Too Small!

This morning I'm sitting in Providence hospital waiting while my mother has surgery. I'm contemplating the words of the spiritual giant, Father Thomas Keating:
"God's presence is so present that in some circumstances we may wish that he would take a vacation!...

"The first thing he (Jesus) said when he began to preach was, “Repent”(Matthew 4: 17). This word does not refer to penitential exercises or external practices but means change the direction in which you are looking for happiness. Jesus' teaching clearly implies that our present direction does not lead to where happiness can be found, and still less to where God can be found. The contemplative dimension of the Gospel is Christ's program for getting acquainted with the Ultimate Reality as it really is, which is “no thing.”“No thing”means no particular thing, whether concept, feeling or bodily experience. God just is—without any limitation. And the way to connect with this “Is-ness”is to just be, too.

The problem is that the person who we think we are—that individual full of programs for success, social status, fame, power, affection and esteem, compulsions, addictions, etc.—is not the authentic man or woman that we are. And not only are we not who we think we are, but other people are not who we, or they, think they are. Our judgments about our character and other people's characters—and the reality of the world within and around us—are largely incorrect. We see everything upside down or from the perspective of downright ignorance.

The question that perplexes many people at the beginning of this century is: Who is God? If this is too abstract a way of posing the question, it can be put it another way: What is your relationship with God? The question of our relationship with God is crucial. There are, of course, as many relationships with God as there are people. The essential point to grasp is that God is very close to us—as open to adults as to the little child who is only able to pray, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”While God is pleased with every sincere prayer, God seems to hope that our relationship with him is going to develop so that our prayer is not just a matter of getting through the night, as may be the case with a child, but of living everyday life in God's presence.

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that God is existence and hence is present in everything that exists. If God is present everywhere, it follows that under no circumstances can we ever be separated from him. We may feel that we are; we may think that we are. But in actual fact, there is no way that we can ever be apart from God even if we try. Indeed, God's presence is so present that in some circumstances we may wish that he would take a vacation!..

Most people do not think of God as present all the time, let alone experience that presence. But this is our misfortune. What we take to be our everyday life is full of misconceptions. For example, we humans—all of us—are walking upside down on the planet. It is just gravity that keeps us from wandering off into space. Although in fact we stick out into space head first, nobody feels it, so scientists have to remind us that what we take for granted is not the way things actually are. Time and space as we see them are projections of a brain that seeks order and certitude.

Spending regular periods of time in our inner room is a way of recognizing levels of reality beyond the limited dimensions of ordinary awareness. Why do we find it so hard to believe that God is present at every moment? One possible answer might be that we are not sure we want to be in God's presence all the time. Jesus invites us, urgently, to cultivate that relationship, but we may be more interested in other preoccupations—the childish things that Paul exhorts us to grow out of (1 Corinthians 13: 11). Faith is an invitation to grow out of inadequate ways of relating to God into the reality that God actually is.

The Christian tradition is the transmission of the relationship with the living God that Jesus experienced. Participation in his own consciousness of God as Abba is what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. This kingdom is not a geographical location, an institution, or a form of government. It is a state of consciousness and of enlightened faith. To enter it, the preconceived ideas and prepackaged values that we brought with us from early childhood have to be re-evaluated and outgrown."

“Think of God in a very big way. And if you do, that’s too small!

You can’t think of anything more wonderful than this God. And you can’t figure out anything about God without a special grace…God is so marvelously good, there is no word for it. So gentle. So considerate. So kind, so tender – so everything marvelous. That is God. And whatever you say is far less than it is.

As Paul says ‘It hasn’t crossed the imagination of any human being what God has prepared for those who love him.’”
-- Thomas Keating, at the annual conference of Contemplative Outreach, Snowmass, Colorado, October 2012