Category: Faith

There is a saying that familiarity breeds contempt.  Whatever about breeding contempt, familiarity can certainly make us blind.  When we grow up with people, when we live with people and become accustomed to them, we can find it difficult to believe that there is more to them than meets the eye.  We can make assumptions that may in fact be wrong.

This certainly was the case with Jesus.  His own town’s people, his neighbours, could not accept the fact that a person who went to school with them, who played with them, who attended the synagogue with them, who socialised with them, who worked for them as a tradesman was in fact a prophet, indeed the long awaited prophet promised by God.

Perhaps the issue for the Jesus’ town’s people was ordinariness rather than familiarity.  How can God be present in someone who is so ordinary, who is like the rest of us?  Can God’s Messiah be someone who comes from a remote village, who lives in relatively poor circumstances, who works as a carpenter, whose life is full of simple, mundane chores?  This is the scandal of Christianity; that God has come to us in and through the life of an ordinary human being known as Jesus of Nazareth.  Whether we like it or not, whether we are comfortable with it or not, God is to be found in the humanity of Jesus.  This is the fundamental truth of Christianity and it is called the Incarnation.

The Incarnation has two important implications for us.  The first is that we need to accept that we experience God in and through the humanity of Jesus.  The second is a consequence of the first.  We also need to accept that we experience God in our own humanity and in the humanity of other people.  God is not to be found in some ethereal world outside and beyond our human experience.  God is found in the here and now, in the concreteness and ordinariness of everyday life, in all that is human.  To deny our humanity in all its forms of expression is to hide from God.  To say ‘yes’ to our humanity is to say ‘yes’ to God.

Contemplative spirituality invites us to find God in all things. This invitation is based on the belief that God’s presence is revealed in and through the totality of our human lives.  We cannot limit God’s presence to the ‘religious bits,’ to what happens in church, to times of prayer, to the celebration of the sacraments. God’s presence is manifested in our encounters with other people, in our relationships, in the inner stirring of our hearts, in art and music and nature, in our times of leisure, in our pain and struggles, in the events of our daily lives.  All these things and more are sources of God’s revelations.  They are the window that looks inward to God.  The human life of every person is the holy ground, the sacred place, where God is met and known. 

For most people recognising the ways in which God is present in their lives does not come naturally.  Tuning into God’s presence is in fact an art and a discipline that needs to be cultivated.  Among the things that can help us to grow in contemplative awareness let me mention three.

(1) Take time to stand and stare.  Most people today are too busy to stand. Perhaps this is because they get their value from their work. A lot of the time we are in overdrive, under pressure to do, to achieve, to produce.  It seems we are not allowed to be anymore.  Perhaps we have lost the art of play.  Play is not only for children.  It is for adults too.  Play is a non-productive activity.  It allows us to be and to rejoice in the act of being. By taking time to stand we are free to stare.  Staring is a particular way of seeing, of looking at reality.  To stare is not to analyse or define reality.  It is to enter into communion with reality.  In the words of the late William McNamara it is to take a long loving look at the real. To be willing to take a long loving look at the real opens us to the reality of God and allows us to glimpse the God of reality.

(2) Pay greater attention to what is happening around you and within you.  There is an old Portuguese proverb which says, “When God wants to hide something he places it right in front of our eyes.”  Often God is staring us in the face and we do not see him!  Elizabeth Browning puts this well when she says, “Earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.  But only he who sees takes off his shoes.  The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries.”  Perhaps we do not recognise God because we do not expect to find God in the ordinary things of life.  But the truth is earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.  Believing God is in the ordinary is one thing, being attentive to the ordinary is another.  Unless we are really paying attention to what is happening in our lives we are unlikely to notice the divine presence.  The practice of mindfulness, widespread today, is a way of paying attention to what is happening in our lives. This art can help us to develop our capacity to recognise the presence of God in all that is real.

(3) Practice a form of prayer known as the examen or review of awareness.  The examen is a form of prayer that comes from the Ignatian tradition.  In practice it involves spending about ten minutes before bedtime looking back over the day in the light of the question:  Where was God in my life today?  Gently surveying the day with this question in mind helps us to notice the way God is working is our lives and to realise how we can in fact find God in all things. It also increases our sensitivity to the movements, often subtle, of the Holy Spirit.

I recently had a conversation with a man in his late thirties.  He told me that many of his contemporaries had no real source of guidance in their lives.  “They have no north star,” is the way he put it.  It is certainly true that there is a breakdown of trust in our society.  Many people have lost faith in the major institutions that have been the bedrock of our way of life.  We are missing a moral compass and things like consumerism, individualism and the social media are filling the vacuum. 

