She cracks a ruler and something somewhere inside of a freckled eight-year-old girl breaks. It’s wooden and marked every quarter inch and it stings, this smacking of wrists, these tears. Lip trembling, notes swimming, I stumble across the wrong ivories. And so it comes again.
“Keep those wrists high. No sagging.” Her voice scrapes with age, gravelly and tired. She waves her ruler towards “Skip to My Lou” propped before keys, prodding me on, but I can’t, don’t, skip. Only trip.
Skin wrinkled like crumpled paper, hair rinsed a shade of red that casts her thinning white hair slightly pink, Mrs. Martin plays the piano the way a flag plays the wind: effortless harmony. And I, obviously, painfully, don’t, a kite snagged in hydro lines.
Her house smells musty, stale, teetering stacks of yellowing music sheets fading, peeling, dull wallpaper somewhere behind the outdated calendars, curling postcards, touristy pictures of a darker crowned, smoother skinned Mrs. Martin smiling beside billboard signs that plasters these ancient walls. Kiwanis Music Festival Certificates, medals and awards punctuate African-violet filled rooms and her memories.
“Practice. You simply must practice more!”
Though her house now slumps vacant on the corner of Turnberry and Queen, her name etched on a slab of polished granite the other end of town, her adage still rings in me more than a quarter of a century later. Skills require practice.
God doesn’t.
I confess: I have yet to practice Dutch farmer’s presence. Embrace it, yes. Passionately so. Fall into it. Long for it. Ravish it. But no, never practice it.
Is it any different with the Lover of our souls?
I have not known God as strings to be plucked, keys waiting to be caressed to life with my attention.
I have met God as alive, breathing, moving, gloriously animate. So I have come to this place, wondering if it may merely be a place of semantics (and yet appreciating how words are our tools to express reality). God is not a thing to be practiced. His presence is everywhere. What of it requires practice? His presence needs no practice on our part for improvement, no human effort to be massaged to life.
One wakes to Him. Rouses to Him, rises to Him, falls in love with Him. Opens eyes and become present to His presence so close His breath falls warm. Surely perceptive Brother Lawrence would agree: We do not practice His presence, per se. We abide in it (1 Jn 2:24).
And yet, practice is necessary. “Living in the presence of the Lord requires practice. It takes practice for us to allow ourselves to see…” writes Ernest Boyer, Jr. God’s presence need not be practiced, He, omnipresent One. Didn’t Brother Lawrence’s compelling life give evidence that it is we who need the practice?
And memories from long ago peek: an alarm strangling interminably, screaming through the dark morning hours, my brother, buried in blankets, head under pillow, blithely sleeping on. He had to practice waking. Setting the alarm during the day, he’d lay on his bed, waiting. And when it shrieked, he bolted. Again and again, he practiced waking. He attuned himself to listen. He cultivated attentiveness.
And so we do: we practice waking from slumber, practice rousing from our sleep walking. We commit to habits of peeling back eyelids and really seeing. Until we live awake, God seen, heard, intimately known.
Early-rising daughter fills still house with piano notes. And I hear again Mrs. Martin’s cracking ruler.
Wake up! Wake up!
Musty and stale, having buried God under it all, I stir.
Father, cause me to become present to Your presence, rousing to embrace You. Make me faithful to the practice part: waking up.
To follow: Further notes on the practice of waking up to God
