Is Anybody Listening

One morning a few years back I was sitting quietly by our daughter’s pool in southern California. A hummingbird, undisturbed by my presence, was darting through the air, hovering and then leaping soundlessly from bush to bush nearby. The sky was cloudless and grew more brilliantly blue as the light slowly rose. Shafts of sunlight began to make their way through dense foliage to the east. Morning glories on the trellis by the pool added splashes of rich violet against the background of dark wood and deep green as the sun began to play on them.

As I sat contentedly reflecting, a disturbing thought struck me: What if all this beautiful serenity were indifferent to me? What if there were nothing personal back of it, no meaning reaching toward me through it? What if my sense of peace with the cosmos were nothing more than my “luck of the draw” at the moment?

What if, instead, I were caught by that same rising sun, but lost in the desert at the U.S. border south of me after a clandestine night crossing? The same still beauty and cloudless sky, but indifferent, and this time, because of my different “luck”, lethal.

I suspect that you have asked some version of this question, whether you share my faith or not. It is a good one and goes directly to the center of things. Either there is somebody there or there isn’t. Either everything, including us and our dreams, is in the final analysis no more than “stuff” in various configurations. Or, standing above the cosmos and engaging us through it is a person.

Jesus introduces us the second option in words he prayed the night before he was killed. Here they are:

Father, I desire that they [his disciples and, by extension, people like us] . . . may be with me where I am. (John 17:24)

These words struck me when I first encountered them. They invited me to contemplate that prayer isn’t my invention. It is, rather, something I get to join in on. When I pray, I am not trying to impose personalness upon a fundamentally indifferent universe. I am, rather, responding to a person who has been praying for me all along.

I find this idea consoling because I am not very good at praying. Nor am I always clear on what it accomplishes (answers are sometimes a long time coming, or they seem never to come, or they come in unexpected, or even undesired, ways). No matter. Prayer is worth attempting because it puts me in touch with a person who is there, above it all, and who actually desires my company (that’s the word Jesus uses).

The thought that Jesus desires people is remarkable, even shocking. It suggests that he doesn’t just love people, but that he actually likes them, the way I like my wife. He wants us around. He perks up at the sound of our voices. He is interested in what we have to say, in how we are feeling, in what delights us, in what upsets and confuses us.

I find this hard to believe sometimes, especially since I am so often indifferent to him. But this is the story that Jesus repeatedly tells us.

The cosmos is personal. More than that, it is welcoming.