“How do we think God speaks to us? Part 1 and 2”

Karen Sloan 24/01/2021

Readings -

Psalm 139:7-12 

Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who was arguably the twentieth century’s greatest writer on Christian spirituality, had this to say:  

“Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything – in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without God. That’s impossible. The only thing is we don’t see it.”

Reflection 1

As I said in the beginning, I spent the last few weeks taking it slightly easier, which meant I had some time to reflect, and to read.  Busyness is a 21st century curse that gives us little time to think beyond what the next job is.

So the past weeks have been a blessing.

When I came to write this sermon, however, to contemplate what we should start the year with, I still had so many ideas. 

But what I realised is what I want to share is what I opened with.  That our knowing of God, of the divine presence, while a mystery, is not related to facts and figures, or material objects that can be measured and quantified.  That the divine is underneath all of that, and we find it and it finds us in this murky space between and within us.  We can talk about God, think about God, write about God, but it’s in the experiencing that we come to know God.

So I want to take us on a little journey. For this is a revelation that, while getting lost in the last few years, has been with us since humans were first wandering around the earth. 

Firstly, I want to share a few insights into a new book by Karen Armstrong, called “The Lost Art of Scripture”.  I haven’t quite finished it, but she has lots to say about this conundrum we have in our modern world that I just mentioned.  

She opens by introducing us to a small ivory figure from the Ulm Museum called the lion man (slide), which is 40,000 years old. He has a human body and the head of a cave lion, stands 31 cms tall and was found in the Stadel cave in Germany just before the outbreak of WW2.  “The cave seems to have been used for communal ritual, where people gathered to enact the myths that gave meaning and purpose of their hard and often frightening lives” says Armstrong.  Lion man was probably used in theses rituals, and is therefore a product of our ability to think what is not.  A  blending of two species that was seen as divine, at a time when we were still very young. It’s incredible, isn’t it.

But Armstrong suggests that, from a  purely rational perspective, lion man could be dismissed as a delusion, made up to help us survive.  Maybe? Yet she also notes, “we now realise we have no real or direct connection with the world we inhabit”, even if we think we do.  “We only sense the world through our nervous system, so that we all, scientists as well as mystics, know only a representation of reality not reality itself. The objective truths we rely on are inherently illusive”. As Bede Griffiths says, “our reality transcends or goes beyond our conceptual grasp”. So perhaps these ancient peoples had more to them than we think.

From the very beginning of our human journey, there has been an a perception of reality different from that which can be seen or measured.  It has been expressed in the Lion man, and many other famous cave paintings and artefacts, and throughout the scriptures, not just Christian. A reality that is based on a deeper truth. A hidden truth , if you like.  Of the divine, not outside of ourselves but within each person.

Prophets, mystics and seers who experience and report their insights were only showing us what lies unknowingly beyond. Armstrong writes “that before the modern period, this ultimate reality, which we name God, came closer to what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called being, a fundamental energy that supports and pervades everything that exists. You can’t  see, touch or hear it, but can only watch it mysteriously at work in the people objects and natural forces that it informs.  It is essentially indefinable because it is impossible to get outside it and view it objectively. God, Ineffable, indescribable and yet within us, a constant source of life energy and inspiration.”

A source of inspiration and energy, because, as Armstrong concludes, “people do not merely seek an experience of transcendence, beyond what we can normally see and feel.  Rather they want to embody and somehow live within it.  We can find a better self, a more kinder and compassionate self. We can become a buddha, a sage, a Christ.  When trying to access this presence, we are in fact trying to achieve a more authentic existence.”  

Religion and therefore scriptures, for Armstrong, “are art forms that help us to live in relation to this transcendent reality and somehow embody it”. Which is where the book heads for the next 500 pages!

I love that, scriptures and religion are not a rule book or a scientific treatise, but an art form.  And they help us embody the divine presence found all around us by leading us to what lies beneath. Not only by using art, but poetry and myth, prose and story, and even a little bit of history. I think we have all known that for a long time, but it’s good to be reminded, as sometimes I’m tempted to put the bible on a shelf for a while.

