Experiencing God Everywhere
IN JESUS God became human experience: ‘What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – this life was revealed so that you also may have fellowship with us, as we are in union with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.’1 John 1:1-3.
When asked about the essence of his message, Jesus replied: ‘Come and see.’ – come for the day and experience the presence of my company. He washed people’s feet. He used the metaphor of weddings to explain the nature of union with God. His humanity was seen in that experience of having his own feet washed by Mary’s tears, dried by her hair and anointed with her ointment.
Before he could believe in the Resurrection, Thomas needed to touch the wounds of the risen Christ. Deep healing and true faith are often found within the experience of woundedness.
Knowledge alone, ideas and concepts do not change us profoundly. Experience does. ‘Some things can only be seen by eyes filled with tears.’ After it we see things differently. Our experience is true when we hold no filtering lens, no preconceived notions: we have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable in our openness to reality. ‘Do not be afraid.’ Luke 12.32
Authentic conversion is experienced bodily and emotionally. It was to make all our pain redemptive that divine love
became wounded flesh.
We experience the Holy Spirit in charity, joy, peace, patience , kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. And that list of St Paul’s is not meant to be exclusive: he includes elsewhere humility and forgiveness, ‘whatever is excellent, honourable and worthy of praise.’ Gal 5.22, Col 3.12, Phil 4. 8
God became flesh, the place of experience, richer or poorer, better or worse, in sickness or health. Faith is that attitude which empowers us to experience, in healing depth, all the hard and joyful and routine experiences that each day may bring.
God desired to become our bodies, our senses, our emotions in time and space, so that divine being could be experienced everywhere, by everyone.
People are looking for the meaning of life, for the experience of being fully alive. They are looking for eternity. And eternity is not just to do with the hereafter. Eternity is a quality. If we don’t get it where we are here and now we won’t get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right now in some degree is the function of life. Heaven is the completion of that experience.
We experience something of God’s presence in everything that happens to us. There is a divine whisper in every sound; even the sound of temptation.
Our future resurrection will reveal that we have been experiencing it all our lives. ‘Heaven will be recognised as a country we have already entered, and in whose light and warmth we have already lived:’
Prayer for Depth
WE SENSE the importance of prayer; yet, we often find it difficult to pray. We might be familiar with various forms of prayer, from devotional prayers to different kinds of meditation, but we may lack the confidence that our own particular way of praying, with all its distractions is prayer in the deep sense.
The gospels show us Jesus praying in virtually every kind of situation. He prays when he is joyful, he prays when he is in agony, he prays with others around him, and he prays when he is alone at night, withdrawn from all human contact. He prays high on a mountain, in a sacred place, and he prays on the level plane, where ordinary life happens. Jesus prays a lot.
And the lesson isn’t lost on his disciples. They sense that Jesus’ real depth and power are drawn from his prayer. They know that what makes him so special is that he is linked to a power outside of this world. And they want this for themselves. That’s why they ask: “Lord, teach us to pray!”
But we must understand what they were looking for when they asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. They sensed that what Jesus drew from the depth of his prayer was not, first of all, his power to do miracles or to silence his enemies with some kind of superior intelligence. What impressed them and what they wanted too for their own lives was his depth and graciousness.
The power they admired and wanted was Jesus’ attractiveness, his power to love and forgive his enemies. What they wanted was Jesus’ wisdom and inner freedom, his
power to renounce life in self-sacrifice, even while retaining the capacity to enjoy the everyday pleasures of life. They wanted Jesus’ power to be big-hearted, to love beyond his own circle and to love poor and rich alike; to live with charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, trustfulness and chastity (self-control) Gal 5.22, . What they wanted was Jesus’ depth and graciousness. cf 1 Cor 1.30
And they recognized that this power did not come from within himself, but from a source outside him. They saw that he connected to a deep source through prayer, through constantly lifting to God whatever was on his mind and in his heart. They saw it and they wanted that depth for themselves. So they asked Jesus to teach them how to pray like him.
