Driverless – Mary-Anne Rulfs
As someone who enjoys words and language, I’m often intrigued by the words we choose to describe our religious or spiritual practices or experiences. And I have a theory … if we can’t use words that other people would understand – people outside our particular tradition – then do we really understand what we’re trying to say? Perhaps we’re just repeating what we hear our religious gurus say, rather than owning it deep down. I call this kind of language ‘Christianese’. We even develop our own local dialects!
That said, I think we all use this kind of language from time to time. Church communities seem to naturally fall into this way of speaking, although some more than others.
I also notice that sometimes we say things we haven’t completely thought through. I remember as a young Christian, people would describe their experience of becoming a Christian as handing over the steering wheel of their life to God.
Really? Is that what God invites us to do? When I read the gospels I hear God’s invitation to us couched in terms of active responses about the way we choose to live – verbs like love, repent (a biblical word that means something like to ‘turn around’ from living selfishly to living God’s way of love), forgive, listen, say, come and go. We get to choose whether we live this way! We’re not passively coming along for the ride that is our life!
Having recently journeyed through the season of Advent and Christmas, and having paid attention to the possibilities of Epiphany, (religious word meaning those bursts of God-light and revelation in our lives), I wonder whether picturing God as the driver of our lives misses the point.
Perhaps we are more like a driverless car …
Brad and I recently had the opportunity to travel in a driverless car in LA. It was one of the most surreal experiences of my life! (No doubt for our grandchildren it will become the norm.)
Hopping into a vehicle where the door could only be opened via an app on our phone, where there was a steering wheel at the driver’s seat but no human driver, where our destination was already logged into the satnav, instructions for belting up were given by an automated voice, and calming ‘whale music’ played softly throughout our trip was a little weird.
Well, actually, it felt really, really weird! And, surprisingly, it also felt really, really safe. I imagined my heart racing and palms sweating til we arrived at our destination. But neither happened. Perhaps the carefully chosen calming background music did the trick. Or, perhaps I simply had an innate sense that all would be well.
You see, we had watched driverless cars operating in the neighbourhood – passengers busy on their phones or laptops, or snoozing. Clearly not anxious about whether the car would continue safely on the journey! And then one day, our son took our 2 little granddaughters across town in a driverless car. Not only did they arrive safely, they loved it!
Hmmm, I thought. If this very protective and caring father is happy to take his daughters in a driverless car, I think we should give it a go as well … as we did.
Driverless cars rely on sensors to create a map of their surroundings, and then use highly developed software to navigate. Safely.
For example, imagine, you’re queued, waiting to cross a 4-way intersection … your driverless car gradually edges forward as each vehicle crosses the intersection, just as you would if you were at the wheel. And then pulls out into the intersection at the right time. How clever!
It got me wondering.
I think there is a beautiful analogy here with our lives. How many of us do picture God as the driver in the driver’s seat of our lives, holding all the controls and making decisions on our behalf? When the reality is that as humans made in the image of God, we not only have the capacity to create, plan, decide and do, that is our responsibility! It is the gospel call on our lives that I mentioned earlier, summed up in the words so familiar to us: Love God. Love your neighbour as you love yourself.
It seems the clue to doing this well is the way our inbuilt sensors are programmed.
Like me, you may have grown up in a volatile household where you had to ‘walk on eggshells’. You were programmed to be supersensitive to what was going on around you and then over-correct or over-compensate because of this protective yet unhealthy programming.
Or perhaps you grew up in a household where emotions were kept under wraps, and your sensors hadn’t developed to express or engage with emotions in healthy ways.
Perhaps your single-minded focus on looking after your nearest and dearest hasn’t allowed your peripheral sensors to take in the information they need to allow you to process and respond to what’s happening in the wider world?
Perhaps you thought you had been navigating life pretty well, and then a curved ball came out of the blue and threw you off course. Perhaps your sensors didn’t have the information they needed to get you back on track.
Does not God invite us into a closer walk with Jesus each and every day, and in doing so, we become ‘programmed’ to live and respond more as Jesus does? Effectively expressing forgiveness, justice, compassion, grace and love. These are the elements that will allow us to navigate the difficult intersections of our lives safely and effectively.
Living this way helps us to avoid collisions and other accidents that cause damage.
Being an active member of a Christian community allows us to develop practices of prayer, worship, reading the Bible with others, and serving. These also help us continually update the data that programmes our life sensors so that we grow more and more into servant-hearted and compassionate followers of Jesus who can respond in more loving ways to everyone we encounter and the problems we face in life and in our world.
Thinking back to our recent trip in the driverless car, the only glitch we encountered was that when we arrived at our destination (a museum), our driverless car dropped us in a somewhat dodgy spot – a very narrow curb-side strip on a busy road. This seemed odd. What we discovered was that there was construction work going on around the museum and so the entrance had no vehicle access for a few blocks. This was the best available option.
Sometimes we are left with limited options in life – we have to work with what we have and make the best decision in the moment with the information available to us. I love Paul’s letters to the early churches in communities scattered far and wide. He offers so much practical advice for programming our sensors to reflect the life of Christ within us, all with the promise of the Holy Spirit – God’s presence in our lives – as our wisdom, encourager and life-giver. Sometimes we simply need to trust that presence to guide us in ways of faith, hope and love.
I’ve just read the novel ‘Wonder’ by RJ Palacio. An easy and heartwarming read that speaks of the power of kindness. Kindness is excellent data to programme into our life sensors. I love the saying, “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.” While we don’t find those exact words in the gospels, I think Paul’s letters come close when he encourages early Christian communities to live in such ways that reflect God’s life in theirs. And these are words that we can share with anyone we encounter as a practical expression of what it means to follow Jesus. And to journey through life in safe, respectful and caring ways.
Travel well,
Mary-Anne