I've been reading a fair amount of Teresa of Avila and Thomas Merton in the last couple of weeks--largely on prayer-life. And I've been thinking about the material world. Cue the Madonna song.
Teresa and Merton, like many spiritual writers, emphasize the "abject nothingness" of our existence. Both commend not only begging to God as essential to contemplative prayer but also recognizing our 'beggar-hood,' our 'beggar-nature.' Perhaps too much religious parody has entered this broken-down living room I call my mind, but they each seem to argue, essentially, "we suck," followed by the smacking of a book against the forehead. Primarily, they say, we suck when compared to God--who is so big, so good, so suave.
The problem here lies not so much in something about self-esteem as it does in a mistaken notion of infinity. If God truly is infinite, without boundary, or even if God really is that great, then God is not limited by seeing things from our perspective. God isn't "big" to our "small"; God is everything to our limitedness. It's not like Andre the Giant standing next to me, where my petty concerns are squashed by his might. It's more like Flatland, where my two-dimensional self has its flat little problems about left and right, but God has a much deeper sight. As the famous poem in Philippians has it, greatness is not about lording power over smaller things--rather, it's about the ability to step in anywhere. We are quite different from God--incapable even of maintaining our own being for one, and involved in all kinds of evil for another. But it seems somewhat mistaken to tell us to get in touch with our beggar-hood, abject-ness. God doesn't see us that way--maybe we shouldn't see ourselves that way.
Recognizing our dependence on God doesn't, it seems to me, require seeing that we suck. Rather, it means being realistic--which is not some codeword for pessimism, but instead a plea for getting in touch with reality. We are not gods--and maybe that is painful, and makes us feel like beggars, if we really paid attention to the way we think and act. But for most of us, learning that we're not gods is as much relief as abject horror. It's a terrific blessing to realize I don't have to control everything--like traffic, or whether my airplane stays in the air, or how my family behaves.
For both Teresa and Merton, prayer begins on some level when we see our insufficiency and start hunting around for what would fulfill us. That seems true to me. But maybe insufficiency doesn't mean abject. Maybe insufficiency means interconnected, dependent, communal. Maybe prayer begins in those quick moments when we see ourselves as we are.