We too want Jesus’ depth and graciousness in our own lives. Like Jesus’ disciples, we also know that we can only attain this through prayer, through accessing a power that lies in the depth of our souls and beyond our souls. We know too that the route to that depth lies in journeying inward, in silence, through both the muddle and the peace that come to us when we quieten ourselves to pray.
In both our reflective moments and in our more desperate moments, we feel our need for prayer and try to go to that deep place. But we struggle to get there. We may feel we don’t know how to sustain ourselves in prayer. Yet in this we are in good company with Jesus’ disciples. A good beginning is to recognize what we need and where it is to be found. We need to begin with that same plea: ‘Lord, teach us to pray!’
13/1/12
Peter Knott SJ
God Loves the World
WHATEVER our beliefs, we can all agree that the world is not as it should be. But too often we and our Churches tend to see the world only as a mess, caught up in mindless trivialization, self-indulgent, short-sighted. We see it as having no values that demand self-sacrifice, of worshipping fame, of being addicted to material goods, and of being anti-Church. Indeed, it is not uncommon in our Churches to see the world as our enemy.
But Jesus loved the world! The Gospels describe Jesus’ reaction towards the world that rejected him. As Jesus Wept over Jerusalem, saying: “If you had only recognized the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” Jesus sees what happens when people try to live without God, the mess, the pain, the heartbreak, and his heartache. If only you could see what you’re doing! Luke 19.41f
Looking at a world that can often break down because of its self-centredness, Jesus responds with understanding, not judgment; with heartache, not rubbing salt in the wounds; and with tears of compassion. Loving parents and friends understand exactly what Jesus was feeling at the moment when he wept over Jerusalem.
What frustrated parent hasn’t looked at a son or daughter caught up in wrong choices and self-destructive behaviour and wept inside as the words spontaneously formed: If only you could
see what you’re doing! If only I could do
something to spare you the damage you’re doing to your life by this blindness! If only you could recognize the things that make for peace! But you can’t, and it breaks my heart!
Our Christian faith asks us to have a genuine love for the world. ‘For God so loved the world he gave his only Son.’ John 3.16 ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ John 15.12 The world isn’t our enemy. It’s our wayward child and our loved friend who is breaking our heart. That can be hard to see and accept when in fact the world is often belligerent and arrogant in its attitude towards us, when it’s angry with us, when it wrongly judges us, and when it scapegoats us.
But that’s exactly what suffering children often do to their parents and friends when they make bad choices and suffer the consequences. They impute and scapegoat. This can feel most unfair to us, but Jesus’ attitude towards those who rejected and crucified him invites us to empathise.
Moreover a genuine empathy for the world isn’t just predicated on mature sympathy. Mature sympathy is itself predicated on better seeing the world for what it is. The 17 year-old adolescent standing belligerent and angry before her parents isn’t a bad person, she’s just not yet fully grown up.
That’s true too for our world: It’s not a bad place; it’s just far from being a finished and mature one. Jesus came ‘that we might have life to the full.’ John 10.10 We find something of this fullness when we allow ourselves to be guided by the light of Christ rather than our passing moods 6/1/12
Peter Knott SJ
Christ Our Light
AS WE enter a New Year we can be encouraged by those words of Isaiah we heard at Mass last Sunday: ‘The people that lived in darkness has seen a great light’. Our fading memory of Christmas must not allow that light to fade.
The light that dawned on the world was the power and glory of God, now seen in Christ Jesus. It is through his life, death and resurrection that we find ourselves able to look at things in a new light, a kinder, more sympathetic light.
Through Christ we can begin to look at everything in the light of truth and love, sensitive to any situation that doesn’t quite ring true; conscious of the need to handle events in a truly loving way, seeing people as more important than possessions, individuals more important than ideas.
We need help with this. If we’re honest with ourselves we have to admit that we often find difficulty in seeing the truth – particularly about ourselves. We can be blind to the truth in so many ways. Sometimes because we don’t have all the facts, and are disinclined to search for them; sometimes the facts are clear but we are blinkered by jealousy and prejudice; sometimes we refuse to face the facts because we’re afraid we won’t show up in a very good light.
