Rowing a Conversation Towards God

(Hi! Just to introduce myself quickly... I'm Stephanie Wong, a junior at Wash. U studying English, Writing and Music. Last year, I went through RCIA and got confirmed Catholic on Easter Vigil, and this year I am a sponsor. I'm glad for the opportunity to post and I hope I can be semi-coherent! God bless you and have a Merry Christmas! - Stephanie)

Rowing a Conversation Towards God:

Have you ever had a really blah conversation? A conversation after which you felt tired and confused and, strangely, unsuccessful? A conversation after which you sat down and doubted whether you really learned anything at all from what came out of your or the other person's mouth?

I had one of those today, and I was surprised it turned out that way because I was talking with my father about God, and I thought all things related to God are supposed to be life-giving. We were having a fairly typical discussion in which my Dad emphasized a God of justice who judges a sinful world that needs saving, while I emphasized a God of grace who became incarnate for our sake and treated those around him with compassion and humility.

God is a mystery, so I wasn't worried that we didn't come to any conclusion about who exactly God is. But it did bother me that, by the end of the conversation, both my father and I had adopted a quiet but frustrated attitude of resignation: Well, it's clear that you and I have two very different gods, and there's nothing to be done about that.

But that kind of thinking is fallacious, and so afterwards I felt unsettled because Christianity shouldn't have anything to do with a "your God/ my God" paradigm. My father and I had painted our separate pictures of God, shown them to each other, and then retreated into silence when we saw that the other's was different - a conversation that went nowhere, built no meaning, and led to no greater understanding of the one God for either of us.

I realized what was missing from the conversation when I remembered something from my experience with the Carmelites this summer in Iowa. When I first got there, I wondered why, during the Liturgy of the Hours, we had to recite the psalms switching back and forth across the chapel; the left side would say one stanza of a psalm and then the right side would say the next - back and forth - and it seemed like a lot of arbitrary distraction to me.

But then the prioress explained that it was like a conversation and, therefore, like rowing a boat! The two halves of the chapel were like rowers in a boat pulling us all towards Jesus in front of us, and we needed both sides to work in turn, one after the other, to keep us moving and keep us on course to God.

It's a beautiful metaphor of cooperation and necessity, and it struck me today that all conversations should have that kind of momentum. Instead of staring across the table at my Dad and inwardly marveling that two Christians could have such opposite understandings of God... I should have sat down in the chair next to my dad and laid a cross on the table in front of us. You take up that oar, and I'll take up this one, and together lets paddle towards Him.

We still wouldn't have "figured out" God, but we would have been living more as the Communion of Saints is supposed to. I hope that I can become better at rowing towards God through conversation with other people. Today I didn't even see myself in a boat until the conversation was already sunk, but tomorrow I'd like to hop in the boat and learning how to paddle in sync with others toward God, who is much bigger than I could ever imagine.