I’ve often wondered, no, asked Him directly, to speak to me. To make His presence felt. More often than not the result was complete silence. And more silence after that too! Does one take that as a sign that He isn’t interested in my prayers?
Or in me?
Or, even worse, that He doesn’t exist at all; that He is a figment of our imagination, because we need to believe in a higher being to remain sane? Anyway, if this were true then where does this need to believe in a Higher Being come from after all?
I started toying with putting these thoughts on paper in September 2008, a short while after my mother died. And I remembered that she always explained that God’s existence can be logically worked out by looking at the beauty of the visible world around us, that there therefore is no effect without a cause, no result without a creator. That the testimony of nations clearly indicates that we all have a natural law that we follow subconsciously and by common sense then someone must have started it all.
So if we accept what the writer of an article in Reader’s Digest wrote some years ago on this, that neurologically it has been ascertained (and photographed with an MRI scanner) that there is a small gland hidden in the base of our brain that switches on when we are in communion with a Higher Being, transcendental or spiritual, whatever, then a God of sorts put it there for us to be able to long for Him in our lives.
There is an interesting comment to make on this point. In the Book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament (Jer 1:4-5, 17-19) there is written “The word of the LORD came to me, saying: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you”. What does that really say about our creation?
So, does our God speak back to us when we somehow dial the right numbers and make the connection? In faith I would reply a resounding “yes” because that is how we have been taught. But in reality He often seems to let us down. Yet over the years of my involvement in the Church, after recognising my call as a lay member to be involved in spirituality and evangelisation, I have recognised that God does talk to us…. But His way.
I am reminded of a comment in the gospels that Jesus once explained that His ways are not our ways; and “your thoughts are not my thoughts” (or something to that effect). The trick (?) therefore seems to be to think differently, to think God-like. Can that be possible though? To think as Gods is definitely not the right interpretation but to think of how we can tune in our internal radio to God’s transmission is a better way of understanding the process.
Carlo Carretto, Italian Church leader of the Fifties who left all and joined a monastic order to live in the Saharan desert, says that the promise of Jesus speaks of his presence, an activity of his spirit and of a revelation. “I shall make myself known to you”. In his book “Letters from the Desert”, Carretto reasons that making themselves known to one another is the task of lovers; a task never finished, never complete. There always remains something mysterious to discover in the relationship, an element of the unknown.
“God’s inspiration searches out our will. The spirit of Jesus settles where the will desires it, because it is love. And two are needed to make love. When I bow before his love he is not slow to come; rather he has already come, for he loves me much more than I, poor creature, can ever love him”.
So, to use lovers’ words, there is no need to speak to communicate love between a couple. Is that therefore why God is so silent when we “make love” with Him, letting us bask in his great love for us?
