Dear Holy Spirit,
I know I am in your hands,
   in all ways,
   on all days,

But today I have forgotten how to say your name,
   or I only say it half-heartedly,
   especially now,
   when I am so thirsty,
   and hungry, alone.
   Especially now,
   when I have so much to worry about. 

My prayer sounds like tin.
   Do you hear it
    rattling around
    with its cup and spoon?

Please help me to become quiet,
   so that I hear your sound.

I will run toward you,
   then walk,
   then finally sit still
   and breathe
   and be empty
   and be whole
   and be with you.

I will rest in your palm
   for a moment,
   like a pebble.

-from Psalm 139

O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me! Though knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; Though discernest my thoughts from afar. Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, And art acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, Lo, O Lord, though knowest it altogether. Though dost beset me behind and before, And layest thy hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is high, I cannot attain it. Wither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or wither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend to heaven, though art there! If I make my bed is Sheol, thou art there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there thy hand shall hold me. If I say, "Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night," even the darkness is not dark to thee, The night is bright as the day; For darkness is as light to thee. For thou didst form my inward parts, Though didst knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works! Thou knowest me right well; My frame was not hidden from thee, When I was being made in secret, Intricately wrought in the depths of the earth. Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; In thy book were written, every one of them, The days that were formed for me, When as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are they thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand. When I am awake, I am still with thee.

The Second Reading this morning is from an excerpt from When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist Nun. She challenges us to think about hope and hopelessness in new ways.

The word in Tibetan for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dopka. More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two. Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there's one, there's always the other. This re-dok is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.

Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can't simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what's going on, but that there's something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like crap, and not be squeamish about taking a good look at the crappiness. That's the compassionate thing to do. That's the brave thing to do…

We can know the nature of dislike, shame, and embarrassment and not believe there's something wrong with that. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better "me" who one day will emerge. We can't just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. It's better to take a straight look at all our hopes and fears. Then some kind of confidence in our basic sanity arises.

This is where renunciation enters the picture-renunciation of the hope that our experience could be different, renunciation of the hope that we could be better. The Buddhist monastic rules that advise renouncing liquor, renouncing sex, and so on are not pointing out that those things are inherently bad or immoral, but that we use them as babysitters. We use them as a way to escape; we use them to try to get comfort and to distract ourselves. The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are. Renunciation is a teaching to inspire us to investigate what's happening every time we grab something because we can't stand to face what's coming.

Once I was sitting next to a man on an airplane who kept interrupting our conversation to take various pills. I asked him, "What is that you're taking?" he answered that they were tranquilizers. I said, "Oh, are you nervous?" and he said, "No, not now, but I think when I get home I'm going to be."

You can laugh at this story, but what happens with you when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, queasy? Notice the panic, notice when you instantly grab for something. That grabbing is based on hope. Not grabbing is called hopelessness.

…Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put "Abandon hope" on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better."

Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself…no matter what's going on.

“The Gift of Hunger” – Brooke Belcher

Nine years ago, in the spring of my senior year of college, I sat on the green industrial carpet of my dorm room, addressing creamy envelopes and stuffing them with resumes. I was about to earn my B.A. in English, and I was looking for a place to try teaching high school. I didn't have a teaching certificate, so I applied to private schools that hired teaching interns. As I addressed the last envelope I noticed for the first time that this school I was writing to was called Culver Military Academy. I lifted my pen, looked out the window. Do I really want to go there? Well, I had already printed the resume and cover letter, and the thick, creamy paper was expensive, so why not? I dropped it in the mailbox along with twenty others.

You know where this is going. The one job I was offered was, of course, the one at Culver Military Academy. August found me setting up camp in an old housemother's apartment in a dorm with fifty high school girls. I was to teach one freshman English class under the guidance of the English department head, coach cheerleading, do lots of dorm duty, and support myself for the first time in my life. There were ten interns on campus, all of us fresh out of college. I lived with fellow intern Leslie Lockett, who taught biology. Our small apartment had only one bedroom, so we slept in twin beds, just a few feet apart from each other, like sisters. She loved to cook elaborate meals and then leave the dishes in the sink for a week.

