Ten-Finger Exercises

hunting for something more than a book

Just warning you: this is a heavy subject. The folks who continue reading are likely to be only the ones who find my attitude sacrilegious, and they’ll be angry. The rest will probably be uninterested quickly. That’s okay. Come back again some other time. I won’t write much on this topic, not in public.

Last week I joined a new group, just forming, of Renovare. I did so for some of the same reasons I mentioned regarding P.E.O. sorority, a women’s group that promotes women’s education. I need some closer ties to people who aren’t my family or my co-workers. It’s too easy for me to huddle away at my computer whenever I can, letting the rest of the world go by. I'm of an age when I need to be forging stronger bonds of friendship.

This isn’t to say, at all, that the friends I’ve made here at WDC don’t count. They (YOU) count greatly, maybe too much. They are comfortable, and comforting. But they don’t require enough of me, don’t make me stretch and grow in quite the same way. They don’t make me, physically, reach out to help. I do having a feeling of accountability toward them, but in a different way, an easier way. I’m needing something more, in addition. I guess I’m not quite sure what it is or why, but I’m trying several different things. One is P.E.O, another is a writers’ group. Renovare is the third.

Renovare is an ecumenical movement for Christian renewal and formation of spirituality. It was begun by Richard J. Foster, whose books Celebration of Discipline, Finding the Heart’s True Home, Prayer, and Freedom of Simplicity are well known.

I have very mixed feelings about joining this group, and did so because they asked for only a 9-week commitment. Even with that, I’m not sure it’s fair to anyone else to have me there. I’m too much of a skeptic when it comes to organized religion, even though I’m a part of it. That’s two strikes against my being there.

A book I’ve just begun is one that a Buddhist doctor recommended to me years ago. I bought it, but just found it again on a shelf, unread. I don’t know why I never got around to it. He wanted to discuss it with me. Maybe I was too intimidated to do that with him. He’s a brilliant, sharp-tongued man who “does not suffer fools gladly.” Unfortunately, he's no longer in the area.

The book is A History of God, by Karen Armstrong. In the introduction she talks about her childhood faith, becoming a nun and then leaving the order, but continuing to be interested in the subject. She said that “God had never really impinged” on her life, although she had made every effort “to enable him to do so.”

When she began to research this topic, the ways humankind perceived God throughout history, she learned something that she wished she had learned thirty years before. “It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety,” to have heard from eminent monotheistic theologians that “instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.” She went on to say that these same men told her that “God did not really exist—yet God is the most important reality in the world.”

I completely understand what she’s saying. That’s why maybe I don’t belong in this small Renovare group of people who may be shocked by this attitude, or worse, brought down into confusion and a loss of faith by it.

On the other hand, maybe that’s why I do belong there, to deliberately create a better sense of God for myself.

Someone I've read recently was writing about a childhood experience of attending a church where a famous preacher was speaking. Despite the man's fame, the writer instantly felt he was a charlatan. When she went to another church to hear another well-known preacher, she was convinced that he was a holy man.

I understand that too. I have been around a few people who I consider to be really whole (holy) people; and it is very impressive, in a way that just being religious is not.

I want to know more about being whole.