Encountering God

Part 5

We have to wait. This can be so painful. Some people may be able to say, “Bloody hell! I’ve been waiting all my life and the bastard’s still not turned up”. Let’s say it how it is and be honest with our feelings. God can take it. Can we? What on earth is going on here? Again, I don’t really know. All I can say is: don’t try to force it; don’t give up; don’t despair; don’t think that you have failed, or done something wrong; certainly don’t think that God doesn’t want you, that he’s not interested in you, that he doesn’t care about you, that you’re not good enough. You want to believe in God. Then start believing. Start acting as though God is real in your life. This may seem strange, like a charade, dishonest, wrong. But all believing in God is an act of faith. All you’re doing is extending this to before you encountered God as well as after encountering him. Abandon all expectations of what meeting with God should be like. When it happens – if it happens – and, yes, somehow, we have to put that “if” in the sentence, it might not happen – you will know that it’s happened. But remember, when it happens it could be the dramatic revelation of a conversion experience, or it could be the unnoticed welling up of truth till you surprise yourself with the sudden revelation: “Gosh. I believe!”. Let’s go back to that “if”: this is really important: if the encounter with God is real, then we must allow ourselves the possibility that it might not happen. Meeting with God is not something that we are socially constructing for ourselves; it is meeting a real person. He “might not show up”, but then, when we do meet him, we know that this is a real encounter. In the same way that we cannot force someone to love us – but when they do it is truly wonderful, so we cannot force God to appear at our command – but when he does appear, it is overwhelming, and wonderful beyond measure. Somehow, we have to believe that he does love us – and then try and spot the signs that this is so – remembering that the signs might not be the ones we were expecting.

God is real. It’s quite easy to accept that as a proposition that may well be true, and, personally, I am inclined to believe it. Just as it is easy to weigh up evidence to the contrary and conclude that this is a false proposition. But to know that God is real – to know this for yourself, requires an encounter with the living God. If you have not had this encounter yet, then reach out. Don’t wait for an encounter and only then decide to give your life to loving God. Start loving him now. Act out a life of faith in him. This sounds so strange: “So, it’s only an act; it’s not real”. But the acting out is both: yes, it is just an act because you are starting to live in tune with a truth that you have not yet encountered, but your actions are also deeply real because you are acting on faith. And what is more faithful than to show faith before you truly, actually have faith?  One of the ideas about the resurrection of Jesus that I love is, “You will meet him on the way”. The resurrection of Jesus has just been announced, but most of the disciples have not met him yet. They are told to go to Galilee and they will meet him there. They have to set off believing that they will meet him before they have encountered for themselves that he is risen. I think this is a good illustration for the life of faith in God. God must be encountered as a real presence in your life. Reach out and give him a chance. I understand that this is still infuriating for those who really want to meet God and feel that he just is not there. I am simply trying to explore as well as I can what the experience of meeting God is like. I wish you well with your search.

Once we have met God, we will love him. Love him with all our hearts. What we need is to encounter him for ourselves. He is real. He is near at hand. He is calling us. He is reaching out his hand now, as he has been all our lives. Reach out in faith and put your hand in his.

Encountering God

Part 4

So, some people are lucky. They say that God, in his grace, always makes the first move, and they have encountered God: he is a reality in their lives, and they love him. What about those others who want to know God and God just isn’t playing his part? If you are saying to yourself, “I want to believe in God”, then, by definition you have made a move towards him. If God is supposed to always make the first move, then he should certainly make a move toward you now that you have declared an interest. God just needs to get a move on!

This is why I say we need to reach out to him before we know that he is there. Consider the gap between knowing about God and knowing God. Everybody knows something about God – even if they then totally reject those ideas. But knowing God requires some sort of encounter and relationship. We may say, “I used to just know what others said about God, but now I know him for myself”. This sort of knowledge of God very naturally overflows into having faith in him. However, we are considering the situation in which we don’t at the moment believe in God. We understand what belief in God is, but we don’t actually have that belief, so we have neither knowledge of God nor belief in him. So, it is an act of faith to reach out our hand before we have either knowledge or belief that he is there. It’s so counter-intuitive. But if we wait until we have faith before we reach out our hand, then we will never reach out, for reaching out is what faith is. When we reach out, we already have faith, because we are showing our faith, even before God takes our hand. Now that is faith!

So, you reach out your hand. What happens next? What should happen is that you experience your hand being taken into another’s hand, an experience of someone leaning into you in an embrace, of a whisper in your ear, which should say, “Hello. Welcome” but instead audaciously says, as the very first words you hear, “I love you”. Of course, I am speaking in analogies; please don’t expect sensory experiences with your external senses; this is all going on in our minds and hearts, but this is the closest I can come to in explaining what an encounter with God is like, and so, if you have reached out your hand, this is what you should experience.

And you might.

Or you might not. God, of course, has no physical hands, so if you literally reach out your hand – which is a lovely gesture and very helpful once you have got to know and love God – you will not actually feel anything. The voice in your ear, which is, of course, the inner ear of your mind, and the feeling of close intimacy are easier to come to terms with, but cannot be forced, and are in no way guaranteed. You just have to take the risk that you reach out your hand, give yourself, and you get nothing back. I can’t explain this. Except perhaps to say that God is a personal agent in charge of his actions, whom we cannot control. He is not like electricity and if we plug in our plug then our device will power up.

