Sympathetic Resonance

Sympathetic Resonance--June 19, 2017

"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." [Romans 8:26-27]

I played the string bass for the orchestra in high school and college, that most monstrously large of the stringed instruments.  And even though playing the bass also entails a fair amount of awkward schlepping of said instrument, one of the coolest things about playing the bass (which is essentially a gargantuan curved wooden box with thick metal strings on one side) is the way you can feel the pitch, as the strings vibrate. 

And I mean literally feeling it--not just hearing notes in your ears or tapping along to a rhythm with your feet, but feeling the vibration of a pitch as it reverberates through the soundbox of the double-bass and into the limbs and body of the person playing it.  Unlike, say, a violin or viola, that is held in place while you play it with a plastic chin rest mounted to the instrument and which absorbs and dampens the vibrations before they enter the musician's body, a bass just passes the energy of those sound waves right into the bassist's hands, and even the whole side of your body as the instrument rests against you while you play.  As you drag the rosin-coated horse hairs of the bow across those thick metal-wound strings, you get a pitch that makes the whole instrument shake with intensity. 

But I also learned you can get the strings of your double-bass to vibrate even when you aren't playing.  Sometimes the strings on your bass will reverberate just because the bassist next to you is playing his or her behemoth instrument.  You can feel it, even if you are simply holding it upright, if someone around you is playing their bass and hits a pitch that matches one of your strings.   It's a phenomenon called "sympathetic resonance," and the gist is that if you get one thing vibrating at a certain frequency, other things in the immediate area that are tuned to the same pitch will start to resonate, too, because the traveling sound waves start them moving, too, even if less intensely.  Now, if the person next to you is in tune, and you are not, your string may not feel the vibrations, so there is good reason to want to adjust your instrument to be in tune with the others around you, so that you can feel the resonance. This happens other instruments, too--with anybody in the string section, or even with two tuning forks that are near by each other, for that matter--but you can feel it and observe it best with a super-sized instrument like a string bass.  At least I'll say, in my life story, I learned about this cool phenomenon of practical physics not in a lab or classroom, but in our high school auditorium where the orchestra practiced.  I learned--and could literally feel--the way one object can cause another to resonate even if they are not touching... and I could feel the reverberations all the way down into my own body.

Well, if for a moment you can put yourself there as an awkward high school string player, then I'll ask you to consider that maybe the key to the Christian practice of praying (no pun intended on that "key" thing... well, maybe a little) is this idea of sympathetic resonance--the idea that it is possible to adjust your tuning so that you are now "in tune" with both the people right around you and the definitive "A-440" of the concertmaster's opening pitch.  Despite the fact that we routinely talk about prayer like it is a matter of aiming the right "magic words" up at a magic genie in the sky, the apostle Paul offers this rather different picture here in his letter to the Romans.   You won't hear Paul talking here about wish-lists like God is some celestial Amazon.com, and you won't hear Paul offer any formula for how to get the "right" words to pray.  (Take note of this--again, no pun intended--before buying any books that claim to offer "more effective prayers" or "the right wording to get God to answer your prayers" or whatever other nonsense they are peddling.)  Here in these verses from Romans, Paul dares us to imagine prayer as less about "me-giving-God-a-to-do-list-as-though-God-were-a-being-that-is-somehow-all-powerful-but-doesn't-know-that-neighbor-is-sick" and more like prayer is about creating sympathetic resonance of the soul.  That is, praying is about the intentional surrender of our personal tuning pegs so that the Spirit can make us resonate with the character of the Reign of God.  Praying does something to realign us, our deepest selves, as much as it may change things in the world around us.

And as a case in point, Paul offers those situations when our words fail.  And, let's be totally honest here, there are indeed those times when we don't know what to pray anymore.  There are days, maybe long seasons or years, where we just don't know how to put the need, the ache, into words.  There comes a point, doesn't there, when someone you love is sick and suffering, and you don't know whether it is "right" to pray for them to keep suffering like that (the way modern medicine can sometimes prolong death as much as it extends life) or for their suffering to be over.  Somehow none of those words seem right.  There are times when we don't know what to say about war and violence, other than the obvious wish for it to stop.  But so often, our understanding of prayer is that we have to come up with the right English words to give God direction about what we think God ought to do to fix things... with the limited perspective we bring... and with our short-sighted timetables. 

