity. I kept repeating to myself “if people only knew.”

Suddenly, as I began praying for my loved ones, I saw my life in the future. I had a husband, children and a lot of joy. Then, I experienced my worst fear, my husband and children died. I was startled out of my feelings of peace and instead felt such profound sadness. I did not want such a future. The rest of the retreat I was left feeling scared and confused. I wondered, how could such a beautiful experience of God’s love be mixed with such deep fear and anxiety? The effects of the experience have stayed with me ever since. The experience uncovered my unconscious fear that loving God hurts, loving God means loss and death.

I didn’t realize it then, but I have sought to understand death all my life as if by uncovering its mysteries and seeing its relationship to God, I would lessen its sting. I have been trying to reconcile my different images of God, particularly as they relate to suffering. I see that God has even used my fears and questions to draw me closer God’s own being.  The fear of death, loss, and the suffering that comes with it, is my personal desert. I began to understand the roots of my fear of death very recently. Actually, it was not until I began to write this article that I saw the connection between my life growing up in El Salvador and my fear of loss and the way this fear affects my prayer, dreams, and even my hopes for the future.

At first, I was very surprised to notice that the first memories that came to my mind while reflecting on my life growing up were those of death and violence, though it makes perfect sense. I grew up in the middle of a civil war. The sound of bombs and machine guns were not an uncommon occurrence. Although they did not happen all the time, they happened often enough that I knew even as a young child which wall in our house was thickest in case we needed to protect ourselves from any flying bullets.

I grew up in walking distance from Universidad Centroamericana (UCA, the Jesuit University in San Salvador. My mother received her psychology degree from that school.  She was taught by and had great respect for the Jesuits who would later be murdered there. I went to a wonderful school growing up where the sense of God was present in its reverence for silence, order, prayer, and care for others. It was a contemplative educational experience. The peace I felt there was disrupted one morning when, while being dropped off at school by my dad, we noticed that outside the main entrance my friend’s father had been shot in the head seconds after dropping off his daughters. While his body was still bleeding in the car, we were rushed inside the school.  Both his girls were ushered inside too, still crying, still shocked. I remember not much being said afterwards. Classes simply continued. 

Something interesting happens when you grow up in an environment like this. When you don’t know that life can be any other way, senseless death is normalized. Your internal defense mechanisms kick in. The society as a whole stops being shocked and continues living their “normal lives.” Stories like this were not uncommon. Death, poverty and suffering were everywhere, yet my family was somehow always spared.  The threat of death, though, was always looming in my unconscious.  While in the midst of this chaos, I enjoyed an otherwise loving and joy- filled upbringing.

It is no wonder that I have always been trying to understand, perhaps even tame my fear of death and loss. The theme is pretty consistent. Throughout my life I have volunteered with orphan children, the elderly, terminally ill patients and their families, and most recently, with bereaved families at my local parish. I feel drawn to chaplaincy work in the area of healing. It is almost laughable that I have never seen this recurring threat/thread in my own life. Spiritually I am asking: Where is God in suffering? Where is God in times of loss? What is God’s relationship to death?

These questions find a voice in my interiority. I have a recurrent dream of standing in front of the ocean, when suddenly I see the waves building strength and rising up. I know something big is coming; I brace myself. Sometimes, I just stand there watching, sensing the fear wash over me, knowing that change is coming. One time I was able to walk on water, knowing and trusting that there was something strong underneath me holding me up. Another time I was able to see, from the safety of an underground house, what was underneath the water. What I saw surprised me.  What I initially took to be a scary creature turned out to be a pair of loving eyes looking back at me. Most recently, I saw the waves rising up again, but this time I chose to go under the waves. I saw myself coming out safely as a transformed new being. I see this series of dreams as a call to the inner world, a call to contemplation, a call to find God even in those things I fear most. It is a call to trust that in the end, what I will find if I choose to face my life with trust and courage, is either God holding me up, God’s loving gaze, or my own transformation into a more powerful being.

The theme of death and suffering is asking something of me I do not yet fully understand. What I do know is that it is urging me to grow, inviting me to come to know God more deeply, and drawing me into the desert. The desert in this sense is serving for me as a source of  both temptation and grace. It is pushing me to confront the demons of fear, doubt, and hopelessness. It is inviting me to leave everything behind, not in a literal sense, but metaphorically as the way in which I can come to engage in a trusting relationship with God. Can I trust enough to give God my loved ones? Can I trust him enough to dive into life and into myself? Can I trust enough to give God myself completely and open up to transformation?

