Risk

However you’ve followed this journey, if you’ve reached this devotion you’re likely right at or just past the halfway point. If you just completed Presence, you could approach this one by imagining that your abiding with God’s absence hasn’t yet been met with God’s arrival. Try to stay in that space of waiting to see what possibilities for risk arise.

It’s more likely you’ve come here from the Fear devotion, though. And for me, at least, trying to transgress fear with risk is probably the hardest move God could ask me to make.

And there are certainly a lot of options in the theological traditions that can help me avoid making it.

For one, I could deny that God is terrifying at all. God is love. The perfect progressive prooftext: true love casts out fear. We’re smart enough to know we’ve moved past Calvin. Or, on the other side of the liberal/conservative divide: we can redistribute the fear — I can be less scared of God’s judgment if I direct it towards others. Or even romanticize it: becoming so enamoured with my fear that I block all the ways God might come to me as tender.

All these impulses have problems. By which I mean that all of them have the potential to keep us from encountering God. And encounter is what we’re looking for here.

I want to pick up Mary’s story that I talked about in the Fear devotion. Casting about for how to transgress her version of fear in the face of God, I initially thought about writing this devotion on consent. But that felt a little too on the nose for our current climate. And besides, I’ve written about Mary’s consent elsewhere.

So, then I got tempted to focus this one on trust – because trust just seems like a natural antidote to fear.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the willingness to risk happens prior to consent or to trust. I’m always risking some part of myself when I consent to another. Trust requires first risking the possibility that someone isn’t trustworthy at all.

Before Mary could consent to God or trust God, she had to take a risk. Before I can consent to God in prayer or trust that God won’t abandon me once we meet there, I have to take a risk as well.

What that risk looks like will be different for each of us.

For me, though…it’s all about praise and worship music. No really 🙂

Back when I was a charismatic Evangelical, worship was ecstatic. Contrary to popular belief about Evangelicals, it was even erotic. I’d lose myself in the build, the peak and the dénouement of a song that seemed to go on forever. Worship music opened out onto eternity. It was a profound act of consenting to and trusting in God’s wild presence.

Then I went to Divinity School and learned all the ways those songs are theological ‘problematic’. So I learned new songs. More inclusive songs. Songs that sung of a kinder, gentler God. Really great songs that I know move a lot of people’s hearts (though probably not their bodies). But that didn’t move mine.

Because, while those songs might not have been theological problematic, I did find them theologically lacking. Their God was less personal, less intimately intertwined with all I do and all I am. The songs didn’t contain a beat or drive that would stir my desire for the Divine. They contained my praise to deliver it to God, which is just fine. But they didn’t unleash my praise upon God. They didn’t undo me, pour me out and drench God with what flowed.

Of course debates around music in churches are dangerous territories to tread! And I’m not actually saying one style of music is better than another. More so, I’m saying that this one kind — evangelical praise and worship — requires me to risk being vulnerable more than traditional hymnody does. So that’s the kind that scares me.

That might sound silly to you – they’re just songs. But it feels really risky to me.

And precisely because they’re my site of risk, when I take that risk I see Jesus. When I let loose with my body and my voice and sing my desire into the rafters — no matter who sees me do it — when I take that risk, I see Jesus.

That’s my risk. I don’t know what yours is, but as the meditations and activities draw a circle for sacred risk in this devotion, I hope you’ll get some insight into what hovers at the edges of your own fear.

Once you’ve completed this devotion,  you’re likely heading to the sacred spaces of Certainty or Doubt. Though of course perhaps somewhere else entirely… So maybe ask yourself what feels like the riskier move for you. Which one lures you towards something that frightens you but where God might be waiting.