The Christian path is one of looking for God in every condition and circumstance of life. It is the remembrance of God, “without ceasing” as St. Paul put it. But how and where is God to be found? Member, Bob Strayer, attempts to answer this question during his summer sermon series. His words follow.
I for one have never had a vision; I do not experience ecstatic states of consciousness. I sometimes wonder just what it means to have a “spiritual experience” or to be aware of God’s presence. So preparing this message has been useful in helping me to sort out my own thinking. It is a kind of sermon to myself. If you like, you are welcome to listen in.
Perhaps the first thing to say is that our experience of God is highly individual. Have you ever noticed how often the Scriptures refer to “my God?” “I say to the LORD, “You are my God” says the writer of the Psalms. Each of us has a distinct, unique and personal experience of the divine, conditioned by our history, education, family background, and a thousand other variables. We are told in the New Testament to “work out your own salvation.” It is a distinct and personal task and yours is different from all others. A great Sufi saint refers to “the private face of God,” unique to each of us. And how could it be otherwise, for the great God of the universe is far beyond our capacity to know in his immense fullness. We are like the blind men, feeling the elephant.
A second general point about our experience of God is that it is often indirect. Much as looking directly at the sun would blind us, so a full experience of the unspeakable power and majesty of the Divine Source would no doubt vaporize us instantly. St. Paul reminds us that “now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.” Even Moses and Jesus, when they ascended their respective mountains, encountered God in a cloud. And so the reminder for today is that the experience of God may be found, indirectly, in many of the ordinary circumstances of life.
But if the experience of God is individual and usually indirect or mediated, we are assured in both sacred text and in the lives of many who have gone before us that such a conscious awareness of God’s presence is available to us. In speaking to a crowd in Athens, St. Paul told them: “Yet God is not far from each one of us.” “Not far from each one of us”! There is the Gospel in a nutshell. There is the essential message of all spiritual seeking. Jesus spoke frequently about the nearness of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, he said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” “Draw near to God,” says the Book of James, “and God will draw near to you.” These assurances of God’s availability can be encouraging reminders, especially when our hearts contract in the face of great difficulty or when we are distracted by the busyness of our lives.
So the life of the Spirit, the life of our spirits, is individual; it is usually indirect; and, praise be to God, it is available to each of us. But where precisely might we look for our experience of God? You have your own list, I am sure, but let me share with you my list of 5 places where God may be found, most of them quite ordinary in the life of human beings. If God is hidden, He is often hidden in plain view.
The first place to look for God, at least on my list, is love, any kind of love—love for your children, husband, wife, friends, your pet cat or dog; love for the earth; love of your work; love of your country. All of our ordinary human loves derive from and participate in the love, mercy, compassion that God bears for us. Our loves are reflections of the love that is God. The Scriptures tell us very simply that “God is love.” Period. Full stop. God is love. Does it not follow then that wherever, whenever, or however we experience love—giving it or receiving it—we are then in the presence of God? God is love. Now there is a theology to live by, and there is an accessible point of contact with the Divine.
The great Persian poet Rumi put it like this: “Listen, open a window to God and begin to delight yourself by gazing upon Him through that opening. The business of love is to make that window in the heart. Listen, this is in your power, my friend.”
A second gateway to the Divine lies in gratitude–moments of genuine thankfulness for the immense blessings of our abundant lives or for the strength to deal with our pain and disappointments. This kind of gratitude opens us to God because it serves to diminish our demanding egos. In gratitude, we acknowledge our dependence on that which is beyond our control. It is an act of surrender or submission. The Old Testament speaks often of the “sacrifice of thanksgiving.” What is it that we sacrifice or give up when we experience gratitude? Is it not our sense of self-sufficiency, our ability to go it alone? And so the Psalms present thanksgiving or gratitude as an opening to God’s presence. “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and come into his courts with praise.” Gratitude, in short, aligns the creature with the Creator in the appropriate fashion. It is a point of entry into the experience of God.
