Deserts and silence and abandoning control

I'm writing this from an outdoor cafe across the street from Margie's apartment. It's a marble courtyard, surrounded by walls on 2 sides, a blue-roofed awning and cream concrete building on another, and open to views of Amman through trees on the fourth. In the middle there's a small octagonal fountain bubbling away and as I write this the call to prayer is echoing off of the concrete buildings and hills of the city. The call to prayer is beautiful. I've never been in a Muslim culture before, never experienced the sing-song message to stop what I'm doing and pray. This, paired with the minarets that dot the skyline and the hijab worn by the women, is an ever-present reminder that this society is dominated by religion.

From the outside, Islam strikes me as a religion of fear and shame. As a woman, I shouldn't make eye-contact with men on the street (most Muslim women aren't even seen on the streets - aside from going to the markets, they stay home. Men pray in mosques, sit on benches and talk, man shops, drive taxis, smoke sheesha; while women pray at home, cook, clean, and hide). I wear pants and long sleeves and keep my eyes down while men stare and sometimes comment (although much less than on the streets of my neighborhood in Boston).

So many things are forbidden for both men and women - it saddens me to think of a god that is so exacting and merciless that so much time and thought is spent in fear of breaking the rules (yet breaking them anyway - by consuming alcohol, even). A girl that I met through Margie just wrote a blog post about middle eastern men and their power over women - how much of what they do is to control.

Pair all of this with a book Margie gave me to read about desert spirituality - the idea that we find God in the treacherous landscapes of our lives, whether literal or figurative. These places are ones that we cannot control, that bring us to the awareness of our own vast emptiness and God's immense and inaccessible nature. The author, Belden C. Lane, writes, "The dainty and delicate will not thrive well in mountain-desert terrain. A life that is too comfortable or too safe will avoid such landscapes at all cost. Wild landscapes are uncompanionable to the qualmish, to those compulsively anxious to please. They disclaim the false niceties of home, the small lies and pretenses by which an entire life can sometimes be shaped... there the fragile ego loses its props and supporting lines." To me, this spirituality is in direct opposition to the fear and control based faith I see as I wander through Amman and to the comfort and affirmation craving religion we know in America. It's a faith that comes from abandoning every attempt to shape, guide, create, control, describe, and instead silently surrendering.

Lane also says, "words are the fig leaves we continually grasp for in an attempt to clothe our nakedness." We justify, we describe, we rationalize, we talk - we don't listen, we don't surrender our right to shape the situation or control toe outcome and choose to instead sit in silence. Sam Keen writes, "if we cannot name it, we canot control it. Naming gives us power. Hence, silence is impotence, the surrender of control. Control is power, power is safety."

Last night, Margie and I met up with a girl who is traveling through Jordan on a religious press tour. She is Quaker and talked extensively of her interest in peace efforts, of her travels, of her previous teaching experience, and of her dreams of doing big things in the Middle East. She seemed smart, capable, passionate, and driven. Nothing I'm writing here is an attempt to belittle her or her work. I did leave the conversation feeling a bit frustrated, though. So much of it on my part and on hers felt like an attempt to validate ourselves based on what we have done. Because I've been here, I know this; because I've done that, I can tell you this. Being the one who tells you the story gives me the power to shape what you know, how you see me, what I am worth.

When we have abandoned ourselves in God, we are able to throw ourselves without caution into the love of other people simply because we have lost ourselves, our ego, in our love of God and therefore of His people. Lane concludes, "a love that works for justice is wholly uncalculating and indifferent, able to accomplish much because it seeks nothing for itself."

This is convicting stuff when I think of it in the context of relationship with others - how I engage in the work that God has for me to do in the world. What would my relationships look like if I abandoned my attempts to use my words to shape my interactions, others' perceptions of me, to argue my value or to lobby my right to be heard? What if I instead listened to God in silence and for God in the words of others and in return responded humbly to the truth that I hear?