Restless

This is more to get my thoughts down so I can maybe express them better this coming Thursday when I'm going to be talking to the teens at my parish. So if I ramble or go in circles, maybe it will help me not ramble then.

We've been talking a lot about Pope JPII's Theology of the Body, and about how sex, the body, everything, is so far from bad that it's ridiculous how it's been twisted by our culture. The song that keeps coming back to me is "How He Loves" which I first heard done by Jesus Culture, and that Crowder has since covered. The line that keeps coming back to me, the line that perhaps everyone knows but no one wants to sing, is "heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss". I'll admit, it's a little out there. But I've been thinking about it a lot in the context of TotB, and, let's be real. There is more Truth in that line than we're often comfortable recognizing.

And since I'm a sinful human, I've been thinking a lot about how, or more importantly, why God loves us the way that he does. I can't go 5 minutes without screwing something up. Even when I am trying specifically to love people, who I can see and have absolute, complete, total belief in their existence (yes, even after having watched The Matrix), things go wrong. I know in my head that our God is a jealous God [Exodus]. He wants us entirely to ourselves. He doesn't want us to be half for Him. He doesn't want us to put anything else above Him. He wants to know us more intimately than we could ever imagine. Or, rather, He does, but He wants us to know Him back.

We've been talking a lot about the book Song of Songs, too, which fits perfectly. It's a love poem to us from Him. It's sensual. It's ridiculously so. But that's how much God wants us, and how God wants us. I've thought a lot about passion vs. reverence; it's not something you can avoid as a music minister. And it's a hard balance to strike, mostly because you can't balance it. The paradox is that God wants us to honor Him, but wants us to know him more intimately than, frankly, is humanly possible. I think we use reverence as a shield so that we don't have to be real with God or with ourselves. God doesn't want our perfection or our grandstanding, He just wants us, right where we're at, no compromises. I get scared because all I can ever think about when I'm right there with Him is all the ways that I've screwed up. It's probably been a year or more since I've been real with Him. I've tried. So sometimes I'll go back to reverence, say things like "be respectful, you're in God's house" or try to quiet people down, or worst of all, try to bring God to them, as if I ever could, even in those times when I've felt really close to Him.

And the incredible thing is that everything that we use to keep ourselves from really sitting down and just being with God is, in and of itself, not a bad thing. For me, lately, it's been: school (a little while ago, but it's been a while since I've been really close), work, guitar, video games, relationships, time with friends, eating, sleeping, and a lot of things that maybe aren't inherently good. God's a jealous God. Even things that He loves about us, things that we do to help others, to love others, to live to see tomorrow so we have another chance to help and love others, even those can get between us and Him. And a lot of those things have to come between us. God doesn't want us to starve to death while in Adoration time. Part of being a human is accepting that you're not in heaven yet. And while God wants our everything, He loves us and loves our half-measures. He loves our trying. He is desperate for us, even when it's not mutual.

Can this familiarity with God go too far, to the point of irreverence? Can we get to a point where anything is acceptable as long as we're in love with God? I used to think there was a line. Now I'm not so sure that it could ever be sinful to love God as much as I possibly can. I need to get to a priest. I need to get some spiritual advising. I need to actually try to be with God first.


An aside to the non-Catholic Christians out there: I confess that I don't know what's in your particular bible. I know that they are different. If Song of Songs is not in yours, I really encourage you to go find a copy. It's not something that I hear anyone ever talking about, even though it is in the (Catholic) bible and is for a reason. It's also not something that they teach us in grade school, so I'm really only just now reading it. So if it is in your bible, then you probably know it way better than me and this is all common-sense. But even so, no one ever talks about it.

If you read this before Thursday, please pray for me. I don't know how it's going to go, or what I'm going to say, because I'm going to try to just be a conduit for God, try to let Him give me the words. I hope I can get out of the way and let God do great things, but it really doesn't matter if anyone comes up to me afterward and tells me how touched they were. I sure hope they are, but the fruit is probably years down the road, and likely not something anyone will ever see. And sorry for the long post at 6am. I woke up at 4:30 and couldn't sleep because it was on my mind.