“I feel God all around me.” My daughter, 6, said to me right before she drifted off to sleep. More often than not, the last few things my kids say before they fall asleep are pleas for water or some other ploy to delay bedtime a few seconds. Theophany is not usually on the table.
“I feel God all around me.” When she says this, there are only two possible responses. I can either dismiss this as the overtired ramblings of a little kid who just minutes before had been throwing a tantrum over her favorite pajamas being in the washing machine, or I can take her at her word. She can feel God all around her. Why wouldn’t she?
Our world has become increasingly cynical and disenchanted, and the church hasn’t pushed back at the wave of cynicism with an equal measure of mysticism and joy. Instead, we’ve co-opted snark and intellectual superiority as our own. We give parishioners practical advice and a listening ear — often doing this less effectively than an actual counselor would — when what they need is permission to commune with the divine. They need to be told they aren’t crazy in those moments when they feel God all around them. Of course they do! God is all around them.
Every week in the Rite I Liturgy, we thank God that we have been made members in the mystical body of his Son. We ask God to allow us to dwell in Christ and for him to dwell in us. Then people walk out of the nave without considering that the mystical body of Jesus is now, in and through and with them, sitting in a vinyl-covered chair at Chuy’s.
In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, there’s the story of Abba Lot asking Abba Joseph what more was there for him to do. It’s an echo of the rich young ruler’s story, in that both men rehash all the ways they have kept the rules and done their duty. Abba Lot tells Abba Joseph, “I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” In a superlative response of pastoral care, the wise old Abba Joseph stands up, reaches out his hands, which have become consumed by fire, and says, “If you are willing, you can become all flame.”
These disciplines — the culmination of years and years of spiritual practice, of participating in the liturgy, and spending time in prayer — are not for making good people, but for making people like God; to transform people into the mystical body of the Son; to make communicants into participants of the Divine Nature; to give people the desire for God that only intensifies the more you receive from him.
We are fighting a lifetime battle with secular moments. The daily grind of life leaves little margin for experiencing God all around us, but we press on. Recently I have begun a habit of recovering moments throughout my day. I associate sounds and sights common to my life with a call to prayer — giving myself signals in order to instigate a Pavlovian response of lifting my heart.
The microwave dings and I say the Jesus prayer. My phone (the soul’s kryptonite) buzzes in my pocket, and again I pray, “Lord Jesus, Holy Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I see a green car while driving, and I smile, resting in the knowledge that even though I may have been screaming imprecations at the last car that cut me off, I have been reminded of God’s love — a cock crowing to remind me of my denial and welcoming me back.
Green cars have become something of a cosmic joke between God and me because, since I have chosen to assign prayers to them, I seem to see them only when I am feeling less than spiritual — when I am acting less than holy. Recovering moments like this, having an inside joke or two with the creator of Jupiter and Saturn, is building holy habits of thought.
Even stuck in traffic, I can sneak away to a secret place in my heart where I can be with my beloved. I can repeat a breath prayer enough to quiet my heart and prepare myself to pray. The classic teachings from Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God is the practice of noticing the Holy One. It is thinking of God all you can. It’s the practice of recovering enough moments and events back from the creep of secular life and turning washing dishes into washing dishes with Jesus.
The doing — the thing that your body is up to — looks the same, but the being — the state of your mind — is different because now you go about your day thinking of God. It’s infecting the mundane with the miraculous, or rather, it’s noticing there are no mundane actions, only the miraculous. It’s recognizing when you feel God all around you and feeding logs onto that fire. The life of prayer is experiential, and repeated experience is required to rewire one’s brain, to be transformed by the renewing of one’s mind. Training our people in this type of prayer is training them in experience. It is training them to learn to see the divine mingling with the human wherever they look.
On August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, we pray, “grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty,” and we don’t add “one glad morning when this life is over.” We mean for God to allow us to behold the King in his beauty here and now. We are being delivered from the disquietude of this world within ourselves, in our own “interior chapel,” to use another phrase from Brother Lawrence.
We have to affirm our people when they tell us they heard from God, or felt God, or met Jesus. Of course they did! We expect those things to happen. We must believe in the immanence of joy, the razor-thin border between this world and Heaven. We must encourage our people that spiritual experience isn’t a part of the Christian life, but is the point of the Christian life.
We aren’t inviting people to a weekly therapy session, intellectual exercise, or morality play. We are inviting people to be utterly changed, to be undone. We are inviting people to feel God all around them. We are inviting people to live momentous lives crackling with purpose. Even when we are stuck behind three cars in line at the pharmacy, we just might notice one of those cars is green.
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