By Helen Thompson
Isn’t it funny the way we connect with our past in our present, sometimes? Randomly? Like running into an old friend after many years, and being able to strike up a conversation as if no time had passed, and yet realizing that the entire context of the conversation has changed.
Around the time I came back to church in 2003, I rediscovered an old Japanese comic an ex-boyfriend had turned me on to. In this comic, you have a dysfunctional superhero, sorta like Batman, except she’s a cyborg scraped together from junk and waste that gets cast off a floating utopian city. You get where this is going. She’d been tossed off the floating utopian city to rot in the junk pile, and of course someone comes along and sees her potential and brings her back to life, and off she goes to dispatch all the bad guys.
Psalm 40, made rather famous to my generation by U2 in its 1983 rock ballad “40,” also talks about the theme of being lifted up, out of dark pits, to be set fast upon a rock. But for years, I had no idea what the song meant or that it even came from, much less was named for, a piece of scripture. It didn’t stop me from joining in the chorus long after the band had left the stage, lighter aloft and shining, and singing the haunting refrain of “How long to sing this song,” over and over and over again with hundreds of other people, voices resonating through inchoate chambers and punctuated by whistles and roars in an accidental worship.
Throughout those clueless years, I spent a lot of time in the scrap heap. But don’t we all find ourselves there at times? Who is going to come rooting through all the mess to find us, put us back together, bring us back to life and fill us with a sense of new purpose? This was a point that I heard a charismatic preacher trying to make to an audience, to mixed receptivity, at a friend’s wedding this weekend. But he was trying to get it across in that brimstone manner that I—and many of my peers—find off-putting.
We 30-somethings don’t much grok the whole “getting saved” business, and when our more charismatic brothers and sisters in Christ start to tout its virtues, we tend to think we’re getting sold, not saved. It’s not until we’re practically lifeless and emotionally bankrupt that we even can allow ourselves to be touched in that way, if we can, and then, it’s not so much a preacher knocking us upside the head with Revelations as it is God, entering quietly through a side door, and, well, revelatin’.
It can happen at any moment. I sometimes think it tends to happen when we’re in crisis mode because that’s the only time we can be open enough to hear God tapping discreetly at the window. The charismatic preacher says he’s always watching, but I don’t know about all that. I think God is just always ready—an old friend, ready to pick up the old conversation in a new context.
Helen Thompson, better known among faith bloggers as Gallycat, has written for the Philadelphia City Paper, RevGalBlogPals, Geez magazine and others. Visit her on the web at Gallycat’s Lounge.