This is a far cry from the Christian vision of ‘living the truth in love’, living in reality with love in its fullest sense – that is, wanting what is good for the other person as well, doing what is for
the other person’s good. We need the help of prayer for this, help to become more sensitive towards others. Our self-centredness can become so dominant we are simply unaware of how inconsiderate we are – and most indignant if accused of it!
This is the darkness of a world without Christ. The light of Christ shows up our weakness – yet only to heal. This kind of light rarely comes in a flash, illuminating the whole scene with absolute clarity. It’s more like the car headlights on a misty night, helping us to keep going, avoiding dangers on the way.
It’s a gradual illumination of the way ahead. It is a light that glows more brightly as we become more familiar with Scripture and Tradition, when we listen more openly to the Church’s teaching.
‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand’ is another way of saying ‘Change your mind and heart from seeing everything in a self-centred way, to seeing things more in the way God sees them, learning to think and judge and act according to God’s way, a Christlike way.’
We all find it difficult to change. It’s easier to sit back and criticize others. It’s less trouble to leave the difficult questions to someone else, not venturing beyond the security of what is familiar. But of course, that leaves us in precisely the kind of darkness Christ came to dispel. In his light we see light, a light to guide us towards the fullness of life, in company with all those of good will. 30/12/11 Peter Knott SJ
How We Become Holy
‘BE HAPPY at all times … and may the God of peace make you perfect and holy … God has called you and will not fail you.’, says St Paul. 1 Thess 5.16-24 Ordinarily, when we think of perfection we have in mind no deficiencies, faults or flaws, measuring up to some ideal standard, completely whole, true, good and beautiful. To be perfect in this sense is never to sin.
In the scriptures, the ideal of perfection is quite different. It means simply to walk humbly with God despite our flaws. Perfection here means being in the Divine presence in spite of the fact that we are not perfectly whole, good, true and beautiful.
cf Micah 6.8
For many of us, our idea of holiness has been shaped by the former ideal of perfection. So holiness has been understood as a question of measuring up to a certain standard, achieving and maintaining moral goodness and integrity. Such a view has merits. It is a challenge against mediocrity, laziness, settling for what is second-best. This can be healthy.
But such a concept of perfection also has a nasty underside. In the end, we all fall short and this leads to spiritual pitfalls. We have false expectations that we can somehow fix all that is wrong with us through sheer will-power alone. We can’t; and because we don’t face this, we often grow discouraged and simply give up trying to break some bad habit.
When perfection means measuring up, we find it hard to forgive ourselves and others for not being God. When the dominant idea of holiness is something that only God can measure up to, it is not easy to give others or ourselves permission to be human. We carry around a lot of discouragement and a lack of forgiveness because of this
So without losing sight of the ordinary
concept of perfection we could profit from listening to the scriptures and accepting into our lives more of the Gospel ideal. Perfection here means walking humbly with God despite imperfection, as the following example shows.
The account of the rich young man asking Jesus what he should do to be perfect ends with an interesting exchange between Jesus and his disciples. The young man had just rejected Jesus’ offer ‘and went away sad.’ Jesus then turns to his followers and says; ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Luke 18.18f
The disciples were stunned! They knew they couldn’t do what was just asked. Peter spoke up for the rest; ‘If that is the case, none of us will get to heaven!’ – one of the few times the apostles actually got it right!
Peter voiced their helplessness, their inability to ever measure up. He is saying, ‘We simply aren’t capable of doing this.’ And Jesus is pleased. Why? Because he can make the point that ‘For you, these things are impossible, but nothing is impossible for God.’ Luke 18.27
On our own, none of us can ever be perfect. But that is not what God is asking of us. What God is asking is that we bring our helplessness, weaknesses, and sin constantly to him, that we walk with him and that we never hide from him.
God is like a good parent. God understands that we will all make mistakes and disappoint him and ourselves. What God asks simply is that we come home, that we share our lives with him, that we let him help us in those ways within which we are powerless to help ourselves.
St Paul wanted us to be happy at all times. That happiness is ours when we allow God to make us holy.
