Lectio
“As the center of all centers, God is the integrating force, the fire, and the essence of reality, bringing together all elements of being into the amazing mystery we call life.”
— Jacqueline Syrup Bergan and Sister Marie Schwan, Freedom: A Guide for Prayer
Meditatio
God is perpetually drawing us into God. Yet, somehow, we are never truly separate from God. For if even for a moment God ceased thinking, willing, and breathing us into being, in that very moment, we would cease to be.
“For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). There is no life outside of God. There is no movement outside of God. There is no being outside of God.
Why, then, do we so often experience life as if we are separate from God or God is separate from us? Why does it sometimes feel as though God has turned his back on us — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) — or that we have turned our backs on him? “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way” (Isaiah 53:6).
Perhaps it all comes down to love. Maybe what we feel, or even choose, in these moments of perceived separation is the finiteness of our capacity for God’s infinite love. While God’s love is perfect, abundant, limitless, the flesh we embody is not.
Even Jesus, whose perfect yes to God’s perfect love never wavered, felt the limitations of the flesh: in the garden, he begged that the cup be taken from him, and his anguish was so great that his sweat fell like drops of blood (Luke 22:42–44).
If God is, indeed, perpetually drawing us into God, and if in him we live and move and have our being, and his love is perfect, abundant, and limitless, regardless of what we feel, or even choose, we are never actually outside of God’s love. If we were, we would cease to exist, for our very existence is the extension of God’s love poured out in and as our lives. Rather, we simply cannot always feel God’s infinite love through the finite containers into which that love is poured.
Faith is precisely this: the yes that holds when feeling cannot.
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (John 20:29). Blessed, also, are those who have not felt, or whose feeling comes and goes, and yet have come to believe and continue to believe.
Oratio
full of doubt
fear
worry
your absence
screams
in your silence
deafened
blinded
writhing in anguish
powerless
to make you love me
powerless
to make you not
then your face appears
on the horizon
as if you placed the moon
in the sky
on this day
just for me
Contemplatio
Can you sit with your own powerlessness before God — not as defeat, but as the very place where faith begins?
Related Scripture
“Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” — Psalm 139:7 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like In God And God In Us: Reflecting On Divine Union And The Brokenness Of Our Hardened Hearts, which explores the same paradox from the other side — that our felt separation from God is an illusion born of the hardened heart, and that we are in God and God is in us whether or not we are capable of feeling it.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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