GOD

GOD

Mother Teresa’s visit to South American village. “Mother, give us God.” In poverty, people want God. “Papa, I am poor.”  I hate to have to admit it, says Peter Lemmas, but my God IS an old man with a long white beard. He sits in the clouds, like a grandpa in his rocking chair. It seems a shockingly irreverent image, even a caricature, but I am not so sure. My God is old. He has seen everything, been everywhere, there is nothing new which would knock him out of his stride, not even Christian theologians announcing that God is dead.

Being over 60 myself, I’m beginning to feel there is something to be said for age. Young people, for instance, can be very censorious, devastating. Listening in to a debate among young people I am struck by the dismissive arrogance of some of the debaters. Lacking wisdom teeth, they sit in devastating judgement on politicians and others who had borne the heat of many a day.  But, “old is gold, and yellow is mellow.” Remember the “Dad”. Old does not mean static or staid. I find it delightful to hear an old man proposing a revolutionary idea, or agree with a new idea proposed by another. You feel the view of this old man comes not just from an itch for novelty, but an anguish for change, something chiselled out of experience, hard won.  Pope John XXIII was an old man when he electrified the world by his calling for an Ecumenical Council.

Taken in that sense, God is always young, always on the move, always active. “Behold, I make all things new.” “New” is his favourite word. That God is always before me, beckoning me. He calls me to be continually on the move, to recognise my pilgrim state. He calls me to trust him over prices, governments, institutions, traditions.

When we sit before God in silent prayer, we make ourselves available. I meet that God in silent prayer, especially in the silence of being “disponible.” I don’t know of a full translation of that rich French word. It means being available, at the ready, being watchful, like a sentry on duty. That feeling of “disponibilite” comes in moments of thoughtfulness, not necessarily of silence. It comes when you let yourself feel challenged by the things that other men and women have done in response to God’s call. It is reinforced in moments of prayer.  (Bishop and the lady: “Do you have a room to sit still in ? Well, begin that way.” Having time for God).

The schoolmen (metaphysicians) said that God is unchanging. God never changes, they said. How dull, I used to think ! How uninteresting he must be ! Things that do not change are lifeless, boring, dead. But that is not what I meant when I said that god does not change. It means, I think, that he is not fickle or moody; that he is steady, constant, reliable. “I AM who AM.” The One who will always stand by you. He’s a friend you can always bank on. His love of me does not depend on my behaviour, so I don’t need to be performance oriented. How many times our mood has changed due to the changing behaviour of our friends. No matter how coldly or selfishly I respond, he is always loving, welcoming, encouraging. Matt Talbot used to say, “What God wants of me is constancy.”  Constancy is a divine trait. The hours Mat Talbot spent at prayer and song in his garret room in Rutland Street were his endeavour to respond to the constant love of God.

God is always before me, always to be discovered, always more interesting, always worth travelling further for. We will not have it all with the beatific vision. It is not a single lightning flash that immediately ends all desire. Each moment of eternity will be satisfying, and at the same time call us deeper into the mystery into the mystery before us. There was a child at Knock who had a vision. She wanted to touch the figures she had seen in the apparition. The vision had delighted her, and now she wanted to enter more intimately into it, to feel it. Or like the young wife, born blind, who fell down the stairs at 32, and woke in hospital to see her husband and two children for the first time. She was disappointed with her husband; he did not look as nice as he felt, she said. But she was delighted with her children, and each day brought a fresh delight, a now tint to the trees, a new flower in the ground, a new colour to the children’s cheeks. (Sometimes, I suppose, we need to fall down the steps to wake up to God, smiling down at us. “You missed a step, dear ?)

Deepening growth of eternal life. Eternal life will be like that. Eternal life is not eternal marble. Life is growing. Eternal life is moving ever deeper into the mystery of this Father-Creator-God, from whom all beauty, interest and joy proceeds. That life is never-ending journey. God satisfies, he is the only one who does. The God who satisfies calls me to divest myself of all that is less than him. Of family, position, money, home.  This was the inspiration of Brendan and the Irish medieval monks. They did not travel to  Salzburg or Bobbio or the big flashy cities to evangelise; they travelled to get away from the props of everyday life which sheltered them from meeting God in the wilderness of the sea, of the hills and forests and deserts. Their missionary work was a by-product of the restless search for God. Search for God for themselves and for others. This divesting of self is a statement that God is God, that only God is God, that only God is the worthy end of life, nothing less.

The idea of God is important, practical, relevant. It determines behaviour here and now. It sets me free from all that is less than him. The Desert Fathers used to say that the will of man is a wall of brass separating them from God.

Angelo Roncalli and his spiritual director: “Il Dio e tutto; io sono nulla.”  The idea of God says to me: “I am nothing, God is everything. I am darkness, God is light. What there is of light in me is God.” He says to me, as he said to Job:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations ?

Tell me, since you are so well informed ?

Who decided the dimensions of it, do you know ?

Or who stretched the measuring line across it ?

What supports its pillars at their bases ?

Who laid its cornerstone

when all the stars of the morning are singing for joy,

and the Sons of God in chorus were chanting praise ?”

