Our fundamental stance before God is one of receptivity. All that is essential in our spiritual lives comes from God. Let’s begin with God’s presence. We do not create God’s presence in our lives. God’s presence in our lives is given. In God we live and move and have our being. As Hopkins so aptly put it, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Without God’s presence we would cease to exist. God’s presence is a loving presence, a creative presence, a sustaining presence. At every moment of every day God is loving us, creating us, sustaining us.
Similarly we do not create a relationship with God. The relationship God has with us, with each of us, is given. It is a natural consequence of God’s presence in our lives. God’s presence creates relationship because God is Relationship. To be God is to be in relationship. This is what we mean when we say that God is Trinity. Whether we are aware of it or not God is in relationship with us. Spirituality is our discovery of this relationship. It is our acceptance that we have received the gift of being in relationship with the Love that includes all things.
And then there is this Unconditional Love. We do not make God love us. God’s love for us is free, unmerited, gratuitous. It is pure gift. The spiritual life is not about winning God’s approval and God’s favour. It is not about making ourselves acceptable to God. Our efforts, our good deeds do not force God to love us. God’s love for us is given. It is a fact. It is with good reason that the late Henri Nouwen said that life is a short opportunity to say ‘yes’ to the unconditional love of God and death is a full coming home to that love.
This is why we need a spiritual path that helps us accept the unconditional love of God. The essential movement or flow of our spiritual lives is from God to us, not from us to God. The spiritual life is not an ascending movement. It is a descending movement. We must learn to pray with open and empty hands. The foundation of the spiritual life is an acceptance that all is grace, all is gift, all is given.