Floating in God's Tide

I like several Roman Catholic authors on spirituality. I tend to read them through my Protestant faith and skip over the “Catholic” parts, I'm afraid.  One book I’ve liked is Thomas H.  Green’s When the Well Runs Dry: Prayer Beyond the Beginnings (Ave Maria Press, 1979).  Fr. Green provides an interesting view of the spiritual life as “floating.” (It’s humorous, I suppose, that as I thought about this aquatic image, I dropped the book in a deep puddle during a torrential rain, soaking the book through. I promptly ordered another copy.)

Green compares swimming (which of course requires effort) with the effortlessness of floating, and concludes that “many people never learn how to float” because they “never learn to relax, to let their head be pillowed by the water” (p. 142).  He lives in the Philippines and comments that even natives of those islands have trouble floating. “Learning to float is counterintuitive; we have to do the very opposite of what our self-preserving instincts urge us to do” (pp. 142-143). Also, floating is “essentially to learn to trust,” which is also difficult (p. 143).

We must decide, spiritually, to swim or float, and we would prefer to do both, he writes, because we want to make our own way through life but to call upon God for help when we feel out of control.  But God, rather, “wants us to have as our goal our total surrender to the [God’s] tide” (p. 144-145). Floating is when we “are totally secure” in God’s love and can thus “float free” and allow God to guide us (p. 145).

Green notes that we don’t necessarily understand “the mystery of floating” and we’ll likely lost confidence that floating isn’t just laziness, or that we’ll become lost in times of “the dark night” (p. 145). After all, “God is always just out of reach, far enough away so we can never settle down in comfortable complacently, and yet never so far that we give up the quest as hopeless (p. 148).

A few months ago, when I “hit” a certain notable, middle-aged birthday, I thought about writing a few things about my personal journey for a blog post.  But I had an article I wanted to post instead, and I didn’t return to the idea.  Thinking about Green’s idea of “floating,” though, reminds me of the numerous turns and paths of my career (to focus on just that aspect of my life). Several times, opportunities that I thought were wonderful were not or did not develop, while other, unexpected ones appeared and were amazing.  I’m sure it’s been that way for many others, too. I’ve even praised God for answered prayer for circumstances, only to find those circumstances fall apart and lead eventually to something better.

If you can be a “floater” who is anxious and fussy and uncertain while floating, that’s me!  Green assures us that it's not easy to trust God.  But Green’s image of floating is a powerful one, and looking back, I see many ways my family and I have been guided.

When I talk to people about prayer (often, these days, via Facebook conversations), I prefer to emphasize this aspect of faith and spirituality: prayer and faith puts one within God’s “tide,” and we should seek to relax if we can as the current guides us. I don’t want people to feel disappointed if their prayers don’t get answered right away, or if “the peace of Christ” they felt in their hearts doesn’t last, or if (like me) the prima facie answer to prayer doesn’t necessarily work out.  To me, it’s more honest and helpful (and more biblically, really) to assure people that God guides us over the long haul, and the wonders of God’s “current” may become obvious only after a period of years.