Third on my list of places to find God is quietness. “Silence,” Rumi said, “is the language of God. All else is poor translation.” There is the silence of the tongue, simply the cessation of speaking, or in more colloquial language, “shutting up.” This is difficult enough but even more demanding is the silence of the heart, which is the abandonment of conscious thought, letting go of the incessant activity of our minds. This silence of the heart, as well as the tongue, is what we seek in meditation, in contemplative prayer, and in moments of quiet during our worship service. “Be still,” the Scriptures counsel, “and know that I am God.” Both kinds of silence serve to clear away the distractions of this world and to render us more open the promptings of the Unseen World. And both are available to us, not only in church, but also with a little effort at any moment of the day or night. Silence is an avenue of access to God that is ordinary, practical and that can be learned and practiced.
The fourth place on my list for meeting with God lies in service, in acts of personal kindness and in collective efforts to repair the brokenness of the world. This includes everything from offering the proverbial glass of water to a stranger, to collecting personal items for migrant workers, to becoming an Open and Affirming congregation, to joining with others to seek greater social justice. Certainly the Christian faith makes such action a requirement, not an option, of discipleship. Listen to the prophet Isaiah: “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord…cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” And then, of course, there is Jesus’ famous teaching: “Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my servants, you have done it unto me.”
In offering such acts of service, we focus our attention beyond ourselves, we begin to tame our egos. In such acts we can know that we are living out the will of God. And in receiving such acts of service, we experience God’s mercy through the hands of others. The lovely hymn that we often sing puts it well: “Won’t you let me be your servant; Let me be as Christ to you; Pray that I may have the grace, to let you be my servant too.”
I have left the most difficult for last. It is our suffering. It is the pain that comes from the bad things that happen to us—illness, loss disappointment. In speaking about suffering as an avenue to God, I must confess that I do not speak much from personal experience. My normal response to suffering, or even to minor upsets, is more likely to be panic, anger, irritation, and withdrawal rather than opening to the Divine. But I have witnessed this capacity in others from time to time—this ability to find the “peace that passes understanding” even in times of great difficulty. At some point, I hope to join that company. St. Paul apparently did, for he writes “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” To experience God in suffering is surely the most difficult place to find him. This is Ph.D. level spirituality. But we have been promised that it is not beyond our capacity to do so, for we are told in that most beloved of the Psalms that God is present even in the “valley of the shadow of death” and that a table of blessing has been prepared for us “even in the presence of enemies.”
And then there is the pain that we carry within us as a mark of our common humanity—our woundedness, our shame, our limitations, our negativity, our tendency to judgment, our sense of failure, our feelings of unworthiness. A wonderful teacher that I heard recently said simply: “Your pain can be your path.” I’m still working on exactly what this means, but at the very least does it not suggest that we can bring our whole selves to God. Did Jesus not wash the feet of his O so human disciples? Did he not say that we can be forgiven 70 times 7? We are not expected to be perfect, or even good. We are invited, just as we are, into the presence of the Most High.
So here are five places to experience the Divine—in love, gratitude, silence, service, and even suffering. They are quite ordinary human experiences, common to us all—Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and atheists alike. We live in a universe saturated with Divine Presence. We do in fact live in the presence of God, constantly, regardless of our particular feelings, formulations or beliefs or lack of them. The task of spiritual practice lies in recognizing God in these experiences and in nurturing that awareness of Spirit in all the circumstances of our lives. Is this not what the Scriptures mean when they ask us to “open our eyes”, to “unstop our ears”, and to “incline our hearts” toward God?
This is a kind of spirituality accessible to people like ourselves. Most of us are not spiritual heroes. We are not numbered among the great saints, mystics, or visionaries of the Christian faith. We are probably not given to ecstatic visions or withdrawal from the world. We struggle, like all of humankind, with matters of money, work, family, relationships, illness, loss, disappointment and death. We have our share of faults and shortcomings. But we are emphatically not outside the circle of God’s love and presence. We too are invited “draw near to God,” even as we live our imperfect lives very much in the world. May we find, each one of us, our own distinct path to Spirit, our own individual and private face of God. Then we can say with the writer of the Psalms: “I call on you, my God, for you will answer me.” Amen
(This inspiration was adapted from Robert Strayer’s sermon notes, dated September 11, 2011.)
