A Saturday Heresy

by

I am so confused. Outside my window is a twisted heap of pine trees, trunks and branches piled 15 feet high by Helene’s winds. The temperature today on November 8 at elevation 2400’ in the Blue Ridge mountains is 80 and the rhododendron by the garage has started blooming. I just don’t understand the votes of a lot of my fellow Americans. The Web is like our city reservoir, normally pristine water, now so turbid we’re on a boil order indefinitely (turbidity is a hot new word around here – I had to look it up, too.) It’s hard to think straight. I am so confused.

One of my favorite prayers that my congregation says in unison almost every week has some lines in it that I ponder a lot. It comes toward the end of the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer and begins, “Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you” – and ends with this punch line: “with gladness and singleness of heart.” I need this beautiful, poetic, and deep language to feel whole. But it also asks a lot, of God and of me, especially right now.

For me, saying these words is strictly aspirational. I’m not very glad at the moment, and I don’t feel “single” in any way. I’m certainly not single-minded – my thoughts are all over the place. Current research is revealing that my gut has a definite role in intelligence, generated by its bacteria and chemistry, but that isn’t helping either. My gut is also all over the place. That leaves it all up to my heart. Is it enjoying “singleness?”

If the heart is a metonym for feelings, the answer is definitely No. I am angry. I am frustrated. I’m in grief for the losses the hurricane rained down on us. I worry about what the scale of the storm shows about our earth and atmosphere. My heart sinks when I see war expanding step by relentless step. My capacity for love – supposedly the heart’s forte – is all disrupted right now by my fear and anxiety.

Singleness of heart? What could it mean to be “single” in heart? To be one – only one – at heart? I wonder if singleness of heart is related somehow to “soul” – my life experience that deeply shapes me. Or to “character” – my sense of what kind of person I am. They’re all words I associate with the center of my being. They are the words I have, feeble and ambiguous as they may be, for saying who I am.

I don’t feel “single” in heart right now, that’s for sure. But maybe what I feel is not the point. Who I am over time, in my various relationships and activities, in the ways I have changed and grown with age, in the consistencies of how I have lived my life – that’s the point of the phrase, this petition to God. God who is One.

So what I’m praying for is to be reminded who I am. Everyone around me in the sanctuary is speaking the same petition with a fierce and searching desire to be whole. There’s a voice in this prayer saying to all of us, “Be glad. Be glad that you’re alive on this earth for this moment.” And the voice says, “Remember who you are. Don’t get knocked off course in the storms. You bear the image of God. You are one as God is One. Trust it.” And that means living in trust of God who is love, continuing to learn how to love my neighbor and to find ways to serve the human good.

Usually after I receive communion I walk to the table where you can light a candle for your prayer. It’s just a moment but it means a lot to me, a moment of focus and heartfelt attention to the subject of my prayer. This Sunday I think I will light the candle for me. I will seek one thing in these tumultuous days. I will look at the flame and say,

“Remember who you are. Love and serve God and your neighbor in all you do. In gladness. And in singleness of heart.”

Tom Frank, of Asheville, N.C., is University Professor Emeritus at Wake Forest University. This post is republished with the author's permission from his Facebook page.