At the same time, the idea of God says that the things I do today matter. It is not good enough to say, “It will do,” or “Sure, it will be all the same in one hundred years.”  A believing person, or a believing nation, could not have that as a principle. The daily decisions I make, the small hidden things I do, matter. “For it from within, from man’s heart, that evil intentions emerge. “ This means that the God I serve looks not so much to my achievements as to my person, asks not what I have done, but what I am. Nobody else can look on you that way. Bishops or Mothers General, in making appointments, however much they seek to analyse the heart, are limited to judging a person by achievements. The Western fallacy of efficiency. Only God can look to the heart. And at the same time He is the measure of my heart. I am not true, just, honest, integral, in face of the truth, justice, honesty, integrity of God. There are absolutes; they are personified in God. Pathetically, I can only approximate to them.

I meet God in failure, in sorrow, in disappointment, sometimes in depression, though mostly when moving out of depression. “The God of the gaps” or “the God of the cracks.....crackpots !” say the theologians knowingly. But it is not that I believe in God only in moments of need. It is just that when bereft of the normal supports of life, the sense of reasonable daily well-being, when shaken down to my roots, that’s the time I see clearly what is important in my life, what really matters. Christians have met God in the wilderness for many centuries. The light still shines in the darkness.  I meet God in ecstasy. Atone Wilson described joy as a “fremissement”. A shuddering, the rush of ecstasy that hits you in fleeting moments of great joy. The family greeting Daddy at the airport, the children opening the surprise on Christmas morning, the “Ex Termed” from Mozart’s Requiem, the welcome of a mentally handicapped child for a visitor to the house, the brave acceptance of tragic news. These are flashes of the presence and activity of God, and you know it when you experience them.  I meet God in the Eucharist. Not only in the action of the Mass, but in the continuing presence of the Lord in the tabernacle.

How do you teach people how to talk on television. Tell them to look at the lens  -  even to love the lens. Some find it hard to speak without people in front of them, with faces reacting. In fact, it is easier to talk to a lens than to an audience. You can only imagine the faces reacting, and agreeing. The lens does not scowl, smirk, or dissent. It is silent and still.  Eucharistic prayer is a bit like that. God-made-man is hidden under the form of bread. Compare and contrast handling the Eucharist and handling parishioners. It is easier to believe in the presence of God under the form of bread than to believe in his presence in the drug addict who skulks in the school compound, the drunkard who hangs around the sacristy door, the improvident mother who is always begging, the aggressive widow who wants to know why her husband’s name was not called out last Sunday. God is present in these as well. I ask the God of the Eucharist to help me recognise the God in my neighbour.

God is in heaven and all’s right with the world. People ridicule that approach, yet it has its merits. You can become so preoccupied with the problems of today’s world that you neglect that basic call of God to adoration and thanksgiving. God’s in his heaven and caring for the world, or calling me to care for the world. But especially calling me to be thankful for the life about me, and in me. As a Buddhist saying goes: “After the ecstasy, wash the dishes.” The true contemplative is well aware of the anguish of the world, but has a basic attitude of thanksgiving despite it. It is the deep down feeling that at the root of our lives lies the love and goodness of God, and that no matter what the global or local problems may be, that fact never alters.

On Good Friday, a parish priest brought Communion to an old man in the parish. The man said, “I’m glad you came today, because this is the day they put that young gentleman on the Cross”. An Afro-American was being instructed for the Catholic Baptism, and he was learning about the Holy Trinity.  “I forget the name of the third gentleman.” A gentleman, not in the sense of a well dressed man in suit and tie. But in the full meaning of someone who is refined, without ever needing the refiner’s fire. Rough gold needs to be refined in the fire. God is pure gold and needs no refinement. The character or personality of  God escapes me. I have no way of estimating it. School children learn of the personality of Christ. Yet even that is impossible. To evaluate personality I have to have some weakness to pinpoint, some flaw against which to judge the rest. It is easy to write about the character of Lady Macbeth, but the character of God is quite literally ineffable.

But one thing I know is that the idea of God is not stifling but liberating. Does the idea you have of God mould your life, or does life mould your idea of God ? Perhaps a bit of both. Dealing with scrupulous people  -  their idea of God is stifling, a constraint. A concept which should be liberating is in fact enslaving.  Take some time off and search your heart to formulate your idea of God. My image  of God is a concentrate of my deepest desire for goodness plus all the love that people have for me plus all the men and women I have admired in life. This is not just anthropomorphic but even egotistical. Maybe there is a rightness to this too, if I take seriously the Genesis account of creation, which sees each of us made in the image of God. Then the traces of God’s presence must be discoverable in my deepest self, my most profound thoughts, my most ardent and fervent desires and hopes. So the longest journey is the journey inwards.

God’s mystery and our deepest self.  What is at the core of every person’s deepest experience, what haunts every human heart, is a God whose mystery, light, and love have embraced the total person. God works in every person’s life as the One to whom we say our inmost “yes” or “no”. We may deny this, ignore it, but deep down we know that God is in love with us and we are all at least secretly in love with one another. One of the most important tasks of theology is “mystagogical”. It must lead persons into their own deepest mystery by awakening, deepening, and explicating what every person already lives. It must challenge persons to grasp the real meaning of their freedom as total response to or rejection of the demands of God’s love for no less than complete human authenticity. And because God has conquered the human heart through the pierced and risen heart of Jesus Christ, we can state the hope that all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.