I listen to this call as I discern another series of recurrent dreams.  After helping at a funeral service, I dreamt of an ominous spirit trying to enter my body. My response to the feeling of fear and dread was to try to protect myself by uttering a prayer over and over. I woke up a couple of times feeling anxious. This fearful feeling loomed around me into the next day. In a more recent related dream, I saw my spiritual director Sr. Peg Dolan. She was an important influence in my life and my spiritual director for many years up until she passed away two years ago. In my dream I saw her, went to her, and with great urgency, I asked her my “spiritual question.” She looked at me and smiled. Her spirit entered my body, but this time there was no fear or resistance on my part. I was able to feel her thoughts and communicate with her. She was caring, reassuring towards me, and pleased by my earnest desire to know God.  She smiled at me lovingly and told me to rest. That time I felt peaceful.

It has taken me a long time to get an internal “click” on the meaning of this series of dreams. Finally, I remembered St. Ignatius’ rules of discernment of spirits and specifically, rule number seven in which he says that those things that come from God feel like water entering a soft sponge. The grace is absorbed gently and without resistance. On the contrary, the evil spirit causes disturbing thoughts like water hitting a rock, scattering in all directions. The ominous spirit in my dreams represents my fears of death, the dead, and loss. Its fruits are anxiety and dread.  My body rejects this spirit. In contrast, my director’s spirit represents love, goodness, and trust in God’s graciousness and is received in me like a healing balm. I am reminded of 1 John 4:18, “love casts out fear,” and I hear once again the invitation to let God’s love in.

Upon reflection, I begin to understand the temptations of the desert, the devils we find along the way, and the call to discern, through contemplation, guidance and prayer, the voice of God in our hearts. The desert is an invitation to listen to our own interiority and come to absorb in our hearts the God whose goodness uses all that we are, even our fears, to draw us closer to him.  And Jesus said, don’t be afraid.

What this experiment reveals, of course, is that we often don’t see what we’re not looking for. Our brains are trained to filter the information they receive through our senses. The brain automatically blocks out what it considers unnecessary, and accepts only what it considers important. While this is a very helpful skill for navigating the world, it does have some flaws. It means that, in many cases, we have to learn to see things that don’t fit into our usual framework. To the extent that we are willing to learn to see with new eyes, we remain humble, growing and welcoming people. To the extent that we insist on seeing things in the same way that we always have, we shut down our ability to connect with anything or anyone that we perceive as “different”.

One of the most important functions of worship is to teach us to learn to see in a completely new way. The choice to follow Christ is an admission that we don’t have it all together, that we don’t know it all, and that we do not see clearly. In fact, the moment we come to worship thinking that we have “arrived” we stop being people of faith, and our worship ceases to be authentic.

One of the most profound acts of worship, and one that completely transforms how we see God, ourselves, others and our world is the act of adoration. We do not praise God because God has a fragile ego that needs regular stroking. We praise God because we need to be constantly reminded of God’s presence, purpose and nature. As author Anne Lamott comically reminds us, “The difference between you and God is that God doesn’t think he’s you.” Adoration confronts us with our humanness and our limited perspectives by opening our hearts and minds to the glory, infinity and wisdom of the Divine.

When we come to the act of praise mindfully and humbly, we find ourselves rising above the small view of the world that we have adopted from our culture, gender, language, generation, race, or religion. We begin to recognise the presence and activity of God in surprising places, and we begin to see the world and its inhabitants from the Divine perspective. When we offer heartfelt praise, we receive a vision of God and of God’s grace and love that teaches us not just who God is, but who we are in relation to God – and this vision changes how we see others and ourselves. The gift of adoration is the gift of wonder, awe and beauty. It is impossible to express praise without seeing God’s artistry wherever we look, and without being overwhelmed by the mystery and majesty of life.

We all “see through a glass darkly” in so many ways. But, as we learn to be people of praise, we will learn to see a little more clearly until that day when our eyes are completely and gloriously opened.

