I was visiting the monastery chapel for Michaelmas today. On major feast days like this, everyone is invited to stick around for dinner and fellowship in the undercroft after the celebration of the Eucharist. Monastery food is always delicious, so I did.
My seat neighbor struck up a conversation, which eventually led to a very meta diversion about dinners at the monastery, which eventually led to me saying something out loud that I had never really noticed before: I always look forward to silent meals with the brothers in the refectory, because they give me time to slow down and notice things. I recalled often sitting in the same place, always looking out the same window at the same tree, noticing its sprouts in the spring and its bare branches in the winter.
I felt like I had hit on something important with that memory, so I thought on it some more.
Ever since I came back to faith, I've taken divine simplicity pretty much for granted. This is the idea that "God is […] identical to [her] attributes", that "goodness, truth, and eternity are identical to God's being." Put another way, she just is these things. With some effort that I will hand-wave away in this post, it follows that she doesn't change. A God whose love we can't rely on, or who might just stop sustaining our existence at any time, doesn't seem like the God the New Testament describes. Certainly such a God wouldn't be perfect goodness, at least not as I understand goodness.
Change is something we do, perhaps in response to God, but still surely human. (Where God does seem to change her mind in e.g. the Old Testament, perhaps it's just the author's perception of God that changes…?)
One of my favorite collects from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer embodies this quite well. We ask for God's presence, "so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest in your eternal changelessness." Almost all of the Compline liturgy feels like it's written or chosen to inspire stillness and peace, and this prayer is no exception. The idea that we can rely on God's promises, that God is truly never changing, is a comforting one indeed. Much of my relationship to God is built on this idea.
Isn't it funny, then, that God sees fit to reveal herself through and in the changes in our lives? This happens awfully frequently to me. She was especially present for me at difficult points in my gender transition. I see her in the full moon, and find her again if I let myself feel wonder at how it keeps coming back every month. I find her every time I travel to a different city, every time I visit a new church building, every time I ring in a tower I haven't felt before. And of course, a decade after setting aside my childhood faith, I found her anew when I embraced the Anglican tradition.
God is always present; I just wouldn't notice her if it weren't for the changes. I encounter her in these big changes only in similarly broad generalities, though. She is present, she is good, she is love. But what that really means is often hard to tell.
It stands to reason that maybe we can become more intimate with God by encountering her in more subtle changes. And that brings us back to that silent meal in the refectory.
I find God in the seasons, too. She's there in the little ways that the tree changes every time I see it through the window. I see her in the way the twilight slowly creeps more and more into the sky every time I leave the monastery chapel after evening prayer. Her beauty shines through the stained glass, in the way the light dances through the windows just a bit differently after every Sunday evensong.
Can you see her in the flickering of a candle flame? Can you hear her in the changing period of a cicada's hum? In the way a different combination of voices sounds chanting Compline, even when all the words are the same? Sometimes I do.
What would we find if we had the space to consistently give these little things our full attention?
What do you learn about God when the rhythm of your life is based around a vow of stability and a consistent pattern of prayer, and stays that way over years and decades? What slight differences might you hear when you pray the psalms in the same cycles over and over again with the same people, and what is God saying through them? What do you see when the noise of the changes in your life isn't as loud, when the differences you are attuned to are so subtle?
I am perpetually amazed that some folks have made it their life's work to find out. I am often moved — sometimes overwhelmed! — by the glimpses I get of that work, and I'm grateful beyond words that I get to share in it even just in this small way.
What I've learned from these experiences, though, is that maybe not everything one learns about God through these subtle changes can be distilled into words written in a blog post or spoken in a homily. And that makes me feel a bit lost, honestly! God beckons me closer, but I'm only rarely able to hear what she is trying to say through the noise of the world. How does it feel to hear her clearly over a lifetime? More and more often now, I find myself wondering what it must be like to find out.
My friend Laurel recently wrote about how "we find God in our questions". They write about how they find God "in the mystery, in the liminal, the not-sure and the tentative." And I suppose the mystery and the tentative is what I'm wrestling with, indeed. A small comfort, at least, that all this wondering is holy just because it involves questions I keep coming back to; that God is present in the questions, too; that really all I have to do is keep asking and I will find what I am looking for.