Hide and seek

I’m remembering church picnics. It’s summer nostalgia, of course. The wind in the trees outside my window and the sound of kids playing. I’m leaving church after the service and thinking about watermelon, remembering the tote bag my mom put the thermos in and the way she folded a travelling rug on top and the sound the Tupperware beakers made when you pulled them apart. The weirdness of seeing church people in the park rather than the pews. And the lawn chairs and the potato sack race and the wheelbarrow race and the big kids’ soft ball game. The little kids would start with easy tag at the edges but soon enough we’d be playing hide-and-seek in the unfamiliar trees, scaring ourselves and each other by climbing too high and hiding in the leaves or staying low and hoping to be mistaken for a shadow or a tree trunk or not seen at all.

Into the shadows

The poet Malcolm Guite wrote a sonnet called Hide and Seek that explores this metaphor theologically. You can read the whole poem on his website or in his poetry collection Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year. Like in many of Guite’s poems, there is an echo of the Psalmist’s cry, here with Psalm 139: “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me and then later if I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you.” God reaches out for us when we withdraw to the shadows, seeking us wherever we hide.

Guite writes frankly about this hiding which sits “below the sunlit surface others see.” And that’s true, isn’t it? We stretch our everything-is-alright smiles across our faces and keep cheerful. This isn’t always a bad thing. Cheerful faces keep the wheels on the road. Humour lightens the load and goodness knows our communities, our churches and our families need a bit of light, too.

Beautiful calling game

Yet despite those hiding smiles, God seeks us. God is closer to our hearts than those sunlit surfaces, calling us away from our shadows: Come out, come out wherever you are!

And we, too, seek God. The early Church taught that even feeling this call to prayer is already prayer itself. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of John the Apostle, wrote in his Letter to the Romans: “There is a living water that murmurs in me, ‘Come to the Father.’” God’s Spirit within us calls us out of our shadows and into the presence of God.

Guite pushes this beautiful calling game one step further by reminding us how God, too, is good at hiding. At times, we seek God like a thread in darkness but God also appears in regular, obvious things. Guite writes: “Even in darkness, I can see you shine / Risen in bread, and revelling in wine.” In our church practice and community traditions. In old words and new poems. In memories of childhood and mothers’ love and games. In all these everyday places, God hides and is again revealed.