Encountering God

Part 3

Some of us are lucky and we have a religious upbringing. This means that we are introduced to ideas about God and to the normality of believing him before we have met him for ourselves. As we are children, we just go along with what our parents say. They – and all the others worshipping – seem to believe in God; they are talking about him as though he exists, in as natural a way as talking about anyone else who exists. And, more than this, they are praying to him, worshipping him, and expressing love as though they are deeply grateful for what this person called, “God” has done for them. Then, at some point it all becomes real for you. This might happen gradually: the reality of God sort of creeps up on you. Perhaps like a mist rolling in from the sea, you suddenly discover that you are enveloped, and what seemed far away, or something that you just knew about, you now know for yourself, because you are experiencing the presence of God – the presence of God which you’ve heard about for so long; had seen no reason to object to by rejecting your religious upbringing, but had not known for yourself – and now you do. Others with a religious upbringing can point to a moment of conversion: “It was about 7.30pm on 3^rd March; I was just thinking quietly when, wham! all of a sudden God was there in the room with me. I was overwhelmed and fell to my knees”.

Both these avenues for meeting God can happen to people without a religious upbringing. I think it’s just easier if you have had a religious upbringing because you are giving yourself opportunities in your life to encounter God. You are making time and space when God might speak to you, and you have equipped yourself with the ideas and images that would make talking about God easier, and easier to comprehend what you are experiencing. Many people today do not give God much of a chance to get a word in with them – but he still manages quite often. When he does, it may well strike you as a revelation out of the blue – and indeed it may be, but perhaps also, it will be, as we were thinking above, a slow unfolding of a dance where we hadn’t heard the music start, but unwittingly we had taken the first steps towards a hovering truth, still barely at the corner of our eyes, until it stands right before us, and, suddenly shifting our focus from far off to near at hand, we discover that we have been staring at the one we love all along, but now we can see him.

Encountering God

Part 2

So, many people wait, wanting to believe, but not quite able to let themselves go – to give themselves to the life of faith, until they know for sure. There is this strange tension between knowledge and faith. People who have met with God are so overwhelmed by the reality and wonder of God that they want to say, “I know that God is real”. However, strictly speaking, they do not “know”; they simply “believe” that God is real. And in our society, knowledge ranks above faith in the hierarchy. Kierkegaard gives a very good reasonable explanation as to why it makes sense to invert that hierarchy, but it is not the natural way for people to think before they have come to faith. And that is exactly the dilemma they find themselves in, because they don’t have faith yet.

Of course, some people seem to be very lucky, and God just comes to meet them! This is so unfair for those who want to meet God, who feel, perhaps, that they are open and trying, and God just doesn’t turn up. On a theological point, I need to point out that much of what I’ve said so far is wrong, in that I am focussing on the need for us to reach out in order to meet God. Actually, the truth is that God always reaches out to us before we reach out to him. This is what we call grace and is the very essence of God. So, what’s going on here?

It’s not that easy to classify, because everyone is different. When people fall in love and look back on how it happened, who can say who made the first move? We may well be able to remember the first moment when that spark leapt into life, but did that happen because of the smile she gave me – was that the first act of our love – or did she smile because of the way I had looked at her – perhaps a look before I even knew myself that I loved her? But with God, he always makes the first move – but it’s not easy to discern exactly what it was or how it happened. As with human relationships, all we know is that we now love each other, so it is with God, we know that we love him, but we can’t quite see far enough back to notice when it happened. We weren’t watching at the time; we didn’t realise that God was drawing him to us with cords of love.

As it seemed to work OK last week publishing a long article in 5 daily posts, I thought I’d do the same this week – but even then, the chunks are pretty long! I thought I’d post a daily prayer alongside each one – at least they’re shorter!

Encountering God

Part 1

Dearest Lord, how may I know you? You who are so beyond me, so unlike me? Yet in your gracious love you draw close to me and make yourself known. I call on you now please to draw very close to me, into my inmost heart and mind that I may know you and love you. Amen

Meeting God is a peculiar thing. Lots of people say they have met him, and recommend that you would be glad if you met him too. And a lot of people are very open to this suggestion. They would love to believe in God, and all it needs is a bit of incontrovertible proof. Just a tiny bit – that’s all it would need. And that’s precisely what there isn’t any of. If only discovering God for yourself was like discovering Mt Everest for yourself. People could tell us about the mountain; we’d realise that we’d like to climb it – and then we start totting up the difficulties. It’s a long way away; it’s very difficult to climb; you need to get yourself very fit and join up with an expedition that requires a lot of time and money and commitment. But that’s all OK: you want to climb Everest and you can get there, and you climb it, and you think: “Wow, here I am. They told me Everest exists and that it’s magnificent, and that when I get to the top it will be a supremely fulfilling experience – and they were right”. Job done!

In this analogy, we see that some people might decide it wasn’t worth the effort – they have enough good things in their life, and they can manage without seeing Everest for themselves. Some might go but fail in their first couple attempts at climbing it and conclude they’re not up to it – it’s disappointing, but, again, life has other joys and so, ultimately, it’s no great loss. But knowing the reality of God, and experiencing it for yourself, are not like this. This is why I began with a prayer. Encountering God begins with us reaching out before we know for sure that he is real. This is risky. What if we reach out our hand to God and nothing happens? We are going to feel so stupid! Of course, this means that meeting with God is an act of faith – we have to step out to meet him before we are sure that he is really there. Damn! If only we could have some objective proof that he is real, then many of us would be prepared to put in immense effort to find him. But we don’t want to waste our life on a wild goose chase. There is not the fear of being rebuffed, which sometimes holds us back from reaching out to another person to say we like them, because everyone who does meet God says that he welcomes them. However, people understand that living your life with God is a big thing: he will want changes in your life. As he is the be all and end all, we really ought to be transforming our lives so that everything is in tune with him. We really don’t want to go to all that trouble if it’s not really true.