On the feast of the Epiphany, sometimes referred to as ‘little Christmas’, we meet three men who had the courage to follow a new star that appeared in the sky.  Their journey brought them to an unfamiliar place and to an unexpected discovery.  They found a child who had come into the world to offer its peoples guidance and hope.  So convinced were they of their discovery that their lives took a whole new direction and were given a new sense of purpose.  The Gospel tells us that they returned home by a different route.

The truth is there is a moral compass to guide us.  We do have a ‘north star’.  This star is the person of Jesus discovered by the Magi in a stable in Bethlehem.  Jesus is the Word of God who came among us to speak the truth that sets us free. He is the wise man who inspires and guides us.  The teachings of Jesus provide us with meaning and give purpose and direction to our lives.     

Let’s not allow the failures of the Church and her ministers prevent us from hearing the message of Jesus.  The Church in her weakness may confuse and disappoint us, but Jesus will not.  He has words of comfort and hope, words that will change the way we see ourselves, other people and the world around us.  Peter once said to Jesus, “Lord, who else is there to go to; it is you who have the words of eternal life” (see John 6:68).  Jesus is still the only one who can offer us the message of eternal life. It is he who is our ‘north star’.

It is somewhat consoling, even encouraging, to know that Jesus got angry and expressed his anger on occasions.  Jesus was a passionate man and he felt deeply about the things that were important.  Using the Temple in Jerusalem to make money was something that offended him.  His anger was not intended to hurt the money changers themselves, but to damage their trade.

Anger is a human emotion.  We get angry.  The anger we feel on occasions is natural and cannot be helped.  What we have to learn to do is channel our anger in the right way, like Jesus.  If we allow our anger to cause harm or hurt to other people then we have lost control of ourselves.

There is of course another more important message in the dialogue between Jesus and the money changers in the Temple.  It has to do with the fundamental question about where we meet God.  Is there a special place where we encounter God?  For the Jews of Jesus’ day it was the great Temple in Jerusalem.  The Temple in Jerusalem was holy ground, a sacred place, God’s home on earth.  Jesus challenged this belief.  While not denying the value of buildings for prayer, Jesus insisted that there is now a new place to find God.  “Jesus said, ‘Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up.’  The Jews replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this Temple: are you going to raise it up again in three days?’  But he was speaking of the Temple that was his body” (John 2:19-21).

At the heart of Christianity is the belief that the unique place where we meet God is in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  It is in the humanity of Jesus where we find God. This means that if we are to get to know God we need to get to know Jesus.  A Christian can be described as one who has found God in the life, the teaching, the death and the resurrection of Jesus.

It is not a good thing to put people on a pedestal. We are all weak, limited, imperfect and fickle.  We cannot not disappoint one another.  To expect too much from other human beings is to set ourselves up for constant disappointment.

It is the same with institutions.  If we put too much trust in institutions we are going to be let down.  In recent times we have seen how self-serving all the big institutions are.  The flaws of our politicians, our bankers and our church leaders have been exposed often dramatically and with devastating consequences.  No wonder so many people in our society seem to lack any kind of moral compass.

When it comes to the institution of the church it is important for us to realise that the church is not an end in itself but a means to an end.  The primary reason the church exists is to bring people into a relationship with God.  Our deepest belonging is to God.  This means that our security is to be found in the relationship God has with us not in the institutional life of the church.  People are often attracted to the church because they believe it will give them the certainty they crave.  Those who seek certainty in institutional religion have a tendency to cling to every detail of church teaching and practice.  No institution including the church can provide us with absolute certainty. Indeed the desire for certainty can prevent us from putting our faith in a loving and dependable God.

To mature in our faith we must move from belonging to encounter.  It is not enough just to belong to the church.  This will only satisfy some of our needs.  Sooner or later we must have an encounter with God.  An encounter with God is a uniquely personal experience and it helps us to take possession of the relationship God has with us.  Only a relationship with God can nourish the deeper longings in the human heart. An adult Christian is one who has encountered God and who finds love and security in a living relationship with God.

It is an encounter with God that brings us into the mystical stage of religion.  In the mystical stage of religion we know that we are loved unconditionally and that we have nothing to fear.  This is the stage when we discover that God is our rock, refuge and strength.  It is also the stage when we surrender and trust at deeper levels. Ultimately we must live by faith.  To live by faith is to anchor our lives in God in the sure knowledge that God who is love is totally faithful to us.