Prayer is intimacy of the spirit.
 

Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe

that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Mark 11:24

Dear Me,

The chief difficulty about writing to my former self is determining who that self really was and what he thought and believed—he had the same problem.  A secondary difficulty is determining the age of the self I address. After some thought, I have chosen my self as he was two or three years into his time in San Francisco. Early twenties, with an apartment, alone, working on a master’s and looking for work and living in a city whose population seemed mostly to be refugees from other parts of the country.

Spiritually and emotionally, he had cut his ties from family and church and lived in a continual exploration of ideas and people foreign to his youthful self. He went to a George Wallace rally, ran the Noe Valley branch of a whole foods distribution collective, and met a young, ambitious, but at that time hapless politician named Diane Feinstein. He shared a meal with a sad group of Communist Party members, whom he thereafter considered a Leftist branch of the Amish.

He had a girlfriend he did not love and was writing a novel he did not like, and as with many explorers, the more he saw, the less he knew. In fact, he was a lousy explorer because he did not like getting lost.

He was an only child: naïve, sheltered, inexperienced, lonely, and unhappy. He’d grown up in the Presbyterian Church, and that church had been a lifeline. He sang in its choir, went on trips and to camps and made friends, many of those closer than the ones he made at school. Until his senior year, he was pretty much a nobody in high school, but from eighth grade, he was a somebody in the church.

So, I am choosing the point where my younger self had pulled up his anchors and sailed, he knew not where. The future seemed beyond the horizon.

To this person, first, a promise: I will not treat you as a foil, a comically misguided and inadequate clown I shrugged off when I became, by God’s grace, my amazing and sensible current self. You were wandering, but that was not a bad thing: you were testing and holding fast to what you felt was good. The times were fermenting, and you were at the center of that ferment, occasionally drinking some really lousy moonshine and wishing you could find a better brew.

I admire your tenacity—your ability to forge through many failures without giving up. Your love of nature. Your openness to people and ideas. And your poverty. That’s what Dad most admired and Mom worried about–your willingness to live without. I’m glad that you did not denounce your faith, though you set it aside. Several of your friends were almost but not entirely ex-Catholics. At the time, you considered that a denomination: ex-Catholicism.

But there is also a lot I don’t admire. Too often, your explorations amount to a kind of tourism: touching this or that idea or person or activity without ever taking the time to understand. Even that admirable poverty was a willingness to do without. You weren’t looking for a foundation, you were learning to surf on sand and complaining when you could not keep your balance. Some people had trouble figuring you out, and I suspect that was because you didn’t want them to.

We are sitting across from each other at one of the rickety tables in the Meat Market Coffeehouse, being served Mexican chocolate by a girl whose face is a road atlas of scars from an accident where her face hit the windshield. My message to you: take more chances, not less. Engage more. Hurt more.

If God seems distant, even absent, that may be because you are distant from yourself. You indict him for evil and pain, but you don’t confront those evils or seek to ease that pain. If you want to understand, you have to be involved. Get involved. You may make a lot of mistakes. Make them. You will hurt more, and may hurt other people, unintentionally, I hope. You may even think of yourself as a bad person. Do it anyway. Martin Luther advised us to “sin boldly.” That seems wrongheaded, but it isn’t. You are a sinner and always will be. Stop denying it and stop backing off from it. Be yourself as boldly and sincerely as you can.

For some, constant engagement is just a messy way of being a tourist, and even more confusing.  If you haven’t yet the tools to build a firm foundation, at least be honest. About yourself, about others, about your beef with God. Pretense leads to pretension, and pretension is just egotism in fancy clothes. Care about what you really care about. Take time to know what you think you know. Act when it, whatever it is, really matters to you. Don’t repeat your mistakes. That’s foundation enough, for now. It may shift from time to time, but don’t worry. There’s no building code.

Seek to be good, don’t seek to be nice. Good people engage with the world; nice people try to keep it at bay.

And if you honestly do have a beef with God, challenge Him, wrestle with Him. Your favorite book of the Bible right now is Job. Okay, treat God as Job did. Demand answers. Don’t listen to comforters. And when He speaks out of the whirlwind you have made of your life, listen.

You’ve got a copy of the Bible. Read it. Forget the Old Testament, for now, read the gospels, over and over. Read the Epistles at least once, treating them not as a set of prescriptions, but as a window to the gospels. Find a pastor who enjoys conflict—there aren’t a lot of them, but they aren’t rare. Wear him or her out with your concerns.

Spiritually, stop acting like a child who wants his parent to behave better, and start acting like a man.

You’ve seen real love and real pain. You had a Jewish friend named Stan, who was killed bicycling in Italy when a car veered into the bike lane. Iris, the love of his life, was distraught, and you were and are even now filled with a strange admiration for her grief. It is real. It is love tearing the sky to pieces in its anger. When she addresses God, it is with absolute fury, as if God had been driving the car.

Open yourself to feeling and expressing love that deeply. Love and generosity and hope and creativity are not just words, they are acts. Caring is not a cure. It doesn’t bring back the dead, but it allows you to see, a little more clearly, through windows the world has darkened.

You want intimacy? Pray. Not thinking about that kind of intimacy? Pray anyway. Prayer is intimacy of the spirit. As my friend Rev. Jeff puts it—into me you see. Open yourself up to God, even if it seems absurd. Lots of your life is absurd. So what? In time, you will find intimacy, and it will bring regret. Regret is the source of the words I am now speaking to you. It isn’t awful as long as you don’t wallow in it. It’s just the insight of a chastened heart.

Love will come, eventually, and you will drive twenty hours through snow, rain and fog, navigating your way around bridges that have washed away, to express it. But that’s later, and it shouldn’t be. Why wait?

Tell your parents you love them and why. Believe it or not, they really don’t know. Tell your friends why they are special. They don’t know either.  Learn more about the nature you so frequently walk through. Care.

Be willing to live in the suspended animation of inklings of God and your fellow humans and the world around you, while admitting you don’t know a damned thing. That is true intimacy. And it’s something you have to learn over and over again.

You will reach a destination, many destinations, and know you are there, wherever there is, but don’t ever stop searching. God and His creation are infinite and eternal, and inexhaustible.

Talk soon,

Richard