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Commentary
WESLEYAN WISDOM: Recovering a sense of God’s presence Donald W. Haynes, Jul 22, 2010
Donald W. Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes UMR Columnist
Growing up in a rural church made up of neighbors, I remember hearing a lot of greetings and chatter as the small congregation gathered. Later in seminary, I was taught to chastise my people if they talked upon entering the sanctuary.
Almost no pastor in the 1950s would have confessed to walking in and out of pews before worship and greeting people! We were taught to urge people to reverence this holy place with silence, meditation and prayer.
For several years after seminary, I tried unsuccessfully to impose this Anglo-Catholic ethos of worship on my rural Methodist churches. They groused!
About 20 years into my ministry, John Bergland, then-professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School, led a preaching mission for us during Lent. He reflected one night on his first appointment, when he admonished his people to remember, “God is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.” He urged them to refrain from talking and to stop crossing the sanctuary to converse during the organ prelude!
After a few months, a farmer asked his new pastor to their home for lunch. The layman said, “Pastor, I know how you feel about our being silent in church, but this week I heard that a widow neighbor lost her milch cow. She has a family of children who need milk; so I sent one of the boys over there with a little Jersey cow who is a good milker, but like most Jerseys, a little skittish. This morning I could not worship the Lord until I learned whether my neighbor was able to milk that little Jersey.”
Dr. Bergland said that conversation changed his attitude, and he stopped chastising people for connecting with friends and neighbors before they talked with the Lord. He referred us to the Hebrew temple, which had a “place of meeting” before one accessed the inner court.
Presbyterian pastor Henry Brinton said in a recent issue of USA Today that he is developing small sharing groups in his church. What he describes sounds very much like Wesley class meetings! Those of us who praise the advantages of small-membership churches know that a small congregation is like the fictional bar on the television program Cheers: We can boast that “everyone knows my name” when we walk in the door of our faith family!
But then Dr. Brinton wonders if we are losing a sense of what Isaiah felt when he entered the temple and “saw the Lord high and lifted up” and sensed himself “a man of unclean lips who was part of a people with unclean lips.” When in church are we experiencing the “Holy Other”? We certainly need to retain our horizontal dimension of worship yet not lose the sense of sanctuary and house of prayer.
Value of silence
Buddhism is now the third most practiced religion in America, according to the 2008 Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Forty percent of Buddhist converts are Caucasian Americans between the ages of 30 and 49. Is it time for us to recover the value of silence and meditation?
Do we not need to lead people to the rarified air of “coming to the garden alone” where God can “tell me that I am his own?” That old hymn, so often mocked for its subjectivity, touches our Achilles’ heel. It is the story of Mary Magdalene in the resurrection garden—“He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.” Not only do we need to call each other’s name; we need to sense that God is calling our name—“His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches me.”
A major childhood memory is my mother’s daily practice of spending time with God alone. She worked hard all day, cooking meals on a wood stove, caring for a cantankerous mother-in-law and harvesting vegetables from the garden for the next day’s midday “dinner” for the field hands.
But as a little boy, I would see her pick up her worn Bible and wend her way down a path to a poplar stump where she would spend the last hour of dusk communing with God. It was her means of survival; it was her soul food.
Our church on a five-point circuit had no activities beyond Sunday school, but Mama talked with the Lord in silence as the sun set. She never asked me to join her, but I sometimes did. When I did, we never spoke, and she never prayed aloud. She read her Bible, closed it and looked at the sunset or dropped to her tired knees beside the poplar stump.
Is not inner peace the sustaining grace we discover in solitude? Do we not need to hear God in the sounds of silence?
Every pastor once knew the writings of Richard Baxter, a 17th-century Anglican. Our arid souls still see truth in his words:
“Concerning the fittest place for heavenly meditation, it is sufficient to say that the most convenient is some private retirement. . . . I advise that thou withdraw thyself from all society . . . that thou mayest for a while enjoy the society of Christ.”
Those words may fall upon deaf ears if the hearer is a single parent struggling to meet the daily demands of work and family. Yet neglecting habits of the heart and care of the soul results in emotional, physical and spiritual dysfunction. Self-care must include some down time alone.
I have learned to use driving time as alone time. I live 53 miles from the church where I am interim pastor—about two hours on the road alone, three or four times a week. I seldom turn on the radio or play a tape or CD. Granted, I miss a few exits! But what quality time with God!
Throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry, the Gospel writers tell us, “He went apart . . .” or “He went up on the mountain.” As a pastor, I was often haunted by the question, “If Jesus could take some time off, why can’t I?”
Deeps calls to deep
Adam McHugh has written Introverts in the Church (InterVarsity Press) about the discomfort of introverts in a church of babblers! “We find our energy in solitude, often listen more than we speak, may prefer to observe more than we engage in the middle and we connect with God most deeply in silence,” he writes. An introvert, he adds, may feel “marginalized or spiritually inadequate” when all about him are engaging in sharing groups or spirited conversation.
The Rev. James Howell, senior pastor of Myers Park UMC in Charlotte, N.C., tells of a time when one of his precious little daughters had a high fever. In his frustration as he felt her fevered brow, he said, “Honey, is there anything I can do for you?” She said words he has never forgotten: “Daddy, just be there when I open my eyes.”
Is that not what our soul yearns to know—that God is there when we “open the eyes of our soul”? It is deep reaching out to Deep and knowing the Presence!
My mother lived for 26 years in The Methodist Home, and unless she opened her door and sought company or participated in activities or worship, she lived in one room all those years. As her vision blurred and her legs required a walker, she ventured out less and less. One day I asked her, “Mama are you lonesome?” She said, “No son, there is a difference between loneliness and solitude.”
While I was a pastor in southern Appalachia, my life was blessed by a blind Episcopal rector in his late 80s. At most gravesides, he would lift his blinded eyes to the majestic mountains and spoke of them as “mother mountains where I learned to soar and ceased to plod.”
Whether one’s holy place is God’s creation or a single bedroom, the “little brown church in the wildwood” or a great cathedral, we need a time and place that to us is “near to the heart of God.”
Dr. Haynes is a retired member of the Western North Carolina Conference and author of On the Threshold of Grace: Methodist Fundamentals (UMR Communications). E-mail: dhaynes11@triad.rr.com.
Donald W. Haynes
