Salvation in My Pocket
fragments of faith and theology
Benjamin Myers
Salvation in My Pocket
Fragments of Faith and Theology
Copyright © 2013 Benjamin Myers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
isbn 13: 978-60899-757-2
eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-048-5
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Myers, Benjamin, 1978–
Salvation in my pocket : fragments of faith and theology / Benjamin Myers.
x + 146 p. ; 23 cm. Includes index.
isbn 13: 978–1–60899–757–2
1. Theology—blogs. 2. Blogs—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.
BR115 M94 2013
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Photo detail of Chagall’s American Windows © 2013 Sharon Mollerus, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Commercial license:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
To Felicity, Anna, and James,
who teach me more than all the books
There is a light, a step, a call
This evening on the Orange Tree.
—John Shaw Neilson, “The Orange Tree” (1919)
Preface
The teaching of Christianity is that God is interested in ordinary human lives. God created human beings—these lovely, tragic creatures, so prone to delirious happiness and extravagant misfortune—and was very charmed by them. And so God became a creature like us, in order to get a better look at us and to see things from our point of view. And, if possible, to mend our broken ways. Because of this—because of the incarnation—we are able to confess that God is interested in us and that everything in our world is somehow related to God.
To believe all this is to see at the bottom of things not human struggles or agendas, not human power and agency, but a simple act of divine giving. It is to see all things against a backdrop of inexhaustible divine generosity, and even the most ordinary daily circumstances as occasions for joy.
The short pieces assembled in this book are miniature experiments in joy. They are attempts to express some of the difference God makes to ordinary experience, and to discover glimpses of God’s generosity in everyday life. Most of these pieces were written originally for the blog Faith & Theology (faith-theology.com). Others have appeared here and there in various magazines and websites, and I have added several new pieces that have not appeared before. “Showing” was first published in I Believe in God, edited by William W. Emilsen (North Parramatta, NSW: UTC, 2011). I would like to record my thanks to the online community at Faith & Theology, a community that has given rise to much writing and many friendships over the past several years. My thanks are due especially to Kim Fabricius, who has been a constant encouragement, as well as an influence—thank him or blame him—on the aphoristic style adopted in many of these reflections. I also thank Steve Wright, who provided invaluable assistance in preparing the manuscript.
If there is any thread that holds these haphazard reflections together, it is just the conviction that beneath the surface of things there lurks an invitation, gentle and alluring; that even in sadness and misfortune there is always rising up, as if from hidden wells, the promise of peace; and that the final word spoken over this world, and over each human life, will be a word of joy.
Sydney
Feast of All Saints, 2012
Amen
Our father who art in heaven
Without prayer there is only—myself. Between the heaven of prayer and the hell of the self there is no middle way.
Hallowed be thy name
Prayer does not give me what I want. It pummels my wants, kneads them, stretches them my whole life long, until at the last hour of my life I have learned to want one thing only, the only thing worth having. And so my whole life becomes a hidden sigh, an inarticulate utterance of the Name of God. My death will be my prayer, the sigh by which I give myself up at last into the presence of the Name.
Thy kingdom come
My prayer encompasses not my own life only but the entire world of which I am a part. What defines this world is scarcity, injustice, oppression—in a word, hunger. To pray is to find in my own hunger an echo of the hunger of the world, in my own small cry an echo of the cry for justice that rises like smoke from the scorched earth.
Thy will be done
Prayer is the beginning of wisdom because it is the end of willing. The life of prayer is a slow dying into the will of God, a slow awakening into the freedom of life.
On earth as it is in heaven
Prayer is not a technique of self-improvement. It is not an instrument of spiritual experience. It is beyond all human competency, beyond language and learning and control. Prayer is heaven’s speech. To pray is to live beyond the narrow walls of the self and beyond whatever can merely be controlled. As flowers open to the morning, so the praying life opens towards the will of God, standing up straight into the bright burning presence of the Name.
Give us this day our daily bread
Every day, morning and night, I hunger. The stuff of my life is hunger, need, lack. Affluence and technology might blind me to my need, but a morning without food is enough to show me the truth of what I am. I live by lack; God lives by fullness. I am only hunger; God is only food.
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors
Hurt, disappointment, resentment are always knocking at the door of my life. As soon as I drive one away another starts beating at the door, eager to come in and set up its home in the little house of my heart. I will die of resentment; I am destroyed by what I am owed. But I learn to forgive when God writes off my debts and makes me free. Now I can live, now I can clear the debts of enemies and friends, and speak the magic word of forgiveness that drives resentments back into the
