God at work

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

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God at work

In receiving the word of God from hearing us, you received it not as the word of men but as it truly is, the word of God, which is now at work in you who believe.

James Finley, former monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani, leads Christian retreats. He spent several years with Thomas Merton when Finley was a novice and Merton was the novice master. Finley wrote Merton’s Palace of Nowhere and Christian Meditation. He speaks more beautifully about the silent path and what we encounter along it, than anyone else I know.

Without warning, we find ourselves falling into the abyss of a star-strewn sky or find our heart impaled by a child’s laughter or the unexpected appearance of the beloved’s face. Without warning we lose our footing in the silence broken and, in the breaking, deepened by the splash of a frog we did not know was there.  

Images for our eyes, our ears, and our heart can send us reeling into the presence of God, unexpected but welcome.

What is so extraordinary about such moments is that nothing beyond the ordinary is present. It is just a starlit sky, a child at play. It is just the primal stuff of life that has unexpectedly broken through the mesh of opinions and concerns that all too often hold us in their spell. It is just life in the immediacy of the present moment before thought begins.

There’s no doubt that James Finley is a wordsmith. But his words allude to what first Merton, and now Finley, call the “cosmic dance.” That could be a careless New Age phrase, but the two monks can’t think of a better way to describe the relationship God calls us into, one at a time, moment by moment, unpredictably.

Here, in this unforeseen defenselessness, is granted the contemplative experience, however obscure it might be, that we are the cosmic dance of God, that the present moment, just the way it is, is already, in its deepest actuality, the fullness of union with God we seek.

God is everywhere, and he is nowhere. He is within me, and he is all around me.

Where can I go from your spirit? If I go up to the heavens you are there, if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

But I have work to do, promises to keep. Miles to go before I sleep.

These moments pass and the real question then for us is, “What happens next?” All too often, unfortunately, nothing happens next. The gate to Heaven opened and your cell phone went off. You were already late to a meeting. Nothing happened next.  But sometimes what happens is that although the moment has passed, you reflect back upon it, and you realize that the subtle moment was a kind of homecoming. You settled, with a sense like “I belong here.”

Perhaps you remember moments, short but oh so sweet, when you have been caught up in the arms of God. Those moments matter more than any others in your life. They define your life. They are the purpose of your life. Do you know that? Do I?

I want to, oh how much I want to.

When you start understanding your life in the light of these moments, you realize this feeling that you’re skimming over the surface of the depths of your own life. It’s all the more unfortunate because God’s unexplainable oneness with us is hidden in the depths over which we’re skimming.

There are certain psalms, including Psalm 139, that nudge me into awareness of what I mostly am “skimming” over as I live through the practical details of my life. In one of the darkest, brutal, breathless moments of my life, Psalm 139 rescued me as God gave me back my breath, life … my joy in the truest meaning of that word.

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; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

(1 Thessalonians 2, Psalm 139, 1 John 2, Matthew 23)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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