Many people say that they could believe in God if they only experienced God. "Then I would believe!" And in my last post, I suggested that one way of becoming aware of God's presence in our lives is through the very desire for God. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O Lord," wrote St. Augustine, the fourth-century African bishop.
The desire for God, I believe, comes from God, and is in fact a way of experiencing God. So becoming aware of those desires is one of the first steps towards growing in awareness of the way God works within us.
Last week we looked at the feeling of incompletion as a way of experiencing the innate desire for God. There are other ways, as well.
Sometimes you experience a desire for God in very common situations: for example, standing silently in the snowy woods on a winter's day, finding yourself moved to tears during a movie, recognizing a strange sense of connection during a church service -- and feeling an inexpressible longing to savor this feeling and understand what it is.
In the years after my sister gave birth to my first nephew, I often felt overwhelmed with love when I was with him. Here was a beautiful new child, a person who had never existed before, given to the world. One day I came home from a visit to their house and was so filled with love that I wept -- out of gratitude, out of joy, and out of wonder. At the same time I longed to connect more with the mysterious source of this joy.
Common longings and heartfelt connections are ways of becoming conscious of the desire for God. We yearn for an understanding of feelings that seem to come from outside of us. We experience what the 16th-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross calls the desire for "I know not what."
Many of us have had experiences like this. We feel that we are standing on the brink of something important, on the edge of experiencing something just beyond us. We experience wonder. So why don't you hear more about these times?
Because many times we ignore them, reject them, or deny them. We chalk them up to being overwhelmed, overwrought, overly emotional. "Oh, I was just being silly!" you might say to yourself. So you disregard that longing you feel of the first breath of a spring breeze on your face after a long dark winter, because you tell yourself (or others tell you) that you were simply being emotional. This happens even to those practiced in the spiritual life: often, after an intense experience in prayer during a retreat, people are tempted to dismiss it as simply something that "just happened."
Or we simply don't recognize these moments as possibly having their origins in God.
"I don't believe in God, but I miss Him." That's Julian Barnes, beginning his recent, and haunting, memoir Nothing to be Frightened Of. The acclaimed author of Flaubert's Parrot takes as his subject his overpowering fear of death.
Barnes writes, "I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm." Barnes misses God. Who is to say that this "missing" does not arise from the very desire for God, which comes from God?
One friend, a self-described workaholic who hadn't been to church for a long time, went to a baptism of a friend's child. Suddenly she was overtaken by powerful feelings -- mainly the desire to live a more peaceful and centered existence. She began to cry, though she didn't know why. She told me that she felt an intense feeling of peace as she stood in church and watched the priest pour water over the baby's head.
To me, it seemed clear what was happening: she was experiencing, in this moment, when her defenses were down, God's desires for her. And it makes sense that a religious experience would happen in the context of a religious ceremony. But she laughed and dismissed it. "Oh," she said, "I guess I was just being emotional." And that was that.
It's a natural reaction: much in Western culture tries to tamp down or even deny these naturally spiritual experiences and explain them away in purely rational terms. It's always something other than God.
Likewise we may dismiss these events as being too common, too simple to come from God. Once, Mike, a Jesuit high school teacher, preached a short homily in our house chapel. The reading for the day was a story from the Old Testament, the Second Book of Kings (5:1-19), about Naaman the Syrian. Naaman, commander of the Syrian king's army, is suffering from leprosy and is sent by the king to ask the Prophet Elisha for healing. In response Elisha tells him to do something simple: bathe in the Jordan River seven times.
Naaman is furious. He thought that he would be asked to wash in some other river, some more important river. His servants say, "If the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?" In other words, why are you looking for some spectacular task? Do the simple thing. Naaman does it and is healed.
Mike said that our search for God is often like Naaman's. We're searching for something spectacular, to convince us of God's presence. Yet it is in the simple things, common events and common longings, where God may be found.
You may also fear accepting these moments as signs of the divine call. If you accept them as originating with God, you might have to accept that God wants to be in relationship with you, or is communicating with you directly, which is a frightening idea.
Fear is a common experience. Confronted with an indication that God is close to you can be alarming. Thinking about God wanting to communicate with us is something that many of us would rather avoid.
That is why so many stories in the Bible about men and women encountering the divine begin with the words, "Do not be afraid." The angel announcing the birth of Jesus to Mary says, "Do not be afraid" (Luke 1:30). Nine months later, on the eve of the birth of Jesus, the angel in the fields greets the shepherds. "Do not be afraid," the angel says (Luke 2:10). And when Jesus performs one of his first miracles in front of St. Peter, the fisherman falls to his knees, out of awe and fear. "Go away from me!" says Peter. And Jesus says, again, "Do not be afraid" (Luke 5:10).
Fear is a natural reaction to the divine, to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as the theologian Rudolf Otto says, the mystery that both fascinates and leaves us trembling.