16/12/11 Peter Knott SJ
Boredom in Prayer
WHEN WE TRY to pray, sometimes all seems well; but more often, all we feel is dryness, emptiness, boredom. Sometimes we have a deep sense of God’s reality and at other times we can’t even imagine that God exists. Sometimes we have deep feelings about God’s goodness and love yet often we feel only distraction. Prayer has a huge ebb and flow.
We may be reassured by the experience of Theresa of Avila who, after a season of deep fervor in prayer, experienced twenty years of boredom and dryness. The journals of Mother Theresa show how, like Theresa of Avila, after some initial fervor in prayer, experienced nothing but dryness for the rest of her life.
Prayer is not meant to be always full of fervour, spiritual insight, and the sense that we are actually praying. An equally misguided notion is that the way to sustain feeling and fervor in prayer is through constant novelty and variety or through dogged concentration.
Classical writers in spirituality assure us that, while this is often true when we are beginners at prayer and in the early stage of our spiritual lives, it becomes less and less true the deeper we advance in prayer and spirituality.
The mystics tell us that once we are beyond the early stage of prayer, the single greatest obstacle to sustaining a life of prayer is simply boredom and the sense that nothing meaningful is happening. That doesn’t mean we are regressing in prayer: it often means the opposite.
If we do struggle with boredom and the sense that nothing meaningful is
happening, it may be helpful to imagine you have an aged mother who is confined to a nursing home. You’re the dutiful daughter or son, and regularly spend time with her, sharing the events of the day, simply being with her.
Save for a rare occasion, you will not have many deeply emotive or even interesting conversations with her. On the surface your visits will seem mostly routine, dry, and dutiful. Most times you will be talking about trivial, everyday, things and you will be sneaking the occasional glance at the clock to see when your hour with her will be over.
However, if you persevere in these regular visits with her, month after month, year after year, you will grow to know your mother more deeply and she will grow to know you more deeply; because, as the mystics affirm, at a certain deep level of relationship the real connection between us takes place below the surface of our conversations. We begin to know each other through simple presence.
You can recognize this in its opposite: Notice how your mother relates to your siblings who visit her only very occasionally. During those rare visits there will be emotions, and conversations beyond the weather and the trivia of everyday life. But that’s because your mother sees these others so rarely.
Prayer is the same. If we pray only occasionally, we might well experience some deep emotions in our prayer. However, if we pray faithfully every day, year in and year out, we can expect little excitement, lots of boredom, regular temptations to look at the clock during prayer: but also a deep, growing bond with God.
14/10/11
Peter Knott SJ
Coping with Distress
WHAT can we do in the face of a disastrous situation we cannot alter?
When someone has to bear this, there is a period of time when we find ourselves feeling helpless. The pain is not easy to reach into and heal. Poets and novelists may offer some insight but no one can do much to take away the pain.
There are some things in life before which we simply stand helpless. For a time, the pain can be so deep that no therapy, and no words of comfort can do much for us.
Eventually we begin to emerge from the grip of that over-concentration and, still further down the road, are able to regain our freedom and resiliency. But there is a time during which our friends could do nothing for us other than to stay close to us.
What can anyone say to someone caught up in this way? We have our stock expressions: life must go on, every morning will bring a new day and eventually time will heal things,
remember too you are not alone; you
have family and friends to lean on: beyond that, you have faith. God will help you through this.
All this is true, but not particularly consoling or helpful during a period of deep unhappiness. It may be that only time can bring about healing; meanwhile the only real option is to try to get one foot in front of the next, stoically, holding our pain with as much dignity as we can muster, waiting for time to work its healing.
Yet there is something that can help make the unbearable more bearable, namely, a more conscious, deliberate effort to love that which, beneath everything else, animates and directs it.
It’s not easy. But we do it when, despite our frustration, and anxiety, we let our generous and deeper side be the deepest voice inside of both our sympathies and our actions.
