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:’
The Eucharist as Homecoming
IT WAS love that conceived creation, and it is love that carries it through. The love of God for his creation was expressed in the love of Jesus for his Father and for his fellow human beings.
Yet the reality of evil presents an enigma: how to believe in a loving God when there is so much suffering. The message of the Cross and Resurrection is that God is not mocked nor is he defeated by the worst that man can do. God’s creative purposes are triumphantly justified by his decision not only to raise Jesus from the dead but also his gift to creation of the risen Christ active in the community of men and women through the invisible work of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus did not try to explain the possible purpose and meaning of suffering. Instead he took it as a fact of life, relieved it when the occasion arose, and announced bluntly that those who wished to follow him must be prepared to shoulder it.
For Jesus the matter was eminently practical: to take up the Gospel is to take up the cross. The cross is not to be sought for itself; it comes to those who respond to the demands of love. The problem remains unsolved; the mystery, however, is infinitely deepened by the fact that in Christ God has taken upon himself the pain and distress of evolving creation.
This is not an answer in any academic or speculative sense. It is an answer in the demonstrative and practical sense. If God himself has chosen to share our griefs, it must follow that the existence of suffering does have transcendent meaning, not necessarily in itself but as a concomitance of freedom and the
power to love.
The Church is the community to which the message of Christ’s conquest of sin and suffering has been committed. It is the visible manifestation of human response to the greatest of God’s gifts. The work of redemption must go on. The mystery of the Church consists in the fact that God wills to bring the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus to bear on all humanity, first, through the sending of the Spirit and, second, through the sending of the Church, the gathering of those who, under the prompting of the Holy Spirit, proclaim Jesus as Lord of all creation.
The man who was God’s human expression of divinity went about doing good, caring for the poor and oppressed, renouncing the attractions of structured power, and being himself marginalised by his concern for the marginalised. He placed his hopes and his commission in his followers on whom the Father had bestowed the Kingdom.
The Church as founded by Christ Matt 16.18 is a community of those who love because they realise we are all loved by God, who forgive because they have been forgiven. Its principal ritual is the Eucharist, in which the symbol of a united family meal is fused mysteriously with the self-sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary to enable the participants to celebrate all that God has done for them and for the world by his offer of unconditional forgiveness and reconciliation.
Every Eucharist is a homecoming, a relaxing in our Father’s house, a celebration in symbol of all that we should be. Every Eucharist is an occasion when the participants express in symbolic gestures all that God wants them to be, and their commitment to extend that love to all the world.
17/2/12
Peter Knott SJ
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
The Dark Enigma
THE PROBLEM of evil prevents many from believing in God How can belief in a loving God be
reconciled with suffering in the world he created? It may be helpful to consider three phases in trying to make some sense of this.
The first is to resist the (often irrational) urge to seek for a moral cause of the distress. God does not send affliction as punishment. Afflictions come to us unbidden from the world which God has made. We do not know why this should be, but the fact that it is so offers us the opportunity of entering into the dark mystery and of seeking to transcend it: and, if possible, to grow through it towards God and our fellow men and women.
The second phase consists in allowing oneself a ‘complaint against God.’ Jewish prayer practices a real freedom before God which a sound Christian theology and spirituality ought to be able to share. We have a long tradition of trust in a heavenly Father who cares for all his creation. If we really believe in a caring God, how can we avoid the sort of complaint we find, for example, in Psalm 6, Our accusation against God here is the impatience of hope in the cry of the psalmist, ‘ My soul is troubled, But though O Lord – how long ..?’ On a lighter note, St Teresa of Avila commented; ‘No wonder you have so few friends Lord when you treat them so badly !’
The third phase integrates complaint and indignation into the suffering itself. Then we see that the reasons for believing in God have nothing in common with the need to explain the origin of suffering. That this phase of integration is a function of prayer more than theology. It is an act of profound trust which is prepared to hope
against hope. It inspires us to trust not only the God who made us but also the very structures of the world he has given us as our environment. He comes to us not only in the serenity of the world which so often delights us, but also from out of the whirlwind of threat, pain, and discontent. God teaches us to discern him through the mist of tears as much as in the tranquility of order. It is a hard lesson, and we instinctively kick against it.
In this phase, we simply accept that our finite minds cannot explain why nature is red in tooth and claw, why one species lives of another, or why it can happen that innocent children suffer. We join our thinking to prayer.
To the unbeliever this attitude will look suspiciously like a case of wish doing duty for rational thought. Believers can only respond that, having opted for the existence of a provident God for other reasons, they are prepared to commit. themselves in faith, hope, and love to that God . Because he is God, he can be credited with reasons that lie beyond the grasp of our finite minds.
It is notable that many believers have said that through enduring suffering they have unaccountably grown in love of their fellow men and women, and of God also. This experience is not an answer to the intellectual problem of innocent suffering, but it does witness to the conviction that the reason for the existence of the cosmos is love and that real love always costs.
