Unless you’re careful, being a minister can give you “altar burn” from overexposure to religious associations. It’s unhealthy being around piety all the time. There is a stained-glass pallor about the people you meet. When they open their mouths to talk, you see little balloons coming out with all the print in Old English. Sometimes you want to preach in Chinese, or some other language nobody will understand, and say scandalous things while smiling like an archbishop.
Whenever that feeling gets too strong, I know I need a vacation from God. I need to be immersed in a world where the signs aren’t all printed in Old English and people’s hands aren’t all folded primly in prayer. I need a freshness that will revive my religion-asphyxiated soul.
Sometimes I need to be in a large city where I don’t know anybody and nobody knows me, where I can walk and gawk and be overwhelmed by the strangeness and the immensity of everything. I love to walk in strange places, see people I have never seen before and will never see again, smell the exotic smells, and feel totally lost. Something about it restores my being.
One winter night in the city of Kyoto, Japan, I took a bus bound for the center of town and got off when my fare expired. I had no idea where I was or how to get back to my hotel, for all the signs were in Japanese. Then the most tremendous snowflakes began to fall-the size of quarters and half dollars. Everyone on the streets looked like a walking snowman. It was exhilarating!
At other times I feel the need to be on a wide expanse of beach somewhere, listening to the cadence of the ocean and feeling the sun on my body.
There are other places to get away to: a cabin in the mountains, a good art museum, a movie, a walk in the woods, a Graham Greene novel. They all afford a certain surcease from the God-thing in my life, however brief or pedestrian.
But the truth is, as any child would point out, I’m not really getting away from God. I’m only walking out of my stale version of God, my limited number of settings for seeing God. God himself easily transcends my tired images of him, my habit of assigning him to this or that.
He is like the covey of birds someone described in a scene in France during World War I. Out of the colorful twilight, a shell whistled overhead, striking a country church silhouetted against the sky. At the deafening sound of the explosion, the birds flew up and disappeared. For a few moments, splinters and pieces of wood rained on the earth. Then it was quiet, and the birds settled down again as if nothing had happened. So God returns to his perch when we’ve had our little explosions. We haven’t gotten away from him. He is there, wherever we go.
That’s what the psalmist said, isn’t it? “If I climb up to heaven; thou art there. If I make my bed in Sheol, again I find thee. If I take my flight to the frontiers of the morning or dwell at the limit of the western sea, even there thy hand will meet me and thy right hand will hold me fast” (Ps. 139:8-10).
There isn’t any getting away from God. Not really. All there is is getting away from our own deadening routines, getting to somewhere new, to some strange country of the mind where our perception is not jaded and we are able to see everything more clearly. Even God.
-John Killinger
First Congregational Church
Los Angeles, California
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
