When is God present to us?

God is always present to us: closer than our breathing, closer than consciousness itself, and closer than our choosing. The reality is that Creation was not a long ago event, but is happening this instant. God’s love is totally faithful. God is creating us every instant of our lives. God’s love is ongoing and forever. Father Thomas Keating wrote that the monumental illusion we have is that God is absent. Maybe we have misinterpreted the phrase in the Lord ’s Prayer – Our Father who art in heaven to mean that God is far away. It does seem to me that perhaps this means here and now we live in mystery and do not see God yet. We are aware of self, but when we arrive at adulthood without any awareness of God, we can be tied up in feelings of guilt, of fear, of resentment, of anger, of loneliness, of greed.

As we are born in a completely helpless state and learn little by little, almost entirely by imitation, we also imitate the desires others have. And often those desires are for things that are replacing the real inner desire. That is we get to be overwhelmed by desire to be the center of attention, to have many possessions, to be in control of others or of situations, to be praised, even the desire to get even, to retaliate. These are all false programs for happiness. Also in this early helpless state and along the way of our first few years, we may suffer other traumas, such as neglect, meanesses, the false expectations of others.

When we are led by God to some awareness of his presence and then his love, we turn to God for what Keating calls Divine therapy. Think of how Christian Meditation is Divine therapy.

We sit down in silence and make that act of faith in the reality of the Presence of God and in the Love God has for us. Then we repeat our prayer word or mantra and in this way let go of our thoughts and images and feelings. And into this silence the Divine therapist is free to heal the wounds of a lifetime. Little by little. It can take along time by our schedules for God to heal us. So right away we need to make an act of faith in God’s loving care of us. It is not necessary to have great feelings about this. Just make the act of faith. We need to acknowledge to God our belief that God is with us, intimately. That God has care of us, mysteriously. Let us pray.