Hello friends,
This is Mark Gladman,
Also known as Brother Frederick James,
Your friendly neighbourhood monk in dogs.
Welcome back to Day 6 in our series,
God Is,
And today we're going to sit with the idea that God is closer than we think.
And this idea comes from one of my favourite lines that's been attributed to Saint Augustine.
Speaking of God.
.
.
Augustine apparently wrote.
You were more inward than my innermost self and higher than my highest.
Listen to that language,
More inward than my innermost self.
Now we usually imagine God as out there.
Something beyond us,
Above us,
Ahead of us.
Waiting for us maybe at the end of our journey when we,
Quote,
Make it,
Unquote.
But Augustine's suggesting something completely different.
That God is closer than we think,
Closer than our thoughts.
Closer than our breath,
Closer than the self we spend our lives trying to understand.
Augustine famously tells the story of searching for God everywhere.
He looked outward,
He looked towards beautiful things,
Ideas,
Philosophy,
Experiences,
And eventually realized that,
I was outside and there I sought you.
So God,
It seems,
Hadn't been absent.
Augustine had simply been looking in the wrong direction.
This doesn't mean.
.
.
That God is just inside us.
That's not the point.
God isn't a psychological experience or our deepest self or the voice in our head.
But what Augustine's doing here is pointing us towards something that's much more deep.
The God we seek.
Isn't distant.
From our existence.
God is intimately present to us,
More intimate maybe than we are to ourselves.
And the truth is we can be strangers to ourselves,
Which sounds kind of odd.
But most of us aren't particularly good at being present with ourselves.
We live in our heads.
We replay conversations.
We worry about things that haven't happened.
We rehearse arguments.
We scroll.
We distract ourselves.
We feel the silence moving from one thing to the other.
And sometimes we can live for years without really stopping and asking ourselves,
How am I?
And I think maybe this is one of the reasons that silence can be really uncomfortable for people.
When everything goes quiet.
That's when we finally meet ourselves and sometimes the person waiting there.
Is someone that we haven't paid.
Much attention to.
And one of the assumptions of the spiritual life is that God's waiting for us somewhere further down the road.
Pray more,
Or meditate more,
Or become less distracted,
Or go on retreat,
Or be a better person,
Then maybe I'll arrive at where God is.
And again,
Nothing wrong with the practices.
Prayer,
Silence,
Transformation,
All of these are good,
But they're not ladders.
That allow us to climb towards God.
They're practices and those practices help us become aware of the God who's already present and that should change a lot of things for a lot of us.
Because prayer isn't,
To put it this way,
Distance traveled.
It's distance noticed,
Or maybe better,
The discovery that there was no distance to travel in the first place,
Just a God to notice,
The God who's beneath the noise.
Imagine standing beside the ocean,
And at first you hear the waves,
And then maybe the wind,
And then birds,
People talking.
Might be a boat somewhere in the distance and the longer you stand there the more you hear.
And it's not good.
The sounds were created.
Because you became aware of them.
The sounds were always there.
It's just that your attention came to them.
And I think maybe God's presence is something like that.
Not another thing that's competing for our attention.
But the depth beneath everything.
The presence that we discover by becoming quiet enough to notice.
And that is why.
Contemplative prayer isn't about producing an experience.
It's really.
.
.
To put it in a slightly weird way,
But stick with me.
Contemplative prayer is about consent.
It's consenting to being here and being still and to the possibility that God is already closer.
Than we imagined.
I think this is where things become incredibly healing.
For us because most of us carry a particular image of ourselves.
Some of it might be positive,
Some of it isn't.
Om.
We talk about how we're successful,
Or where we're failing,
Or where we're too much,
Or where we're not enough,
Or where we're loved,
Or where we're unlovable.
Often we say things like,
I am the person who did that thing.
Or I'm the person who never managed to become what I hoped.
And we carry those identities around with us like luggage.
And after a while,
I think we forget that we're carrying them.
It's almost like the muscle gets strong enough to carry them without even noticing that we are.
But what if God is closer to us than the stories we tell ourselves?
About ourselves.
What if,
Beneath all those labels and failures and achievements and anxieties,
There's something Incredibly humble and incredibly beautiful.
I am held.
So before we have to do anything or get it right or understand ourselves or explain our lives,
Before all of those things.
I am Held.
This is the deepest truth about you.
And the thing is,
It's not anything that you can accomplish or do.
Just something that you have received.
Being.
Life.
Breath.
Presence.
Gift.
Many of you know that my word for this year is ABIDE.
An older word means to remain,
To stay,
To make your home.
Jesus doesn't always seem incredibly interested in sending people somewhere.
He invites them to remain.
Abide in me.
And INU.
That's intimacy.
Mutual indwelling.
There's no possession.
You're not being absorbed into something.
There's relationship there.
Maybe that's what Augustine was trying to get at.
That God.
Isn't the destination of the spiritual life,
But the environment in which the spiritual life happens.
That we don't travel towards God as though crossing some empty desert.
All the way that distance to get there.
Because in God we already live and move and have our being,
So the journey is learning how to abide.
In what has always been true.
So today.
Maybe don't imagine God as somewhere you need to reach.
Don't look up or look ahead or even try particularly hard to look inward,
Just stop.
And feel the ground beneath your feet.
Notice your breathing.
Notice that you are alive,
That you are here.
And you're not the version of you that you were yesterday.
And you're not the version you hope to become tomorrow.
It's just you.
Here.
Now.
And maybe the prayer.
In that moment.
Is simply to pray,
God,
You are closer.
Than I think.
Closer than the prayer that I'm trying to pray.
Closer than the thoughts that I'm thinking?
Closer than my certainty or even closer than my doubt,
Closer than my understanding.
Closer than my fears,
More inward than my innermost self.
Maybe the God that you've spent your life searching for isn't standing at the end of the road.
Maybe all along God has been the ground beneath your feet.
That God has been the breath beneath your words.
That God has been the presence beneath your awareness,
Not far away,
Not waiting,
Not absent.
Bit closer than you think.
And may grace,
Peace,
And love be with you and hold you.
As you sit in this awareness today.
And always.
Grace and peace,
Friends.
Until tomorrow.
Bye for now.