We all have these “rogue” elements within us that, although they may lie dormant, threaten to bring us – and those around us – great pain and suffering. I’m not talking about physical issues here, of course. I’m talking about the attitudes, thoughts, habits and values that subtly influence us toward destructive behaviour. In our celebrity-addicted culture we have grown very uncomfortable with facing our darkness. From every side we are encouraged to celebrate our light, to reach for our best and to ignore anything that seems negative or painful. It is a good and powerful thing to acknowledge the divine image that lies within us and to strive to be the best people we can be. But, unless we couple this quest for growth with an honest acknowledgement of what keeps us from wholeness, we will always be doomed to failure. We cannot be healed until we are willing to admit that we are sick, and do what is necessary to get better.

The paradox that we must all face about ourselves is that we are a combination of divine glory and evil shadows. We all hold within us good and bad, health and sickness, creativity and destruction. Each day we must choose which forces we will embrace, which will drive us and which will affect how we treat others, how we make our decisions and what direction our lives will take. But, if we refuse to recognise these forces within us, seeing only those we want to see, we will find ourselves driven by the worst in us, and powerless to change.

This is why the Church has traditionally included the practice of confession in its worship. As we focus on the beauty and holiness of God, we cannot help but become aware of all that is not beautiful and whole within us. As we acknowledge our sinfulness and brokenness, we need some way to process it, to face it and deal with it – and confession is exactly the surgery we need.

It takes courage to do the work of confession, opening ourselves to God’s searching Spirit and to the painful transformation that God’s Spirit brings – which is why we so often choose not to do it. I am always curious when those who facilitate worship gatherings choose to leave this practice out of their orders of worship
. When we neglect confession it becomes harder to be honest about our struggles and weaknesses, which simply drives them underground. Without confession we feel no need to apologise, and we inevitably project our shadows on to others, blaming and judging them for what we won’t face in ourselves. And, of course, any need we may have to change is the furthest thing from our minds.

As we seek to follow Christ we will find ourselves facing the call to confess again and again. My prayer is that we will embrace it, face the truth that God’s Spirit seeks to reveal to us about ourselves, and willingly submit to the surgery that will make us whole. It may be a painful process, but the healing it brings is most definitely worth it – for us, and for those with whom we journey through life.

Dawning One,
you are in this moment,
not entombed in the past.

Forgiving One,
you are in the freedom of my soul,
not the stones of my surroundings,
not the grave of my deeds.

You whose glory it is to set us free,
deliver me
into the present moment.

You who give life
where there is none,
I live not by surviving
but by being raised
each moment,

with each breath
to have died,
with each breath
to be risen.

(Weavings “Do Not Lose Heart” Issue, page 47)

Did you try the writing exercise? What was the experience like for you? What do you think Jesus wrote in the sand?

Seeing the print magazine took me back to the days when I was putting this issue together. The first task is to look through the submissions folder to see what came in freelance for the particular topic. I remember commenting to a colleague that there were very few submissions for the previous issue on “All Who Have This Hope,” but a thick folder full of submissions for “Why Are You Afraid?” How interesting! We spent a few minutes wondering aloud why this difference. Perhaps it is a sign of the times.

Titus O’Bryant addresses the prevalence of fear in his article entitled “Fear in a Handful of Dust.” He says, “‘To be human is to be afraid. Fear ranks among the most basic and powerful of human motivators.” That rings true for me. We all “live in fear” of many things: the phone call in the middle of the night, the distracted driver in the lane next to us, the spontaneously called meeting at work, the appointment to hear the diagnosis.

One of the most poignant stories about fear in this issue is the one about a rescued dog in Flora Wuellner’s article. The only way the woman who rescued the dog could calm his fear and wash him properly was to get in the water with him. As a proud owner of a rescued cat, I was totally taken in by this beautiful story. After spending some quality time with my cat, I began to think about the message of the story. I began to wonder: who do I know—a work colleague, a friend, a family member, even an acquaintance—who is afraid and needs me to get in the water to help? Ask yourself this question. And maybe, just maybe, someone will do the same for you when it’s your turn to be afraid.

I find that the Lenten season functions in a similar way in my spiritual life. As the celebration of Easter becomes my destination, I seek quiet moments to prepare my heart and mind. But even though I desire silence and solitude, I am distracted by many things. The solitude of Lent is not “forced” in the same way as that of air travel, but the move of the liturgical calendar toward the cross invites me and reminds me to carve out space and time for reflection for which I do not always make room.