Take the war in Syria right now--I have no idea what would "fix" that mess, that violence, that devastation--I only have a profound heartache that this endless quagmire keeps on going while more and more people are displaced, maimed, or killed, and more little boys and girls find themselves dazed, distraught, and dust-covered sitting in ambulances like that iconic image of the little boy we all saw on the news a while back.  I have no good words to direct the divine, only the ache, only the awareness of the pain, and all I can do is hold that image of that boy up to the sky and say, "This is not right."  Those words are not much of a direction, if prayer is primarily supposed to be giving God directions (the way we foolishly and overconfidently think it sometimes).

Or take the friend, the relative, or the loved one, you know whose heart is broken with despair, depression, or grief.  I suppose you could cobble together words like, "Make them feel happy again," or "Fix them, God..." but in all honesty, sometimes the hurt of life in a world full of death is inescapable.  Sometimes you just have to be sad for a while, and there is no drug, no distraction, no busy-ness, no project to occupy the mind, that can be plunked down from heaven to make it go away.   When those we love hurt, sometimes there are clear things we identify as "solutions" that someone needs to try... and sometimes there are no fixes, only more salt in the wound.  Sometimes even the sentence, "I'm praying for you" causes more hurt than good, when it comes off as "You are pitiable and incapable of coping... but I have magic holy words that you must not have..."  Try as we might to find good words, sometimes there simply are no good words.

In those times (and there are surely many more instances--maybe far more than we realize), Paul doesn't advise the followers of Jesus to give up praying, just because there are no good words.  But rather, Paul pulls back the curtain a bit and says, "Maybe it's not even about getting the words right..." Paul is convinced that praying is less like giving God directions the way you speak commands to your iPhone's "Siri" feature to give you the weather report or recite your calendar to you, and more like surrendering our instruments to be put in tune... so that they will resonate with the will and way of the living Spirit.  Praying opens ourselves up to let the Spirit bring us into harmony, instead of being cut off in our own little sectional and absorbed with ourselves.  Praying doesn't have to have "right" words because the Spirit is able to take our clunky, awkward, well-intentioned-perhaps-but-still-insufficient words, and to make us resonate in tune with the God who loves rightly.  And if my own self-interested mindset keeps me lobbing off prayers like, "Give me a good parking space, help me make more money, and make my favorite team win their next game," the Spirit has a way of helping us to hear that we are not in tune with God's A-440 pitch.  The Spirit has a way of helping us to see and to feel when we are not resonating... and not only that, but to help turn the pegs so that we become more and more in-tune with the things that really matter in the Reign of God.

There is an old line of Frederick Buechner's about how daring a thing it really is to pray and to allow the Spirit to go banging around in our hearts.   Because in a sense, once we have let go of the idolatrous way of prayer-as-heavenly-take-out-order, we will see that all prayer is, in a sense, about mindfully offering ourselves up to be re-aligned with the character of the Reign of God.  In a sense, all prayer then becomes variations on the them of "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth."  Buechner writes about those words from the Lord's Prayer:

"It takes guts to pray it at all. We can pray it in the unthinking and perfunctory way we usually do only by disregarding what we are saying. "Thy will be done" is what we are saying. That is the climax of the first half of the prayer. We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we want, but what God wants.... And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? What would stand and what would fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the hell out? Which if any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human beings are would prove to be more or less on the mark and which would turn out to be phony as three-dollar bills? Boldness indeed. To speak those words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze."

To pray, then, is not to present God with MY list of wishes--no, that is magic-genie thinking of the worst kind.  To pray is to offer up our instruments, as it were, and to ask for the whole orchestra to be put in tune--so that we there will be sympathetic resonance across the stage, and all creation itself will reverberate with the pitch that puts us in harmony.  It is to ask not only for injustices to be put right "out there" but also to invite God to compel me to see where there is injustice and disharmonious self-centeredness "in here" in my soul's soundbox, too.  It is not merely to give God a prescription for what I think should happen to OTHER people (which God, by the Spirit, is free to take or ignore), but to face the very real likelihood that I myself am out of tune and need to be brought back into resonance.

Today, then, the Spirit is moving us... to pray.  Not in the mechanistic mindset of "Enough-people-have-to-believe-and-clap-or-else-Tinker-Bell-will-die" picture of prayer, but in the sense that praying is a practice that lets the tuning pegs of our souls turn, so that we can be changed, too, and so that all of creation can be brought back in tune.  And if we dare to take the time, even if it looks like a total waste of time to the watching world, to be moved to prayer that looks like surrender of our instrument, we will find that everything--ourselves included--is changed.  We will find the Spirit helping our ears to hear where we are out of tune, and helping our deepest selves to feel again the sympathetic resonance of being in tune with the Reign of God and the Way of Jesus.

Lord God, we have no good words of our own today... your kingdom come... your will be done... take these instruments of ours, and put them in tune.