Aint Misbehavin'

Sunshine this morning. Birds were singing. The threat of snow, so prominent two days ago, left with a whisper; the hind part of winter. How could anyone feel bad this morning? Indeed, for the first time this week, I really felt awake, as if the malaise is lifting away along with winter itself. Driving to work listening to Louis Armstrong's "Aint Misbehavin'", it seemed like New England itself was beginning to shake things off and remember how much it enjoys summertime (if New England listened to Kara, it may have remembered it a little sooner.)

It is strange, in a way, having Good Friday be so open, bright and clean. Good Friday isn't good for the same reasons as Easter Sunday. The "good" of good Friday is that God humbled himself to be present within it. The weather seems to have overshot the season in anticipation of what is to come. I remember well a Christmas Day in 1985 when it was so warm that Dad, Karen and I drove to Sunday worship with the top down on Karen's Volkswagen Rabbit. There, again, the weather seemed to have forgotten itself and remembered Spring on the shortest day of the year.

Struck by the disconnect between world and meaning, I felt caught. The stress of a disconnected life has settled like all that sand in my heart, working and chafing at any felt sympathies between God and I. Life demands more than I have available, or, if I do have it, I cannot find it. I keep expecting God will visit myself and my family and will open a door, put something together, come unexpectedly out of nowhere and perform the Deus ex machina opening a way out to some higher place. So far, that has not been the case. Thus, the chafing and its resulting disconnect between the world and meaning. I want to join the open praise of creation, but my heart is bruised and sore.

Hugging traffic over the Choate Bridge into Ipswich, I get to thinking about St. Theresa of Avila. She, an Abbess in the Discalced Carmelites, once wrote to her nuns that she had gone some 17 years at a stretch without the least feeling of the presence of God. Other Christians well schooled in prayer have often reported such things. Yes, St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) himself wrote a book about what happens in such a dry process as this. God, as it were, moves from the inner to the outer. The God of your good feelings, the happy Dionysius-ish pan-God who assures us health and good fortune is pressed, pressed, pressed out until he seems to slip away altogether from any human experience. Abandonment, dryness, one is trod under the feet of your gentile nature seemingly without help. This, according to St. John, is actually a very blessed experience. It is a weaning experience which starves selfishness to make room for the maturity of faith.

All of this flashes through my mind just before the left turn in Ipswich proper (Lynn-nore and I tasted our first New England clam chowder on the corner there.) I realize that, in my small way, this has happened. I do not know the answer to this present question of life, but I will and do trust in Christ whether I see an open door or serendipitous chain of events or not. But wait, isn't that Good Friday, then? Isn't that what it is: God himself has been there in the disconnect and has overcome it. Now what that means for the physical situation my family is in at the moment is beyond me, but however it is for us, for me, I'm done with restless doubt. My soul may be the curmudgeon to Spring, but I'll welcome it anyway.