The Sauntering Pilgrim

When Anne Lamott was nervous about getting on a plane for the long flight to Africa, obsessing about all the ways she could die, she received some advice from her pastor. “Annie, when you get on a plane, it’s a little late for beggy prayers. It’s time for trust and surrender.”

This far into life – today I begin my seventy-eighth circuit of the sun – I’m aware it’s more than a little late for beggy prayers, the vending-machine kind in which I drop a prayer in the slot and expect God will cough up the favor I’ve selected. It’s a season for the trust-and-surrender kind. Its probably always been the trust-and-surrender prayer season, only now I’m more aware of it and more ready to trust that whatever it is I call “God” values me enough to provide what I need and make me into whatever is needed in order to do what life has me here to do. “God’s name for me is Beloved,” Annie wrote. “So, just for today, I pray trust and surrender, I pray not to be such an asshole, I pray gratitude, I pray thankyouthankyouthankyou sweet gentle shepherd; and I pray Make me ever caring and available to the needs of the poor.”

Three hundred years or so ago, Jesuit priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote these fitting words. “It is true that a canvas simply and blindly offered to the brush feels at each moment only the stroke of the brush. It is the same with a lump of stone. Each blow from the hammering of the sculptor’s chisel makes it feel – if it could – as if it were being destroyed. As blow after blow descends, the stone knows nothing of how the sculptor is shaping it. All it feels is a chisel chopping away at it, cutting it and mutilating it.”

If asked what it believes is happening to it, the stone might answer, “Don’t ask me. All I know is that I must stay immovable in the hands of the sculptor, and I must love him and endure all he inflicts on me to produce the figure he has in mind. He knows how to do it. As for me, I have no idea what he is doing, nor do I know what he will make of me. But what I do know is that his work is the best possible. It is perfect.”

If the psalmist is right that “The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty if we are strong” (Ps. 90:10), then my cup of years is running over with abundance. Today I have completed seven solar circuits, 364 weeks, 364 Sabbaths, more than my biblical allotment. When Sheryl asked what I wanted for my birthday, what I wanted to do for it, what came to mind was a phrase I heard someone use this week. I want to “be where my feet are.” I want simply to be where I’m standing, really here, at the threshold of week 365 of added, undeserved, unexpected grace – it’s all the gift I need – offering a prayer of thanksgiving, trust, and surrender.