nobodysgod

In my last post, I said that I saw prayer as a way of keeping in touch with God. I think that phrase could use some clarifying.

You know how some people "keep in touch" by sending one another an annual holiday card? Or sending an annual family "catch-up" letter? My idea of keeping in touch is definitely not like that. To me "keeping in touch" means maintaining–sustaining–a relationship in an everyday way. Being present to the relationship in an ongoing way. Sometimes intimately, sometimes with simply an awareness that it’s there, a part of your life.
And with any other good mutual relationship, when you really need to know it’s there. . . you know it’s there. You don’t need to squander time or energy "catching up" before you bring up what’s troubling your mind or
heart or spirit. Or are facing a terrible event.

My mother’s dying night was like that for me. Our relationship was "clean"–there was nothing to bring out or up which had been shoved under the rug, so to speak. There was no need to tidy up our relationship. We had no loose ends to try to tie up. The only thing I had left to tell her was that I loved her, which I said many times that night. Words said not to inform, but in an attempt to be present to her even as she became less and less present to me. I was not saying it in hopes she would tell me she loved me too, because I knew that as surely as she knew I loved her. In that, as in every other way, it was our habit to keep in touch. Thankfully, that was our reality, because, well before morning, she was too far away to speak.

Maybe that’s when I learned the value of always keeping in touch with those who are important to you. Whom you love. I am pretty sure it’s why I do my best now to keep in touch with God–Whom I didn’t know back then. In the years since He came into my life, my wish is to be as present to Him as He is to me has only grown. So that when He needs me to be truly kind to someone, I will be ready to hear that from Him. And when I am impelled to alert Him to some emergency in my life or the life of a friend, He doesn’t dismiss my prayer with some divine version of "I know, I know," He allows me to think for the moment that He had to hear it from me. When life rebounds to normality, I can admit to both of us that I knew He knew what was going on, and was "on" it. I just had to remind myself of that.

Today, I know the Shekhinah–God’s softer, maternal half–is holding Japanese babies especially close to Her. Against Her very breast. I know She’s with them. Still, I pray for that. It reminds me that I need to keep them close to my heart, too.