“If you hallow this life you meet the living God ”
~ Martin Buber
In 1961, Senior Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin, the Russian Cosmonaut who was the first person to orbit earth, dropped the already frigid temperature of the Cold War era even further when upon his return from his one-man space odyssey he announced rather self-assuredly that he had been to the outer limits and looked around, but God was nowhere to be found. Imagination teases with the thought of some hawkish anti-communist or rabid creationist calling a press conference to match the spaceman’s inanity by defending the divine no-show: “Let’s not forget that Mr. Gagarin was only in space for 108 minutes after all and was traveling at a blurry 18,000 miles an hour. Visibility was less than ideal.”
Again, the central conviction and revelation of Christianity is that God is with us and that this is epitomized and embodied for Christians in Jesus who is Emmanuel ~ God-with-us. As a work of love, the incarnation, the compassionate ongoing action of God in Christ through the power of the Spirit, not only saves us, but saves us from understanding God as a far off, extra-terrestrial, transcendent being that dwells above the heavens in outer space. The incarnation saves us from having to look or listen for God in some ethereal realm, in the extraordinary, ahistorical, unearthly, or celestial. By becoming human, God saves us from understanding and experiencing the spiritual life as something otherworldly, contrary to matter, castle in the sky bye-and-bye, incompatible with the everyday, and thus divorced from this life and this earth.
Getting Inside In Again
That God in Jesus became human is a living reminder that we have to listen and look no further than our own lives to become aware of and respond to the Holy. For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, human experience becomes a sanctuary where we encounter and are encountered by God. As Martin Buber wrote, “If you hallow this life you meet the living God.” Grounded in the incarnation, a listening heart invites and encourages us to be attentive to our own lives where, if we know how to listen, we stand a good chance of hearing the Holy. We find God here or we don’t find God at all, or more accurately, we are found here by God or we are not found at all.
With God’s primal question to Adam and Eve still echoing in our ears, “Where are you?” we too realize that our first call, our original vocation, is to come out from hiding, or perhaps I should say to come in from hiding in order to be here, to be present not only to God but present in the garden of our own lives where God waits for us. God is not the Transcendent, Holy Other found far away from my life but kneaded smack dab in the midst of it like yeast in dough, like a bundled child lying in a manger, like a manger placed in the human heart.
The problem, to use Robert Frost’s diagnosis, is “We’re so much out / that the odds are against / Our ever getting inside in again. / But inside in is where we’ve got to get.” The reason we’ve got to get inside in again, and one of the rationales for cultivating a contemplative life, is expressed by St. Augustine in his now famous prayer which includes these words: “You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. . . .You were with me, but I was not with you.”
Listening to our lives in prayerful silence makes it possible for us to get inside in again where we meet God in the rendezvous of hushed hearts. Encountering God here in this “elected silence” increases the chances that the ears of our heart will be open enough to hear God in the garden of creation, in the orchard that is our everyday life.
PRACTICE:
Prayer mantra: You were with me, but I was not with you.
A Blessed Christmas,
Dan