Despite the narrow confines of my life, I soon discovered that Culver was not the cultural wasteland my east coast prejudices had trained me to expect. I worked under the gentle guidance of Dr. Paul Hamer, a wise and loving man who looked with sympathy upon my urgent need to get things right, and to be praised for it. The first year of teaching is never an entirely pretty one. In September, as I struggled to establish my authority in the ninth grade class I took over from Paul, he took me to lunch at the local Subway. As we sat at a sunny table, munching our turkey subs and sipping mocha frappaccinos, we talked about Brad, the macho kid who was giving me the most trouble. I couldn't tell Paul all of my insecurities about the job I was doing, but he sensed them anyway. The stream of questions bubbling through my mind sounded like: Do you think I could be a great teacher? Or what about a poet? Or perhaps both? (I didn't even know about oriental dance at the time.) Should I go on to be a professor? What about being a minister? Should I try to teach in a public school? Or should I skip that and go directly over to India and help Mother Theresa? And what if I miss my calling all together? What if I spend years doing the wrong thing? What then? How could I possibly live with myself then?

As we finished up lunch, Paul switched topics and told me in his slow, careful voice about his brother, who knew from the very start of his life that he wanted to be a veterinarian, and indeed became one. I said to Paul, "I wish I were that sure about my life…"

He looked at me with his round blue eyes that were almost always a little watery, as if on the edge of crying, and said, "If you are not one of those people who knows exactly what you should do from the beginning, you can't become one, you have to be who you are, which is someone who's not sure." I felt a little latch in my heart let go, and I breathed in deeply. Up until that day I thought it was my job to hide my inner restlessness. You mean I can be who I am? I thought. The answer was yes, you can be who you are, in fact, you have no choice. And who you are is full of questions.

Later that year I read a collection of essays about community and writing by Wendell Berry called Standing by Words. In it, I came across a passage that nailed me: "One loves what one knows. One cannot love the future or anything in it, for nothing is known there. Love for the future is…an irremediable loneliness."

First I looked up irremediable, and I found out it means something that can't be remedied. As soon as I realized he was talking about loneliness with no end in sight, I knew he was talking about me.

I was then, and still am quite often, a lover of the future: someone who bides her time, expecting a better self to show up any minute, someone who is up to the difficulty of the present moment, rather than this person I currently am, who is woefully inadequate and behind schedule. When I first read that sentence, I lived in a dorm with fifty high school girls; I had a roommate who wouldn't do the dishes; I had a job that required lots of experimenting and public failure. I felt I needed the future bad. Instead of paying full attention to where I was and whom I was with, my thoughts were filled with speculation, worry, and fantasies of the perfect future. One of these fantasies starred, ironically, a man named Hope Strong IV.

He was the intern who taught Latin, and I had a tremendous crush on him. He wore cowboy boots that romantically smelled like the horses he rode after school. He was an alcoholic, a Southerner, a fan of Faulkner. He drove his Jeep through the nearby bird sanctuary at night, without his headlights on, just for kicks. He got me drinking bourbon and ginger ales, playing pool, and dancing to the jukebox. He also got me to bail him out of jail one Sunday morning. Oh, and he was a naturally gifted swing-dancer.

One spring night, I returned home from an outing up to South Bend with a few fellow interns. I was restless and disappointed with our sour night of bar hopping, so I decided to take myself for a little walk, even though it was about three in the morning. I ended up on the side of campus where Hope lived in one of the boys' dorms. I found myself standing on the wet grass, staring up at his dark window for a long time. Then, out of sheer loneliness, I decided to climb up to the fire escape and knock on his window. I had in the breast pocket of my wool jacket a box of Junior Mints, which I knew were his favorite. Had I been noticed by campus security, or worse-by one of the boys whose windows I climbed past on my way up-I would have been fired. But did that stop my hungry heart from wanting to be up there? No way. At the top of the fire escape, I knocked on his windowpane. After a breathless minute, he threw up the shade angrily, thinking I was one of his rowdy students playing a prank. He looked me with groggy surprise.

"Would you like a Junior Mint?" was all I could manage to say. Hope looked bemused, graciously accepted the Junior Mints, talked with me a few minutes, and then went back to bed. I climbed back down and walked home in the dewy, April night. Talk about irremediable loneliness.

But being unsure of my career path and loving someone who didn't return the feeling were really only the tip of the iceberg. That feeling of fundamental lonely restlessness was not new to me. It had been with me for as long as I could remember. At the age of twenty-two, I thought I was the only one who possessed a desert inside of her…a forsaken landscape where boredom, lack of love, lack of activity, lack of certainty, and indefinite longing for a better future combined sometimes into a toxic, endless mood that only a mighty distraction seemed able to shake me out of.

