Boldness in Regard to Heaven

I read an article recently that left me stunned. Beiden C. Lane manages to put into breathtakingly beautiful words a side of God that we all too often step away from - He loves us with a passion, and longs to be loved back in the same way: "Israel's God longs to be deeply desired by God's people—a God taking joy in aggressive lovers."

See Hosea 2:14-20, for instance:

¹⁴ “Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
^{(...) 16} “And in that day, declares the Lord, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My Baal.’ ¹⁷ For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more. (...) I will make you lie down in safety. ¹⁹ And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. ²⁰ I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord."

And from this place of deeply knowing the God who is our bridegroom and husband, we can call out to Him with an intimacy and fervour that is lacking otherwise. Just like Jesus himself -

"In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence." Hebrews 5:7

Lane states that "boldness in prayer (...) exhibits a robust faith." This boldness is what we need in the face of suffering, when we don't know which way to go because we are stuck and swamped over by grief and desperation. Then, like the prophets and many of God's men and women in the Bible, we can argue with God - not a distant and removed God, but with a God who takes any attack on His Holy Ones personally:

"There is a shockingly profound access to God's inner life that is revealed in the stories growing out of this tradition of prayer rooted in prophetic insight. As the following examples suggest, God is so vulnerable to the pleas of God's children as to need to be protected from divine graciousness. God so agonizes over behaving justly toward God's people as to open the divine will to their scrutiny. God so exults in God's law as to rejoice even when the people quote it against God. These metaphors offer an imaginative reconnaisance of the divine interiority. They disclose a God rich in pathos."

We can remind God of His promises in our prayers, and hold Him accountable towards them when we find ourselves oppressed!

"Hutzpa [= 'arguing with God'] in prayer can result only from a prolonged and painful look on unrelieved suffering. Yet, there is a comfortable triumphalism that too often has characterized the common prayer of enculturated Christianity. It knows very little of a costly sharing in the sufferings of Christ. It lacks that passionate longing and impatience for the reign of God that frequently marks the churches of the oppressed. Secure in its own distance from suffering, it finds unnecessary any agonized appeal for God's promised redemption. It rests content with a reign half-realized, a resurrection not yet complete. Its God, therefore, can remain one-dimensional, immovable, unembroiled in pathos."

This arguing does not have to be well-phrased, deeply thought-through, and fully understandable. When we really face suffering, and long for God's reign in it, we can call out to Him as the one closest to our hearts and minds.

"The language of prayer discussed here is a limit-language, spoken from the edge of the abyss. Incapable of the secure certainty of prose, it mumbles half-words— lapses into a grief eased only by story. The theologian is here displaced by the poet. Perhaps that must always be the case when ordinary language succumbs to the enormity of existence."

And so, we can eventually enter into a relationship with Him that John Donne describes in a - for some - outrageous poem. May we all know Him so intimately, and depend on Him so fully!

"Batter my heart, three-personed God.
Take me to You, imprison me, for I,

Except You enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me."

(quotes from "Hutzpa K'lapei Shamaya: A Christian Response to the Jewish Tradition of Arguing with God" by Beiden C. Lane)