Minutes of Meetings with God and with Myself
<Click here for another "Minute">
The Nightmare ...

The mental picture was both vivid and disquieting. It was the picture of a 50 year old "me", sitting in a super-sized highchair. The chair's foodtray was snapped in place in front of me and I was stuck there waiting impatiently to get some-thing to eat. Then a big hand with an even bigger spoon came out of no where to shovel something like grits or oatmeal into my mouth. There was no opportunity for me to do anything but struggle to make my mouth keep up with the food that was pushed at me. Food leaked out of the edges of my mouth and the spoon just kept shoving back in. I felt like a helpless infant in the hands of an over-zealous parent. That was the vivid part of the picture. The most disquieting part of all this was where all this seemed to be happening. It was in a the sanctuary of a church. Now, none of all this was a dream. Maybe it would have set better with me if it had been. Actually, this picture began to come to mind as I was plopped at a table in a local restaurant with a couple of clergy colleagues, talking about why people go to church. I had polished off a bowl of grits only a couple of minutes before the convers-ation turned to those of us who say that we go to church to "get fed." Some thing in my mind "click-ed" (some might say that some thing "snapped") and the mental picture of the highchair started to form as I struggled with what it means to go to church to "get fed." Almost all of my life, I had heard family, friends and others say, "One of the reasons I'm going to church is to get fed." I knew they weren't looking forward to a potluck dinner at church that day. And I understood them to mean that they were going to church in hope of getting something that would help their spiritual strength and growth. And it had always seemed to me that "getting fed" was a laudable goal for church attendance. The picture of me in the highchair went against the grain of the way I tend to view myself and the reasons I consciously hold for going to church. The picture cast me in a very crude and infantile light. I didn't like it one bit. And, yet, the picture captured in a very dramatic way, all the negative stuff that I tend to associate with "getting fed". The "highchair" picture has forced me to ask myself, "Is it really me in that highchair?" Is that the sort of Christian I've become? Have I some-how arrived at the place in which my assumptions about God, about church, and about myself reduce my spiritual and church experience to the level of an infant in a highchair? Fundamentally, a highchair is a restraint, a little prison. It closes a person in a confined space and limits the activity of the person who is sitting in it. The highchair puts its occupant at the mercy of someone else. It forces a person into a certain passivity. It takes away a significant amount of a person's freedom. We don't often think of high-chairs that way, unless we have seen the adult versions used to control the behavior of disabled or older people in nursing homes. A person in a highchair generally has little or no capacity for self-care. They are essentially helpless. "The feeding," of such a person has to be done by someone else. The person in the highchair has to wait for food to be brought to them, and then faces the challenge of swallowing all that gets pushed into his or her mouth. The one who does the feeding pretty much dictates what happens and has the power. There is a certain deep-seated unnatur-alness, something demeaning, in that state of help-lessness which forces someone else into caregiving. It is a state that we want to grow out of, when we are children. If we are otherwise healthy and persist in that sort of helplessness as adults, we have made ourselves emotionally and spiritual sick with what the psychologists call, co-dependence. I find I'm asking myself, "Have I allowed the church to become a sort of highchair for me?" Has it become a little prison that limits me, puts me under the control of someone else, and forces me into a passive mode of living? Have I tried to force God into the role of feeding me, of being a cosmic caregiver that is supposed to do nothing but see to the fulfillment of my wants and needs? If my answers to those questions is "yes", then I have allowed the church to become something Jesus never intended for it to be. And I have changed my relationship to God into something other than the sort of discipleship that Jesus modeled in the way that he lived. Jesus, on more than one occasion, told his closest friends and disciples, that unless they became like little children, they could not enter the Kingdom of God. Through the ages since Jesus walked among us in the flesh, wise saints have observed that there is a vast difference between being child-like and being childish or infantile. Children, at their best, are energetic and trusting, curious and creative, awe struck with the wonder of life and totally involved in both playing and growing. Most children tend to be free spirits who want to learn to do things for themselves so they can take care of themselves. It seems to me, that at its best, our discipleship as Christian can and should be that kind of child-like. I think I want my own discipleship to be energetic, trusting, full of curiosity, full of awe and totally involved in grow-ing to be more like Jesus. The pictures of people being fed, which Jesus drew with his parables and sayings and miracles, had nothing in common with any sort of "highchair" sort of experience. There weren't any tales of spooning food into the mouths of helpless babies. Those meals that Jesus so vividly described were wedding banquets and fabulous feasts to which a most hospitable and generous God invites everyone who is willing to come. Jesus spoke of the ultimate celebration, the final, infinite feast in the Kingdom of God. The miracles were in the turning of water into wine, of the breaking of bread, and multiplying fish so that there would be more than enough for anyone who would reach out a hand to receive what was given. However, all of these were very adult affairs. The people were expected to show the ability and the maturity as well as to expend the energy to put the food into their own mouths. Christians have discovered that Jesus, in his death and resurrection, offered the invitation and threw open the door to that incredible, final feast at God's table. One way of looking at our observance of Lent, is that it's a time for us to get ourselves ready to go to eat a fabulous meal with God. I guess that my hope during this Lenten season is that I will "put away childish things" and really learn to feed myself with what God generously provides. When that last, great banquet begins, I want to be sitting right up at the table with Jesus, eating real food, and not in some highchair off to the side, getting grits or oatmeal shoved in my face!