June 2005: Bearings

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By Martin L. Smith
Washington Window
Vol. 73, No. 7, June 2005

I suppose Jesus' listeners shook their heads at the seeming impracticality of his advice about prayer - they were to find privacy by going into a room where they could be in secret with God after shutting the door? Life then was utterly public and ordinary houses didn't afford privacy. They knew he meant going into the tool shed or grain store at the back. Rather eccentric. But Jesus was insistent. Our prayer isn't something other people can monitor or watch. In a world where we are constantly observed, supervised and interfered with, prayer is an activity that is ours alone, where we 'come into our own.'

In my imagination, I associate Jesus' advice with my first experience years ago of developing photographic negatives in a darkroom. A neighbor gave me a battered old camera to take on my first trip abroad to Switzerland, and a friend who had access to the darkroom at school helped me develop my films when I returned. It made a deep impression on me in the faint reddish glow to see the image of the village church at Seewis appear mysteriously from nowhere in the chemical bath, and then to hang the photograph up to dry. Prayer for me is like that. The door has to stay shut for the process to 'work.' We bring to prayer our memories and images from scripture and worship that are usually as difficult to decipher as photographic negatives. But in the special conditions of the darkroom we can develop them, and the true images can emerge from the negatives.

We are now in the long season of the Sundays after Pentecost. It is as if the church recognizes that the intense cycle that lasts from Advent through Eastertide has given us more than enough images of God's presence and action in our lives. Now it is up to us to develop those images for ourselves. Perhaps we should give a warmer welcome to this next cycle in which the input from the Sunday liturgies is far less dramatic. The church is really saying 'enough is enough,' and giving us permission to take our spiritual rolls of film into the personal darkroom of our own prayer life.

Where to start? This year I am realizing that I am long overdue to renew my own appreciation of the Holy Spirit. I have the equivalent of rolls of film containing images of the Spirit, images from hymns, passages of scripture and poetry, images from my own life experience in the last few months, but what good are they to me until I have developed them for myself in the darkroom of the heart?
I certainly need the time until Advent. I can hardly imagine getting through the process any sooner, given the variety of images through which the Spirit is revealed. I've made a quick inventory in advance of the points I need to revisit.

First, I'm going to listen to spontaneous promptings. For example, for days now a couple of lines from one of old hymns to the Holy Spirit has been going through my mind: "What is rigid, gently bend; what is frozen, warmly tend." The Holy Spirit is God coming to us in our fearfulness of life. It is out of fear that we turn rigid. We recognize this in the church and the world: rigidity based on fear, usually rationalized as 'standing firm.' I recognize it in myself. I hold my breath. I stiffen. I rely on routines and set ideas. My rigidity is fearfulness of what is next…

Or even more what is now. I will need to re-embrace the imagery of God as life-giving breath. Breath is the one thing we can't store up. I can't live off the breathing of 10 years ago. I can't even live off the breathing of five minutes ago. I can only live from this breath now, and the same is true of my relationship with God, the Eternal Now. God is the now or nothing of my living. Only God-the-Spirit can train me to live the present moment, weaning me from clinging to the past, gently resisting my anxious straining into the future. I can only learn how to live now from the Now. "And he breathed on them and said. 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'"

I'm long overdue to develop all the imagery of the Spirit that is drawn from the forces in creation that are most fluid and unconstrained and free and beautiful and spontaneous. The public conversation about God in this America of ours is riddled with imagery of coercion. I need God-the-Spirit revealed to me again personally in water, fire, birth, love-making and dance, and only I can do the darkroom prayer work that will make that renewal possible. No one else can do it for me.
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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