The Music Playing Behind The Door Of Despair

I am so grateful to be part of a Centering Prayer group at St. Timothy’s. For the past few months, we’ve been chewing on Martin Laird’s little book, Into The Silent Land, A Guide To The Christian Practice of Contemplation, and it’s been a delicious “chew”. I have a tendency to skim through lots and lots of books, so taking a chapter a week, sometimes only a half-chapter, has forced me to slow down, chew well, and digest. Now isn’t that a picture for a fast eater like me?!

We’re nearing the end of the book and the past couple of readings have been on our “wounds”. It’s so good: “When the student’s ready, the teacher comes.”

I’ve been thinking of someone I know, and praying for them—and wondering how to get past “the blame game”. We all get caught up in it so often—how do we get past it? How do we turn off the tapes so that transformation can seriously begin?

And this morning, Martin Laird has been my teacher.

“Sometimes…self-loathing masquerades as a compulsive need to blame others for things that go wrong…The problem is that this is just another mind game. Self-loathing is just another video we’ve learned to watch. This is actually an obstacle to the humility required to see straight through our wounds into God. For true humility is the wide open space of self-knowledge that opens onto God…Self-knowledge cannot end in the awareness of our faults and failings. It opens onto God…Perfect humility is meeting the unfathomable love of God, who is the ground of our being…In order for humility to mature it must blossom into self-forgetfulness.”

I know from experience that I blame others because I can’t stand the finger pointing at me. And I forget just how fickle “self-esteem” is.

For several years back in the 90’s, I listened to a guy named Mike Bickle who’s one-stringed guitar constantly played the tune of the Beauty of God. He didn’t encourage us to look at our sin, our guilt or our shame, but taught us instead to behold ourselves in the face of the Beloved. He taught me to see myself in God’s face. Meister Eckhart said, “The eye with which I see god is the same eye with which God sees me.” And Bickle has taught thousands that God sees us as beautiful, kind, good, complete, and whole. I will forever be grateful for his teaching.

But when I forget that teaching, I tend to blame in order not to be seen at all. We all tend to blame—it’s easier than looking through our garbage until we see the face of God—pure unbounded LOVE. And that’s where we discover the truth of ourselves.

Laird quotes part of a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, entitled, “From Failure Up”:

“O God: can a man find you when he lies with his face
downwards
And his nose in the rubble that was his achievement?
Is the music playing behind the door of despair?”

Laird confirms that silence and contemplation are precisely where we learn “to listen, not to confusing shrills of despair, but to ‘the music behind the door of despair.’”

So that’s what I pray for my friend this morning—and for all of us when we are playing the blame game—that we will stop, be quiet, and listen through all the shrill noise of self-loathing, all the way through to the other side, the music of God’s Everlasting and Always Sure Love, the very ground from which we are made.