As I begin the Lenten journey, I remember Jesus himself taking time to retreat from the crowds to pray in dark, early morning hours. Such moments of silence were not a luxury, but were instead necessity—a vital practice of a spirit attuned to God. Lent calls me to follow Christ to the quiet places.

Gracious God, help us to find our way to the rest you offer. During this Lenten journey, draw us closer to you in silent spaces. Give us the strength to set apart times in our lives for solitude. And in those quiet moments, Lord, fill us with your Spirit so that we may be renewed. Amen. 

“If God is for us,” asks Paul, “who is against us?”(Rom. 8:31) (2) He probably intended it as a rhetorical question. But his premise is yet another form of the fundamental question. Is God for us? Or have we been abandoned by God, left alone and helpless in an uncaring universe? We have to answer that question before we can go on to the choice to give ourselves to God in self-abandonment. We may answer with a confident, “Yes, God is for us. We can trust God’s loving guidance.” Even then it can be a long struggle to get from a decision that God is trustworthy to actually trusting God.

The first step is from ought to want. It begins in an external suggestion (or command): “You really ought to trust God and trust yourself to God.” Whether by an experience of God’s love or conviction of the futility of trying to be good on our own, that is transformed, internalized: “I want to trust God to guide me.” That often comes as a single dramatic step, a conversion. The problem, of course, is that while we may want to trust God, we don’t. At least, I don’t. I hold back whole areas of my life from God’s control. I try hard to follow what I can see of God’s guidance in some areas. In others I still second-guess every hint of God’s will. And so there needs to be a second step, the slow movement from want to be. Gradually we learn to trust God more and more, until our will is one with God.

Throughout this process we need all the help we can get: encouragement from friends, spiritual guidance, immersion in scripture and other spiritual reading. But it is good to have some constant prod, something to keep us moving forward toward the goal of complete self-surrender. For me that spur has been the Covenant Prayer. The version I first learned was in the 1964 Methodist Book of Worship.

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Put me to what thou wilt, rant me with whom thou wilt;

put me to doing, put me to suffering;

let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low for thee;

let me be full, let me be empty;

let me have all things, let me have nothing;

I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Thou art mine, and I am thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

Let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.(3)

This prayer has its origin in two mid-seventeenth-century books of piety by Puritan evangelists (and brothers) Richard and Joseph Alleine. John Wesley read these works and borrowed freely from them to create services of covenant renewal, beginning in 1755. Methodists continued such services, particularly as watch night services on New Year’s Eve or on New Year’s Day. In 1922, George B. Robson chaired a committee to create a modern service of covenant renewal for a British Methodist worship book. One of the features of the service was the Covenant Prayer, greatly shortened from earlier services and using phrases from both of the Alleines. Robson is credited with creating the prayer.

I first met the Covenant Prayer in seminary as part of a service of covenant renewal. A few years later, after using the service in my first parish, I began to include the prayer in my own daily devotions. This practice was reinforced when my bishop presented me with a copy of the prayer when I was ordained as an elder. It has been a regular (but not constant) part of my daily prayers ever since. I keep hoping I will grow into it. But I find that the deeper I go, the more deeply it invites me into abandonment to God.

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Right there, in the first line, is the essence of Christian humility: knowing whose I am, and therefore something of my place in the grand scheme of things. It announces my intention in response to the question of whether I will hold onto myself or surrender control to God. When I was starting in ministry, I had the opportunity to talk with Harry, a retired pastor whose ministry had begun in the early years of the century. He said that in those days, surrender to God was a regular topic in preaching and evangelistic services. But after World War I, that changed. It was un-American to talk about surrender any more. More recently, people who have been struggling for the right to control their own decisions find it difficult to turn that control over to God. No matter what our level of power or autonomy, we can find reasons to insist that we alone know what is best for ourselves. We are happy to accept suggestions from God, but reserve to ourselves the final decision.

