Instruments of love
I bought my first guitar on a dark, rainy night when I was fifteen years old. I saved up $45.00 in cash to buy the instrument from an older kid in our neighborhood. My dad drove me to his house after supper, and I made the purchase in his living room. I stayed up late that night on the couch in our den learning chords printed on a chart my sister’s boyfriend had given me. I pressed myself to the task of learning how to play because I had this deep inner intuition that there were songs inside of me that needed to come out. My early efforts and my late efforts too would likely be embarrassing to listen to now, but the gladness I felt at being able to express what I felt inside outwardly in song was real. When you write a song you’re getting in touch with something that resides inside of you and allowing it outward expression.
Something similar happens with prayer. God dwells within you. That’s just a fact. There is some-thing happening inside of you. That something is the Divine indwelling. If God did not dwell within you, you would not be. In silent prayer we descend into the depths of our own being, we rest in God who dwells within us, then when the period of prayer is over, we come forth from our silent center as renewed expressions of God in the world. We come forth as a new song each time we emerge from prayer. It’s not a hit single every time, or even most of the time, but it's a song nonetheless, an outward expression of an inner resonance and grace.
Not long after I bought my first guitar I met a man, a family friend, who was a really great guitar player and songwriter. He had school age children. In those days I was high on being able to play music, and I wanted everyone to be able to play - so that they too could get outside what was held and sometimes trapped inside. I said to my friend, “Do your kids play? Have you taught them the guitar or the drums?” He said very matter of factly, “Well, Hendree, all my instruments are in the basement at our house. The kids know that they are down there and they are welcome to pick up and learn to play whenever they want just like you did with your guitar.”
That’s all he said. “They know where the instruments are.” The guitar, the drums, and a host of other instruments were down in his basement waiting patiently but not insistently for his children to pick up anytime they wanted to. The instruments would not force themselves into the hands of his kids, but they were there ready to be accessed anytime.
The same is true of the Divine Indwelling. God is love and infinite patience waiting non-insistently in the depth of your own soul. God is not going to come up the stairs and grab you and drag you down where the instruments are to force the relationship to happen and then deepen. But you can open the door to your inner room and go down the steps into the silent basement space of your own being anytime.
Rest with God in the silence and emerge after a time as God’s own song, a note of love in a universal symphony of joy.
P.S. Come join us in the silence at our Silent Retreat on Saturday, March 8th at Good Shepherd. Register HERE.