When we are brought to our knees by frustration, the best thing we can do is to remain kneeling in helplessness before God – who will help us in God’s own way in God’s own time, and bring some good out of the most disastrous situation. Rom 8.28
Peter Knott SJ
Discovering God
THE OLDER we get, the more we realise that things are often not what they appear to be on the surface. This is abundantly true of human beings for ‘whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.’ William James
This is also true of the physical world where appearances often conceal deeper and even contradictory realities. You might, for example, be standing or sitting still whereas the train you are on is travelling at great speed Einstein helped us to understand that the notion of absolute space or time was meaningless and to merge them both in a single four-dimensional entity he called ‘space-time’ in which everything moves at the speed of light. It is within this reality that energy is converted into mass and mass into energy, thus forming the universe.
One of the consequences of this is that we should not be hasty in judging either things or people. The opinions we form need to be continually tested and retested against an ever-changing reality. We should not allow ourselves to be led just by our senses or feelings.
Considerations such as these affect our image of God whose creative power formed such a universe. Yet this should not make God unintelligible. Though as limited human beings we cannot expect fully to understand the divine nature, we not only have the definition given to Moses – ‘I am who am’ – which leaves us with a God who is divinely mysterious; but another definition, from St John; ‘God is love’.
The very essence of God’s nature is not a mystery of isolation or individualism but of sharing, of mutual outpouring, of giving and receiving. The exchange of love between Father and Son is what Jesus called the Holy Spirit, the spirit of love. And it is because of this love that we and everything else in the universe exists.
We were loved into existence by God in order to love. Our whole purpose in life is to learn what love is or, better put, to learn how to love. This is why we are in the world, and if we miss out on this, whatever else we might learn, whatever else we might do or achieve, we have missed out on the most important thing of all. This is what Jesus described to Martha as ‘the one thing’ necessary. Luke 10:42
God’s love consists in a total gift of self and we can only share in this, which is the purpose of our existence, when we too are able to give ourselves totally. Yet we are all born with a love that is profoundly selfish, turned in on self. And it is no easy task to rid ourselves of this selfishness we all have. In fact the whole of our life can be seen as a long gradual struggle to achieve a love that is ever more selfless, more geared towards the other.
Our innate self-centredness makes this a difficult task. Yet the more we give and go out to others, the more we ourselves receive and the richer our life becomes. As Jesus taught, ‘Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.’ Luke 17:33 If we gradually die to our selfishness, we become more alive to others and in God
This union with God we call heaven, involves a total going out of oneself, the meaning of the word ecstasy. Love is indeed ‘ecstasy’, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication like falling in love, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God. Deus Caritas Est, n.6 000000
Peter Knott SJ
Wise Yet Simple
BE WISE in the ways of the world, but simple in your openness to God and each other, said Jesus. The deep secrets of life and of faith, he added, are hidden from the learned and clever and revealed instead to those with the openness of a child. Matt 10.16, 11.25
Clearly intelligence and learning are good, a gift from God. Every healthy society and every healthy individual strive to overcome ignorance and lack of education. Scripture praises both wisdom and intelligence, and the health of any Church is partly based on having a lively intellectual stream within it.
Popular piety and the prayer life of ordinary people is essential for growth in the Church. At the same time there is need for solid theological reflection to ensure, before God, that we are on the right lines. The Reformation arose out of just that, and one of the first things that the Council of Trent mandated for Catholics was that its priests be better trained intellectually.
Intelligence and learning are good things. Naiveté is not a virtue and should never be confused with innocence. So why is being “intelligent and clever” something that can work against our understanding of the deeper secrets within life and faith?
The fault is not with intelligence and learning, both good things in themselves, but in what they can inadvertently do to us. Intelligence and learning can have the unintended effect of undermining what’s childlike in us. The very strength that they bring into our lives can allow us unconsciously to claim a superiority and have us believe that, given our intelligence, we have both the need and
the right to isolate ourselves from others in ways that the natural neediness of children does not permit them to do.
Children are not self-sufficient even though they may want to be. They need others and they know it. Consequently they more naturally reach out and take someone’s hand. They don’t have the illusion of self-sufficiency.