But the Covenant Prayer keeps calling me away from this misplaced self-confidence. It helps me remember that I haven’t really done very well trying to call the shots in my life. A century ago, Hannah Smith wrote her own prayer of surrender:

Here, Lord, I abandon myself to thee. I have tried in every way I could think of to manage myself, and to make myself what I know I out to be, but have always failed. Now I give it up to thee. Do thou take entire possession of me. Work in me all the good pleasure of thy will. Mold and fashion me into such a vessel as seemeth good to thee. I leave myself in thy hands, and I believe thou wilt, according to thy promise, make me into a vessel unto thy own honor, ‘sanctified, and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work.’(4)

 Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt;

I have always had trouble with making long-range plans. Things always turn out differently from the way I envisioned them. I began to feel that I was wandering in the dark, without a clue where I was really headed. This feeling crystallized in a meditation many years ago. I imagined that I was in the dark, without a clue where I was headed. I had a small candle, but it barely lit the hand and arm holding it. I couldn’t even see the floor of the cave. So, as I’d been taught, I asked for the help I needed. I asked for light, so I could see where I was going. Instead, a hand reached into the small globe of light, offering guidance. I became angry. I didn’t want a guide through the dark. I wanted light—and a map, too, for that matter! I wanted to be able to make my own plans. And, for then at least, that is where the meditation ended.

The Covenant Prayer calls me to accept the guiding hand. Abandonment means not only that there is no promise of a map, but no hope for one. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, in his classic Abandonment to Divine Providence, seems to speak directly to my meditation.

 Imagine we are in a strange district at night and are crossing fields unmarked by any path, but we have a guide. He asks no advice nor tells us of his plans. So what can we do except trust him? It is no use trying to see where we are, look at maps, or question passers-by. That would not be tolerated by a guide who wants us to rely on him. He will get satisfaction from overcoming our fears and doubts, and will insist that we have complete trust in him. (5)

In another place, de Caussade compares making long range plans to trying to predict a shifting wind. All one can really do is pay careful attention to the wind moment by moment and change course accordingly. (6) So it is, he says, with the direction of the Holy Spirit.

put me to doing, put me to suffering;

First, this is suffering as in “suffer the little children to come…” It is allowing others to do something. We might paraphrase, “put me to doing, put me to being done to.” Sometimes I am called to action. But at other times, all I can do is wait for others to take action—or for events to catch up with me. Thomas Merton tells of a time when construction work was going on at his monastery. Young novices were assigned to hold signs warning of falling bricks. He writes, “At first one of them was standing at the precise spot where all the falling bricks would land on his head. He was saying the rosary in an attitude of perfect abandonment.”(7) Sometimes being-done-to suffering can lead to physical suffering as well. The ultimate example, of course, is Jesus. His active life ends with the prayer in Gethsemane, “Not my will but yours.” Immediately his passion, his time of being done to, begins. It ends only when he is raised by God from the grave (note the passive voice).

One recurring season of suffering for me has been waiting for news of a new pastoral appointment. Since I have never come close to guessing where I would be sent, I might as well simply pray the Covenant Prayer and pray for the Spirit to guide the decision. The appointive system can be excellent training in abandonment. And of course, when I have abandoned myself to the process, I have little room to second-guess the result. I can only accept that whatever happens is what God would have me doing, at least for the next little while. Once I give up thoughts of career advancement and concentrate only on growth in abandonment, even the most confounding situations can be received as God’s gift. All my appointments have had something to teach me both about being a pastor and about living in abandonment to divine providence. Sometimes it has taken a good bit of distance to gain the perspective to see what I’ve been taught.

let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low for thee;

Humble abandonment does not only mean being brought low. It means accepting whatever task God assigns us. That can even mean being exalted. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the two apart. Therese de Lisieux was made novice mistress of her convent at twenty-three, against her preference for obscurity. Somewhere she speaks of herself as a rubber ball belonging to the Child Jesus. When Jesus is paying special attention to her, he is playing with the ball, and she gets bounced off walls and generally bashed about. When life becomes calmer, it is because Jesus has set her aside for the time being, back in the toy box.

For me, the hardest times have been the times of transition from being employed to being laid aside. These become times when all thought I knew of God’s plan for me gets called into question. I face at least the possibility that I have misheard or misinterpreted God’s call. A few years ago, I was sure that my time as a pastor was over. For the next three years I concentrated on writing and editing. I am glad for all the work I was able to do. But during the second of those years, I was again a part-time pastor. Now I am serving full-time as pastor of a small church with a very large building. I can look back and see how many of my experiences have helped prepare me for this parish. I suspect the problem was not so much misunderstanding my call as thinking that anything was permanent. Abandonment means listening each moment for God’s new call.

let me be full, let me be empty;

let me have all things, let me have nothing;

I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

This section of the Covenant Prayer seems to deal mostly with stuff, with things. The prayer reminds me that it is all the same whether I have a lot of stuff or nothing at all. I understand all of that in theory. But I still think I desperately need all kinds of stuff. Surely I would be able to write much better if only I had the latest, most powerful computer. With dozens of books on spirituality and preaching being published every year, don’t I need at least some of them to keep current? On the other hand, computing power really makes much more difference to the kind of games I can play than to my word processing. And I’ve done a better job keeping up with newly purchased mysteries and fantasies than with spiritual reading. I have a long way to go in simplifying my life. At least the prayer holds an ideal of detachment in front of me. It keeps me aware of my greed.

