Knowing the Bridegroom

And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut. Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not. (Matt 25:10-12)

So it's been awhile since I've written a more serious entry, for reasons which should be obvious. But since my mind insists on formatting every thought I have into a blog entry, I guess I better recommit myself to the blogosphere.

One thing that I realized on my study abroad trip was the metaphors in the scriptures are anything but accidental. For one of our devotionals in England, I wrote a talk on why the scriptures refer to Christ as the light of the world. The implications of that metaphor are astounding to me. (I plan on revising that talk over the next few days to post on Blogger of Jared. Keep an eye out for it.) But the metaphor that's been snagging my mind lately is Christ as the bridegroom and ourselves as the bride, again for obvious reasons.

The lesson in Relief Society this week was "Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me" from the Spencer W. Kimball manual. Our discussion veered off on the interesting tangent of how we can grow to love God more. As we listed all the typical answers, it struck me how apt it is to compare our relationship with Christ or God to a marriage. It seems from my limited experience that there are two ways we spend time with a spouse. The first is the process of life--buying groceries, looking over the weekly calendar, picking each other up from work, running errands, getting stuff done. The second is the specially set-aside time, time we make away from the work-a-day mill to spend with each other, the weekly dates the Church so frequently councils us toward. One isn't better than the other; both are necessary for a healthy relationship.

How well these two elements apply to our relationship with God! God is to be part of our everyday actions. We must be listening to spiritual promptings and doing the 'errands' of our spiritual lives--our scripture reading, our prayers--in His presence. Yet equally important is setting aside weekly time to meet with God, to commune together without an agenda of getting things done, just listening and talking and repairing our relationship.

How many of us can say we set aside time for a weekly 'date' with God, though? In my life at least, there's often much emphasis on relying on Him in my daily actions--the Spirit is my support through the day--and not enough of simply getting to know Him better. Much of my time with God seems about incidental convenience. Blogging time double-counts as pondering time. Writing in my journal is following the prophets as well as creating material for my honors thesis project. I can learn all sorts of spiritual things while also getting paid to work on the footnotes for the next volume of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley. (Now they pay me to be obsessed with him. Yay!)

I'm not saying such double-counting is bad. God's presence should permeate our lives like light. But it gets to be a problem when I have a hard time thinking of that last time I did something to commune with God without the ulterior motivation of being productive elsewhere. That kind of relationship is exhausting. When George and I went through a few days doing nothing but working and planning wedding stuff, my ability to give and feel love was severely impaired. Without downtime in any relationship, you simply forget why you are doing things. And lack of downtime in my relationship with God leads me to forget why I push through the 'errands' of spirituality.

Another question is this: what do you do with one-on-one time with God? Unfortunately, I can't take God down to the Malt Shoppe for two-for-one Mondays. For me, the answer to alone time with God is prayer. At FHE, we discussed Elder Scott's conference talk on prayer, and this phrase from the "How Should You Pray?" section stuck out to me:

Don’t worry about your clumsily expressed feelings. Just talk to your compassionate, understanding Father. You are His precious child whom He loves perfectly and wants to help. As you pray, recognize that Father in Heaven is near and He is listening.

That description of open communication, without worry about clumsy phrases or entertaining the listener, is exactly the type of communication that ought to exist between spouses. That willingness to say whatever comes to mind, to talk about anything, everything, nothing, is exactly the way I feel when I talk with George. Prayer ought to be the kind of talk that comes of lying in a hammock with someone you love, staring at sky through the tangled leaves, where all life suddenly comes open, and in that instant you can fix problems that have taken years to form, or doing anything really. It's so vast yet personal--overwhelming to me.

On Coincidences and Prayer

In response to Ben's post on prayer:

Woah, I'm totally freaked out by this post. Not because you're marriage hungry (honestly, anyone who's been reading your blog for more than a month would know that) but because I had this exact conversation on the tube (read: subway) with my study abroad group after seeing the play A Matter of Life and Death at the National Theatre. (Yes, you should be jealous. Excellent play.) Anyway, it was the same conversation--minus some of the marriage bits--which wouldn't be so weird except that I also pulled out Christ's prayer in the garden as an example of how we can pray for things we want and still pray in faith. Creepy. Maybe we've been reading each other's ideas too much, and our minds have started to work the same way. Gah!

But on a more serious note, I think that trying to simplify prayer down to one aspect is always too, well, simple. I try not to think so much about what I should be praying for and instead just use it as a chance to talk with God.

Let's use the very apt metaphor of being out on a date. If you're always thinking about what you should or shouldn't be saying, it really undermines your ability to get closer to the other person. Everything feels contrived and second-guessed, and in the end, you end up with a relationship with your philosophy of what pleases the other person, not with the person themselves. Whereas if you simply speak your mind, you'll get to know each other for who you are, not who you picture each other to be.

I've started to take the same approach with prayer. I don't worry about how it's changing me or how I should be praying. I simply talk with God as I would to anyone else about my day--what I thought about things, what I think I did well or not, what I wish had happened differently, what I'm worried about--and trust that by actually just talking with God it is changing me. And as far as I can tell, it's working because I feel closer to God this way than I ever did when I was worrying about what I should be praying about.

This debate on prayer changing reality (or not) is much the same as the dilemma of omniscience and agency--very difficult to come to conclusions on, people have been arguing about it for centuries, yet the answer really has little impact on how you live your life. You must still continue to make choices, and in this case, we are commanded to pray. There are multitudes of different things we're instructed to pray for; I find it hard to believe we can simplify them all down into one category. How about we just rely on the Spirit and our relationship with God to tell us what to pray about, hmm? Just talk. Really.

(And no, I'm not back from England yet. Don't bother me to post more stuff. I will. When I'm done with London. And Paris.)