Behind You and Before You

Dear Friends,

At school chapel on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, we give birthday blessings to the students and teachers who are celebrating that week. This week was a special one for me because I gave a blessing to Fritz. His second to last at St. Peter's, as it turned out. I know this because it hit me while I said the words and it was an exercise in "not losing it in front of a room full of elementary school students." But that's a story for another day. What I've been reflecting on about our birthday blessings is the words we use:

May the Lord walk behind you and before you, may His strength be a light to you this year, and may He bless you, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

I love the reminder of that first phrase—that wherever we go, God is already there. It's a good reminder for all of us, who live in a season that finds us with so many reasons to be anxious. So many reasons to think that maybe God isn't actually going to be there—if you get sick, or on November 4th, or if your job goes away, or whatever your primary anxiety happens to be at the moment.

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In our Wednesday study group, we've been moving through Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God. It's a wonderful book, and I commend it to all of you. But it's not without its problems. Specifically, there are times when Br. Lawrence's views of pain just don't seem to line up with the way the Christian tradition has typically viewed that topic. He seems to believe that God intends and sends those sorts of struggles our way so that we might become more faithful, more dependent on God, a people who know God more.

And of course, those are good things. We want to be more faithful. We want to learn to depend more on God. We want to be a people who know God more. And I'd even go as far as saying that those of us who have walked through times of darkness and pain and come out the other side have often learned in those times exactly those things—faith, dependence, knowledge of and love for God.

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But all that is just a bit different than saying that God meant for us to experience those times. As though God sent them our way to teach us a lesson, or something like that. That is just not where most of the Christian tradition has been on the subject of how our pain and suffering relate to the presence of God.

Rather, as I have continued to ponder all this since class on Wednesday, I keep coming back to that chapel blessing. May the Lord walk behind you and before you. Christians don't believe God intends suffering. Christians don't believe God sends it our way for our own good. Rather, we believe that even in the midst of it, God is already there. God's grace and goodness are at work. The glory of God's presence is revealed even in the darkest of times.

God bless,
Fr. Quinn+