like i was telling mittens, sometimes you touch the universe and the universe touches you back, and other times you touch the universe and it's like there's nothing there.


there's the story - jesus told this story to his friends when they asked him, "teach us how to pray," - the story about the person who goes to his neighbor's house in the middle of the night and hammers on the door and says, "can you give me some bread, because some houseguests just showed up and i don't have anything to offer them right now," and even though the neighbor says, "go away, can't you see we're all in bed," eventually, even if the neighbor won't give him the bread because of their friendship, he'll give it to him because of his persistence.

and there's the shaker song i admire so much:
i hunger and thirst, i hunger and thirst after true righteousness.
in what i've obtained, in what i've obtained my soul can not rest.
an ocean i see without boundary or shore,
oh, feed me, i'm hungry, enrich me, i'm poor.
but here's the hook:
i will cry unto god, i never will cease
til my soul's filled with love,
perfect love and sweet peace.
don't you think "god," supposing there is a god, rolls "his" figurative eyes, hearing that, and sighs, oh all RIGHT. i mean, what an extravagant demand, to never cease crying out until your soul's filled with perfect love and sweet peace? my goodness. i'm impressed.

unfortunately i am a lazy person and i can't muster up that much persistence. i'm more like, "oh, i'm sorry, of course you're all asleep - i'll come back later..." but thinking, "dang, what am i going to feed my guests?"

must be my inner lake-wobegonian.

then there's the song from church last week, which had our marching orders in it - "we are called to love tenderly." yes, i know it is corny. it struck me though because in my daily work, at least a couple times every hour, i check for tenderness. you come to see me because your back hurts, and i will poke on it and see if it's tender - because a back that has "midline tenderness" is different than a back that doesn't. you tell me you think your toe is infected, i will squeeze it and see if it is tender.

"tender" has this specific meaning in medicine - there's pain, which hurts by itself, and then there's tenderness, which only hurts with help. so i was struck by the true fact that in this racket, the religion-and-spirituality racket - well, the christian racket - there, i said it - it's, you know, supposed to be a love cult. and we are called to love tenderly.

in my estimation, the song says we are supposed to feel that love as a tenderness. we will know we have a heart, because when others poke it and squeeze it, we will feel it acutely, and do something about it, rather than just theoretically saying, of course i have a heart, i'm still walking around aren't i.



my point is that i'm not afraid of work, i'm willing and able "to love tenderly," i'm cool with that practice, i've been a lifelong subscriber. but when i reach out to the universe and it's like there's nothing there, where once there was something there, i have no persistence and am suspicious, kind of, of the whole persistence enterprise, even though himself said that is specifically how you are supposed to pray.

this happens every so often. i would be concerned that i had "lost my faith" if i hadn't been through this repeatedly before. fortunately i have the wise advice of stephen gaskin to follow, which has been so helpful so many times:

There's grace, and then there's law. Grace works best, but law works good if you happen to be temporarily out of grace. You can figure out by the rules how to get back again."

so that's what i'll do.