DIVINE UNDERSTANDING

                          Divine Understanding

                                         

Does God mind if we don’t give him attention for some periods of time? Is God okay with this kind of neglect?

Yes, but only if that yes is sufficiently qualified. Taken as it stands, this can be used to justify too many things (spiritual laziness, selfishness, excessive self-preoccupation, culpable resistance to deeper thought, excessive procrastination with what’s important, and countless other things) that are not good. As the Catechism says, prayer “ought to animate us at every moment. But we tend to forget him who is our life and our all. This is why the Fathers of the spiritual life in the Deuteronomic and prophetic traditions insist that prayer is a remembrance of God often awakened by the memory of the heart: ‘We must remember God more often than we draw breath.’”

But let’s not forget: God understands! God is a loving parent who understands the inattentiveness and self-preoccupation of his children.

God has not put us into this life primarily to see if we can keep our attention focused on him all the time. God intended for us to immerse ourselves in the things of this world without, of course, forgetting that these things are, at the end of the day, passing and that we’re destined for a life beyond this world. We’re not on this earth to be always thinking of the eternal, though we’re not on earth either to forget about the eternal.

However, because the unexamined life is less than human, we also need to have moments where we try to make God the centre of our conscious awareness. We need regular moments of explicit prayer, of meditation, of contemplation, of worship, of Sabbath, of explicit acknowledgement of God and of explicit gratitude to God. We do need moments when we make ourselves consciously aware that there is a next life, an eternal one, beyond this present one.

But, in the end, that’s not in competition with or in contradiction to our natural focus on the things of this life, namely, our day-to-day relationships, our families, our work, our concerns for health, and our natural focus on news, sports, entertainment, and enjoyment.

These are what naturally draw our attention and, done in good will and honesty, won’t prevent us from pushing our attention towards the deeper things and eventually towards God. The great mystic, St John of the Cross, tells us that, if we’re sincere and honest as we focus on the mundane things in our lives, deeper things can happen, unconsciously, under the surface and we will grow closer to God.

For example, the famed monk, Carlo Carretto, shares this story: After living many years alone as a hermit in the Sahara desert and spending countless hours in prayer and meditation, he went back to Italy to visit his mother. She was a woman who had raised a large family and who had gone through years of her life when she was too burdened with responsibility and duty to spend much time in explicit prayer.

What Carretto discovered to his surprise was that she was more contemplative than he was, not because all those hours of explicit prayer as a monk weren’t good, but because all those selfless tasks his mother did in raising her family and caring for others were very good.

And God understands this. God understands that we’re human, spiritually frail, busy, and instinctually geared towards the things of this world so that we don’t naturally move towards prayer and church, and that even when we are at prayer or in church, we’re generally still distracted, tired, bored, impatient, thinking of other things, and longing for prayer and church to be over with.

It’s not easy to keep God as the centre of our conscious attention; but God both knows this and is not unsympathetic.