That first year in Indiana, I felt it acutely on Friday afternoons. I would always look forward to the end of the busy week, but then, as soon as the bell rang and people started happily drifting away from the brick buildings, I panicked within. What would I do with my time? Who would keep me busy? Who would be sure I didn't slip into the pits of loneliness? But as I stood in my classroom full of tall afternoon light, before I even knew it, I was already there. The loneliness was masked by my work. As soon as that cleared away, the loneliness was revealed right where it had always been.

During spring break of that year, I went to a family gathering back on the east coast and ended up driving there with my father's cousin Todd, an MD who also meditates a lot. On the car ride, he noticed me feverishly writing in the backseat and asked what I was doing.

I told him, "Well, I'm feeling undefined and I'm trying to figure things out by writing about them. I've been a student all my life, and now I'm not anymore, so it's almost like I don't know who I am." I left out the part about the crush on Hope, of course.

Todd replied, "That seems like an exciting time, a good time to be in, when you're not so clearly boxed. When I meditate, that's what I'm trying to do, get out of the box."

I replied to him, "Of course, that's true-it's an exciting time, but I'm suffering!"

Todd nodded knowingly. He had been there. Everyone has. In fact, we are all still there, struggling with the parts of ourselves that are still being born.

On May 4th, I wrote in my journal, "The hungry heart-I figured out this week-is like an injury, an illness, an emaciated body. No one wants to look at it. It's disgusting, pitiable, it asks for everything. It will take so much work to heal, to be brought to health. Some of us are injured in this way, and it's invisible at first-but not so after a little conversation, after a meal with a hungry-hearted person, you know what you're looking at; you know what that person's heart is asking for."

I think we all know what heart-hunger is-that inner restlessness, that longing, that ache that waxes and wanes like the moon. When I described my own hunger as "disgusting, pitiable, an emaciated body that no one wants to look at," I was finally seeing the depth of my need, but I was horrified and filled with self-contempt. I didn't know then that the hunger is universal.

I also didn't realize that the hunger had been and would continue drawing me closer and closer to God all my life. In fact, without this longing, I wouldn't be able to know God at all. The hunger is what humbles me, tears down my hopes of a safe, happy, life built on good work, good money, good looks, good companions, success, a bright future. The hunger dwarfs those things; it swallows them and then keeps asking for more, in fact, it is asking for me. The hunger, like God, never ends. It lives in me so strongly. It floods me at times, the only difference is that I am not so surprised by it now, and I'm learning how to honor it, care for it, or as the Buddhists would say, I'm learning to be friendly toward it.

The hardest thing is not to be ashamed of that neediness. It is so tempting to try to hide it. It's important that we not do this, though, because I believe the will of God ceaselessly calls to us through our hungers.

The most important work for us to do is the work of the spirit. It is our deepest desire. It calls to us as often as our hearts ache and our stomachs rumble. Our job is to listen to it without contempt, without judgment, and with an open mind about how our longing will change our lives and the world.

My hunger was not the obstacle to happiness that year; it was leading me toward wisdom, showing me what is food for the soul and what is not (particularly Junior Mints). The obstacle was my shame. I thought I was supposed to be complete, functioning, happy, whole, but I wasn't. I was consumed with mysterious, gigantic hopes and needs. I was right there in the presence of God, but I was often too ashamed to look up and feel the light on my face.

If we are kind enough to ourselves, and not ashamed of all the ways we are incomplete, then we can hear that still small voice calling our very names over and over, beckoning.

Two years ago, during a summer workshop for teachers, one of the leaders shocked me by saying, "There's something so wonderful about being a new teacher-the kids seeing you figure things out, being so much more like them than the other, more experienced teachers. They love it."

How could that stage be good? I cried out in my mind. I had always hated it, wanted to fast-forward out of it into the future. But she was right.

The tenderness of our desires, needs, and failures is precious. I think of my fledgling relationship with God: how I start a pray and trail off into a mental to-do list, how I try to meditate and last one minute. Even now, I am feeling inadequate, and full of hope that I can pull off something brilliant and be praised for it. My eyes have a hard time looking away from the future. And I'm just beginning to learn how to sit with my hunger, how to be patient and friendly toward it, and let it be the key to knowing God, instead of feeling ashamed.

When I surrender completely, (which is very hard to do-I usually need to be pushed), when I hold out my hands and ask for what I hunger for most deeply, I feel God's light flood my inner empty space. It is not the light of things to come, but rather the light of love in the present moment. And then I know the reason why the space exists inside me, why it's so enormous, and why it will never leave me: God lives in that space.