Tired Inside Your Own Head

Constance has believed in God for twenty-two years, entirely inside her own skull, and she is exhausted in there.

That is not a complaint about her church. She wants that on the record. Her church is fine. The people are kind, the preaching is careful, and she has never once been mistreated by anybody in it.

It is that every single thing her faith has ever asked of her has happened between her ears. Understand this. Believe that. Examine your motives. Check your heart. Take that thought captive. Renew your mind. Search yourself. And she has done it, faithfully, for twenty-two years, and the room she has been doing it in has slowly turned into a courtroom, and she is the accused and the lawyer and the judge and there is no door in it.

She notices it most on a Sunday afternoon. She sits down after lunch to have some time with the Lord, which in practice means going back into the courtroom voluntarily, and something in her sags before she has even started.

And here is what she has never said to anyone, because it sounds like a spiritual problem and she is afraid it is one: she would give a great deal to meet God with her hands.

Not instead. As well. Once. To do something with her body that was not thinking.

She has never asked, because she does not know if that is allowed, and because she suspects it is the sort of thing people who cannot manage real faith fall back on.

I want to tell you plainly that it is the opposite of that, and that the reason you are tired is not that you have been failing at an interior faith. It is that you have been carrying a whole faith with one hand.

He did not send a thought

There is one sentence at the front of John's Gospel that settles this, and it settles it so completely that people read past it a hundred times without noticing what it has done.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.John 1:14

He became flesh.

Stop there and let it be as strange as it is. God had every option available. He could have sent a conviction. He could have sent an idea so clear that it settled in the mind of every person alive and stayed there. He could have done the entire thing on the inside of us, where Constance has been doing all her work for twenty-two years.

He did not. He took a body. He took bones that could be tired and a throat that could be dry and a voice with an accent in it that people could place. He ate. He touched people, which He did not have to do, because He could heal at a distance and did more than once and clearly did not need contact. He touched them anyway.

And when He wanted to be remembered, He did not hand out a concept. He picked up something you could hold.

So the instinct in you that wants to meet God with your hands is not a lesser instinct, and it is not a crutch for people who cannot think. It is a response to the way He actually came. The Word became flesh. If matter were beneath Him, He would not be wearing it.

Now, I am not going to tell you what to do about that in anybody's building, and I want to be clear that I am not walking anywhere near that. What any church does at its own altar is that church's to hold, and there are people who have thought about it far longer and far more carefully than a page like this can, and it stays theirs. I have nothing to say about it and no standing to say it.

What I have is a much smaller thing, and it is the thing you can actually have this afternoon.

Grace has always come through ordinary matter. It came through a shared meal on a beach after a bad month. It came through mud on a man's eyes. It came through water poured over a head, through a cloak touched in a crowd, through bread torn in a rented upstairs room, through oil, through hands laid on shoulders, through a coat handed over on a cold night by somebody who had two.

The door He has always come through is the ordinary one. It is the oldest habit of this whole tradition and it is why the door was never allowed to close: whoever turned up got fed, and the feeding was real food.

You have been believing that the spiritual life is what happens when you shut your eyes. Some of it is. But shutting your eyes is not the only way to be with somebody, and you would not accept that arrangement from anyone you loved. John 1 says the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and the Spirit was in that arriving through matter, so you have never been required to leave your body to be with Him.

Open them. Pick something up.