Besides, it may be that I have attachments that are of more concern to God than my love of books and computing power. Pride, anger, self-importance, control—these are the things I really need to let go of. And they have been under constant attack for years. As de Caussade explains:

No matter what it is we attach ourselves to, God will step in and upset our plans so that, instead of peace, we shall find ourselves in the midst of confusion, trouble and folly. As soon as we say, “I must go this way, I must consult this person, I must act like this,” God at once says the opposite and withdraws his power from those means which we ourselves have chosen. So we discover the emptiness of all created things, are forced to turn to God and be content with him. (8)

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

thou art mine, and I am thine.

So be it

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

The Covenant Prayer ends in praise, summary, and one final request: “let it be ratified in heaven.” By itself, the prayer will only remind me of how far short of my ideal I fall. I can offer my will to God, but only God’s grace can transform my heart. This is good news. God’s part of the bargain is far harder than ours. All we really have to do is respond to God’s guidance and accept whatever comes as God’s good gift, intended for our growth in abandonment.

I continue to pray the Covenant Prayer because I still need it. I am growing slowly, by fits and starts, with many more fits than starts. The prayer is not a map. It gives me no clue about how God will guide me. But it does claim God’s promise to make me God’s own, to help me to grow “to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”(Eph.4:13) It holds up to me a picture of that maturity. It holds up to me a picture of that maturity. It keeps me aware of areas that need more attention. Above all, it reminds me to take one step at a time, offering myself to God’s service every day, opening myself to God’s guidance at every moment. It is a good companion on the spiritual journey.

1 Keith Miller, The Taste of New Wine (Waco: Word Books, 1965), 39.
2 All scripture references are to the New Revised Standard Version.
3 The Book of Worship for Church and Home (Nashville: The Methodist Publishing House, 1964), 387.
4 Hannah Whitall Smith, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), 23.
5 Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, trans. by John Beevers (Garden City: Image Books, 1975), 83.
6 Ibid. 61
7 Thomas Merton, A Thomas Merton Reader, edited by Thomas P. McDonnell (New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1974), 195
8 de Caussade, 74f

The moment we commit to moving beyond our own needs and desires, the instant we recognise that life can only be lived in connection with others, we face a startling and shocking truth. To build strong and deep relationships requires us to be willing to change, to bend with the needs and expectations of others, to lose our need to be “me” in the quest to find a healthy and life giving “us”.

This is why I remain committed to the organisation we know as the Church. Unfortunately, too many churches are simply congregations of individualists, seeking their own personal Jesus for their own personal fulfilment and salvation. At its best, though, Church is true community, a gathering of people who are committed to something bigger than themselves–the Reign of God. And when we step into the life of such a faith community, everything we do helps us learn to belong–together.

Gathering with people not of our own choosing flies in the face of the individualism of our time. It teaches us to lay aside our own preferences and desires for the sake of the community. Greeting one another, as we do at the start of our worship gatherings, calls us to celebrate our diversity and learn to love and respect those with whom we would not naturally choose to associate. As we are called to worship, we are invited to recognise that we each reflect something of God’s image, and that together we can encounter God more fully and effectively than we can alone (See Matthew 18:20). And then, as we invoke God’s presence, opening our awareness to the Spirit of God that moves within us and among us, we find that our love for God and our love for one another are not two loves but one.

When we take our connectedness seriously, when we open ourselves to belonging in a community, and when we allow our worship to teach us how, a whole new world opens up for us. We discover that we are more deeply connected with God, and more actively involved in God’s purposes. We discover that our relationships become more authentic, deep and accepting, and we learn the glorious skills of compassion, forgiveness and mutual self-giving. And finally, through these deepened connections with God and others, we discover ourselves–the good and the bad–more honestly, more completely and more able to live the life God has created us for.