When we are “learned and the clever” we can more easily forget that we need others and consequently don’t naturally reach for another’s hand as does a child. It’s easier for us to isolate ourselves. When we are less aware of our contingency we more easily lose sight of the things to which God and life are inviting us.
The very strength that intelligence and learning bring into our lives can instill in us a false sense of self-sufficiency that can make us want to separate ourselves in unhealthy ways from others and understand ourselves as superior in some way. And superiority never comes alone, but always brings along arrogance, disdain, boredom, cynicism. All of these are occupational hazards for the “learned and the clever” and none of these helps unlock any of life’s deep secrets.
But we must be careful not to misread the lesson. Faith doesn’t rule out stretching our minds. Neither ignorance nor naiveté serve faith. Faith not only doesn’t fear the hard questions it invites us to ask them.
The depths of infinity are never threatened by finite intelligence. So it’s never a bad thing to become learned and sophisticated; it’s only a bad thing if we remain there. The task is to become post-sophisticated, to remain full of intelligence and learning even as we become like children in our openness to God and each other. 4/11/11
Peter Knott SJ
An Advent Meditation
EACH DAY in the middle of our routines, anxieties and disasters, the liturgy brings its work of healing. ‘It binds up the wounded soul’, gives us food for the journey of our lives and renews us in the truth that only faith can see and sustain. It carries us when we need to be carried and celebrates with us when we mark those moments of joy and thanksgiving, weaving them all into the fabric of God’s own eternal life, sanctifying our life in its everyday ordinariness.
In the rhythm of the liturgy the Spirit makes Christ present, so that he may draw us more deeply into His life with the Father. Each day it wakes us and summons us into His mystery, his active love at work for the sustaining and healing of our world.
Every season of the liturgy asks us to discover or refresh a disposition of heart and mind and action. Advent asks of us an openness, an attentiveness, to what God is doing in us and in our world. It orders our relationship to God in reverence, humility and gratitude.
There is a sense of the immensity of God’s glory which shows itself in a total outpouring of love: “Take, this is my body, this is my blood.” Each day in this moment we see and experience the humility of God who chooses to be present and give himself to us.
We also glimpse something of a God who is not afraid to make himself one of us that he might gather our weakness into Himself. Most people are conscious of a deep mystery in life. Advent helps us to attend to this mystery at the heart of our lives and our faith. Like the Mass itself, it is the school of humility – something the world thinks effete.
Advent points us to a different way of thinking. The humility of God in the Incarnation does not demean us but graces us. God gently exposes our weakness: he slips into our world almost unseen: he clothes our weakness with his own.
God does not force us to acknowledge
Him but waits in the simplest places for us to find our way to him. He does not compel Mary to do his will, but invites her to a service which can only be her fulfillment – and ours. All he asks of her, and of us, is to see how much we are loved. His humility opens up before us the depth of that love and the wonder – full power of his weakness. He asks only that we accept that ‘nothing is impossible for God.’
We are not the masters of creation but its guests and servants. It is not our world but His; it is ours only by gift. Our minds can never exhaust its wonders. Through the Incarnation God has made our world his home. Advent gazes with joyful wonder into this mystery. It points to inner freedom..
Advent is the time between His first coming, his everyday coming, His coming at the end of time. Advent is a time to leave behind all that weighs us down, holding us back from giving ourself to God. It is our time to begin again, a season in which our own freedom is renewed. It is a time to put right whatever has gone wrong, to begin a new future guided by the light of Christ rather than our passing moods.
We should be joyfully expectant of Christ’s everyday coming, as a loving friend who knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us beyond our power to imagine. We should expect him in small things as well as big events. If our heart is right and our mind expectant we will find Christ in many places – in the face of a child, in some need of others, in our joys and in our sorrows.
Advent unfolds for us a time of promise. It shows us that patience is part of God’s loving kindness. As we wait for Him so He waits for us, even as He waits on us. This is the season of our be – coming, in which the opening dialogue of the Mass is recognised as both prayer and proclamation, fulfilled in his presence: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you” .. .forever, 2/12 11 Peter Knott SJ
