Hurried - Part 2 - Looking for God on the Moon

So the morning after my last post - a post about hurrying - I resolved not to hurry so much.

I took it slow with my kids in getting them ready for school.

And something kind of weird happened. In the middle of applying sun screen on my oldest daughter we had a conversation. She started telling me about how she wished she could go into outer space and see the moon someday. Instead of the usual "that's nice", and because I was really listening, I asked her why she wanted to go out into space.

She told me that she thought maybe we could see and hear God out there.

Does anyone else find themselves at loss when trying to talk about the mysteries of God with a 6 year-old?

I tried to explain to her that we can talk to God right here right now because we're surrounded by God's presence...and that we can learn to see and hear and be more aware of God's presence, but we don't need to "go" anywhere for it to happen. The thing is that I do believe this, but...

Our separation from God (however self-imposed) is a painful reality to confront, and most of the time I avoid it. I probably even try to go places (maybe not the moon, but other places) hoping that I will find God there, instead of facing the reality that God appears to be so entirely absent at times.

And maybe they're not even physical places I go to "find" God sometimes, but places in my own mind. They're mental places that involve being good enough, or happy enough, or spiritual enough, or right enough; places that I think God will finally release me from exile if I just do a certain thing.

But in a sense we are in exile in this life, and perhaps we need to embrace our exiled status and be honest with ourselves and each other. I think my efforts to locate God in a specific physical place or state of mind leave me disappointed and feeling more isolated. Perhaps that's one reason why so many of us find church services so difficult. God is there, but He/She/It is not something we can conjure up whenever it suits us.

I told my daughter that seeing and hearing God is a mystery to me. I don't think we need to go into outer space, but we do need to keep wrestling with the mystery. Waiting to experience, but not straining so hard that we create something false or miss God altogether.

Searching, listening, looking, being open...

and of course,

not being in too much of a hurry.

Hurried

My children seem to have no capacity to hurry.

I ask politely. I get frustrated. I explain the reasons to them. I appeal to their empathy. I model the behavior I'm asking for.  I give them encouragement. I threaten them with consequences. I promise rewards. And sometimes...gasp...I even yell at them when they still don't hurry like I've asked them to.

It seems so simple to me. I know they can move their bodies faster because I've seen it.

But then I got to thinking: Is hurrying really such an important thing to teach them?

While they seem to have no interest in hurrying - I seem to be entirely enthralled by it.

Or maybe, enslaved by it, is a more accurate way of describing it.

I can certainly be that guy who gets frustrated whenever everyone else isn't moving as fast as I am. Slow drivers, people who take their time at the grocery check-out, waiting on hold for customer service, an internet connection that takes more than a second to load a page...

What am I in such a hurry for? Why is it so important to me? Why do I think my kids need to take on this of all my habits? Maybe their lack of hurry should be teaching me? Maybe their lack of hurry isn't a deficiency to be remedied, but the actual default mode humans should function in?

Am I hurrying towards anything in particular? Or has hurrying just become a chronic state of frantic activity that serves some other purpose in my life other than accomplishing any particular goal? In other words; is it hurry just for the sake of hurrying?

Rollo May (a thinker who's wisdom was lost on me when I read him in my twenties, but now seems brilliant and profound), said that society's proclivity for frantic activity is indicative of just how much anxiety it's people are trying to cope with.  He suggested it's not that we sit around consciously thinking through our deepest fears of death, meaning, responsibility, and isolation, but rather that we keep them at arms length by creating a lifestyle so busy that it gives us the sense we must be doing something important. Even if the things we're busily pursuing aren't particularly meaningful or important, the pace of our activity gives us the illusion of importance and meaning. So it becomes, hurrying for hurrying's own sake.

Even the truth of this is something I'm eager to hurry past and move on to the next "super important" thing I "should" do tonight. Maybe as you finish reading this you'll be tempted to hurry on to the next thing.

I wonder what would happen today if we all slowed down, at least just a little?