Stop, Look and Listen

Friday 1/4/2013 6:36 AM

My psalm for the week is Psalm 46, perhaps best known for verse 10, “He says, ‘Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.’”  Yesterday I wrote about the busyness of life that often precludes a healthy relationship with God.  This verse reminds me to slow down, to rest, to listen.

When I look back upon my life it seems that the times I felt closest to God were times in my life when I was experiencing trying circumstances.  The circumstances drove me to God because there seemed to be no other option.  There was nothing I could do to remedy the situation.  I long for that same kind of intimacy but I don’t really want the dire circumstances that so often accompany it.

In his book Man’s Quest for God, Abraham Joshua Heschel suggests an alternative path.  “But there is a wider voluntary entrance to prayer than sorrow and despair–the opening of our thoughts to God.  We cannot make him visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to him.  So we open our thoughts to him–feeble our tongues, but sensitive our hearts. … Mindfulness of God arises slowly, a thought at a time.  Suddenly we are there.  Or is he here, at the margin of our soul?  When we begin to feel a qualm of diffidence lest we hurt what is holy, lest we break what is whole, then we discover that he is not austere.  He answers with love our trembling awe.  Repentant of forgetting him even for a while, we become sharers of gentle joy; we would like to dedicate ourselves forever to the unfoldment of his final order.”  I feel as if I have forgotten God for a while and I long for that gentle joy I once had.

I have a tendency to look at life cerebrally, analyzing things rationally, trying to understand how and why things are the way they are.  The joy for which I long is not something that can be analyzed or explained; it can only be experienced.  Kallistos Ware describes this in his book The Orthodox Way, “…Christianity is more than a theory about the universe, more than teachings written down on paper; it is a path along which we journey–in the deepest and richest sense, the way of life.”  I need to think less and enjoy the journey.