We need to keep in mind the price that God himself in Christ was prepared to pay in order that the world might believe and so be saved. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.’ 2 Cor 5.19 It is inspiring, and a profoundly moving insight that our God is a crucified God.
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
Don’t Lose Heart
ONE OF THE reasons we need to pray is so that we don’t lose heart when frustration, tiredness, and fear in the face of life’s challenges conspire together to freeze our energies, deaden our resiliency, drain our courage, and leave us feeling dispirited.
There are many examples in scripture of men and women being brought to their knees in prayer through fear, discouragement, or loneliness. Two examples of this follow.
We see an example of praying not to lose heart in the prophet, Elijah, when he is being threatened because of his prophetic message. Elijah had been a courageous prophet, but at one point in his ministry he became disconsolate. His own people had ceased listening to his message, he had witnessed some of his fellow prophets being martyred, and the most powerful woman in the kingdom had now sent out men to kill him. To flee Jezebel, Elijah hid on Mount Horeb.
However, as he retreated into a cave, he was confronted by God’s voice, asking him what he was doing there. Elijah confessed his discouragement, his loss of heart. But God, through the sound of a gentle breeze, drew him out of the cave where Elijah again confessed his depression and fear; but this time in the form of a prayer.
Through that prayer, he regained his strength and came down the mountain ready to face his ministry and all its dangers with renewed energy and courage. When all his own strength had dried up, Elijah approached God with his weakness; and that movement renewed his heart.
We see something similar in Jesus when, facing his passion and death, he prays in the
Garden of Gethsemane. It’s the low-point of
Jesus’ ministry: The people have stopped listening to him, the religious authorities are conspiring with the civil authorities to kill him, those few, his inner circle of disciples, who are still listening to his message, are not understanding it, and he feels utterly alone, ‘a stone’s throw away from everyone.’ He falls to his knees in prayer, a prayer so intense that he ‘sweats blood’; but that prayer ends in consolation, an angel coming to strengthen him.
Contrast Jesus with his apostles. At that very moment, they too are discouraged, lonely, and fearful. But they are asleep while he prays; and their sleep, as the gospels hint, is something more than physical. They are ‘asleep out of sheer sorrow.’ In essence, they are too depressed to be awake to their full strength. They couldn’t face impending suffering as Jesus did, because they didn’t pray as he did. They had lost heart.
No matter how blessed our lives may be, it’s impossible to go through life without, at times, feeling misunderstood, disconsolate, succumbing to a numbing tiredness, and simply losing heart.
We are human and, like Jesus, we will have days when we feel a stone’s throw away from everyone. What’s paralyzed inside us is our capacity to forgive, to radiate generous hearts, for empathy and understanding, for joy and for courage.
But in moments like this, we can find encouragement in the examples above. Like Elijah, when we are in the darkness of a cave, discouraged and brought to a standstill, God is there at the entrance, a gentle breeze, encouraging us back where we become ourselves again, trusting that God can bring good out of the most disastrous situation.
f27/1/12 Peter Knott SJ
Planning for Depth
SINCE THE current financial crises there has been much talk of Plan A and Plan B. We need such plans of course, but there is also the need for a different kind of plan which is necessary regardless of the material situation Plan D (for depth!) consists of pausing, thinking, reflecting, reading, especially poetry, listening to music, going for walks, giving time for prayer,
By failing to question propaganda and following the wrong leaders human beings can quite quickly be reduced to a condition in which there is little human about them at all. An extreme example is the cruelty and barbarity inflicted on so many Jews and others during 1933-45, performed by individuals who had the appearance of humans and prided themselves on their efficiency, but who had lost whatever it is that constitutes humanity.
Part of humanity is fellow-feeling, the ability to empathise with the sufferings and joys of others. We need a plan for feeling, for full human feeling.
We need the arts, first and foremost because we constantly need to be reminded of what it is to feel fully and humanly; ( that would not apply to the work of certain
contemporary artists who appear to
simply want to shock, which is a kind of numbing.) In the midst of the mundane complexities of everyday life we can be stopped in our tracks by some inspiring music or work of art.
We need a plan for depth. We need to go a bit more deeply into things; that means going into ourselves as well as what is around us. When we discern depth in a work of art, we must also be recognising it in ourselves. Appreciating art isn’t just about looking or listening with the clever brain, spotting surface connections, influences, and so on. It is also about feeling, about a deep resonance.
The work, whether it’s a Beethoven sonata, a poem by Hopkins, a self-portrait by Rembrandt, can only resonate in the right, receptive chamber. That chamber in ourselves becomes greater through prayer and sacraments. ‘I came’ said Jesus, ’that you might have life to the full.’ John 10.10
All this talk of depth, and especially emotional depth, no doubt goes against the cultural grain. But undue preoccupation with material concerns, addiction to banality, and glorification of ‘celebrities’, makes for shallowness.
And that blocks the way to the fullness of life, the kind of happiness we were created to enjoy.
20/1/12 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