Religious experiences are often dismissed -- not out of doubt that they aren't real, but out of fear that they are real after all.
Reflection Questions:
1) If you've never believed in God, or have doubted God's existence, have you ever had a desire for God? Or a longing for "I know not what"? How do you feel about identifying that desire as coming from God?
2) If you've wandered away from belief, do you "miss" God, like the author Julian Barnes does? Why?
3) Naaman dismisses the suggestion that the water from the Jordan River could heal him because it's too "common." What areas of your life might you be overlooking as "common" but which could be ways that God is present?
4) When you think of God communicating with you directly, through these heartfelt desires, does it ever make you frightened? Why? What does this say about your image of God?
In our next post, we'll look at "uncommon longings" and "everyday mysticism" as a way of experiencing God.
James Martin, SJ, is a Catholic priest and culture editor of America. This essay is adapted from his new book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything.
Paul Brandeis Raushenbush: 5 Suggestions for Re-Creation This Summer
Head in the sand Christians have more in common with militant Islamists than you could possibly imagine. Lets stop using fables that aren't even as old as the Greek Myths to run our lives.. My Grandfather left the church when he was a teenager because what they were teaching him and what he observed in the real world didn't match up. Is that hard to do?
Christianity is the belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
It isn't much but a bunch of straw men and deliberate jabs at Christians, but you do seem to enjoy poking us with that stick.
Christianity, like the other Abrahamic traditions is a perverse archaic superstition of desert nomadic tribes of the middle east from 3000 years ago!!
Christianity is the belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
There will NEVER be peace in the world until God and Allah go the same way as Apollo and Zeus - nothing more than interesting beliefs of ignorant people.
I don't want to live in a world where the little pleasures I receive from the neurons in my brain are not god. please, please, please let this little trancendant pleasure be god so I can write for Huffington post in a spiritual vein. And get high on an expense account.
Some atheists in US history:
Mark Twain, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison
More recent (worldwide):
Lance Armstrong, Isaac Asimov, James Cameron, Noam Chomsky, Rodney Dangerfield, Micky Dolenz,
Phil Donahue, Roger Ebert, Bob Geldof, Ricky Gervais, David Gilmour, Billy Joel, W.P. Kinsella (Field of Dreams), Bruce Lee, Geddy Lee, Seth MacFarlane, Barry Manilow, Sir Ian McKellen, Butterfly McQueen, Randy Newman, Ray Romano, Carl Reiner, Gene Roddenberry, Andy Rooney, Oliver Sacks, Pat Tillman, Kurt Vonnegut, Roger Waters, Gene Wilder, your neighbors down the street,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12201563
It's also "absurd" and "beyond all rational thought", as you say, to assert that god does *not* exist.
Can you prove to me that god doesn't exist?
Go ahead, right here. And talking about "sky fairies" and "flying spaghetti monsters" doesn't really count because these are insults, they aren't rational arguments. So let's see you come up with some well-reasoned arguments for atheism.
- yes it does. So does talking about Zeus, Thor, Swiatovid, Baal, Ranginui, Maheshwara, Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva, Ganesha, Hanuman, Tlazolteotl, Chalchiuhtlicue, and thousands more. Unless you are willing to claim that you can prove any of these "doesn't exist" your point is moot.
So let's see you come up with some well-reasoned arguments for YOUR atheism.
I don't know if you understand how frustrating and maddening it is for those of us who are atheists, and quite happy being so, to be told that we have in fact experienced god, the thing we have logically, rationally and calmly rejected as unsubstantiated nonsense, in the form of a perfectly ordinary human emotion. One of the truly liberating realizations that comes with atheism is that one can do good, and be passionate, and feel sympathy or joy or pain, for one's own and humanity's sake, without fear of being judged evil if one dares to be and feel anything else.
Religion has been on a steady retreat for a few hundred years as science explains (or flatly contradicts) more and more of what was considered biblical, supernatural fact previously. Your arguments continue this trend by trying to tell us that god is the thing that makes us feel what we feel. Nonsense. Just like the creation story is nonsense, just like geocentrism is nonsense.
I encourage you to open your mind to the fact that if your idea of god has been reduced to a thing that messes with our minds, perhaps you don't need to worship it anymore either.
Which one?
Someone writes a plot designed to be emotionally touching, a skilled actor acts the part, a skilled director directs, editing, background music, lighting all designed to touch you, and you give credit to God?
Gee, there ought to be an Oscar for Strongest Emotion Caused by a Deity.
This article is a classic example of working backward from a desired conclusion to your evidence.
And it's easy to prove. It's very common for several people to witness (i.e., experience) the same event and, when questioned later, give conflicting accounts of that event.
Humans are capable on their own to have intrinsic, pleasurable experiences without this attribution to an extrinsic source.
Here's a hint: Towards = Good, Away = Bad