Unfortunately, our society is rooted in logos or reason which must relate precisely to factual objective and empirical reality if it is to function efficiently in the world.  And this has been applied to our faith as it has to secular society. God has become an object, all powerful and external, rather than something within. We believe or we don’t in this puppet God. And the scriptures a literal document taken only at face value.

Yet life and the divine is a lot more mysterious than that.

Let us take a moment to reflect just a little bit…

(a little Taize interlude)

Note: “The Lost Art of Scripture”, Karen Armstrong,

Reflection 2

So after all that, and I know it was pretty heavy going, we still have this question.  Where do we find God, where do we look to sense the presence and moving of the spirit?  We have to look beneath the surface of things, or as Frederick Buechner says, “in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of our own lives and of the world”. Faith is so much more than certainty, faith is trust and a sense that we are all part of something deeper and more profound.

God found in the muck and misery and marvel of the world. This line comes from a sermon from him, called  “Message in the Stars”. I revisited it during my break, as it is in a book of sermons, called Secrets in the Dark.

I don’t want to rewrite it here but rather give you a taste of someone who is regarded as one the 20th centuries greatest theologians and writers.  He uses story and prose to give the same message.

In the sermon, Buechner imagines a scenario, where God’s existence is dramatically demonstrated in the stars. Suppose, he says, “God takes the milky way flowing across the night sky and brightens it up a bit, and rearranges it so that when the world steps outside and looks up, it would see written out in light years tall,  the sentence, I REALLY EXIST, or GOD IS”. Pretty dramatic!

And then Buechner imagines what people might do when they see it.  Fall down on their knees, run away in fear.  If they were a preachers or theologians they might feel vindicated and churches might suddenly become full and perhaps wars might cease. And so that the message doesn’t fade, he has God rewrite it in different languages, with music.

Surely, Buechner says, this clear messaging in the sky would satisfy even the deepest metaphysical speculations. “The last hardened sceptic would be convinced that God must indeed exist”.

But then…he ends it…

What if, after a period of time, some plain “garden-variety child with perhaps a wad of bubble gum in his cheek” was crazy enough to ask a reasonable question? What if the child simply one day turned to his father or even to God and asked: “So what if God exists? What difference does that make?”

So what? What difference does that make?

And in the twinkling of an eye the message would fade away for good and the celestial music would be heard no more. 

In the long run this sign in the stars isn’t enough.

We all want certainty, proof, refutable truth sometimes.  That’s what our society says, show us God.  But we know the truth is so much more than that. 

“It is not objective proof of Gods existence that we want”, says Buechner, “but whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle that we are really after”. 

“And that is the miracle that we really get”. And we have gotten since the beginning of time, in Armstrong’s view. We just have to look with different eyes.

In Buechner’s sermon he suggests “we know much more about God than we admit that we know, than perhaps we altogether know that we know.  God speaks to us. But its not written out in starlight, rather it is written out for each of us in the hum drum, helter skelter events of each day, and  it’s a message that in the long run might just make all the difference”.

He then goes on to explain how we might just realise this presence in our own lives. If we look and listen. And it’s a different way of knowing than the knowing that comes from fact and figures, regardless of how wonderful they are.. 

Buechner suggests we find God in a restlessness for wholeness and creativity that sits with us day in and day out.  Someone said to me the other day, that everyone has a God centred hole in them that needs to be filled, and without that filling we are forever unsettled.  As St Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.  We probably see that more today than at any time, an emptiness, and unease, or a feeling of incompleteness in our inner life. Anxiety, depression, a feeling of unworthiness seems to be pervasive.  Of course it’s complicated but maybe in a world that has given the notion of God away, we are missing the very thing that might complete us. God hasn’t gone away, but we have.

But that is not the whole story. Its also about what we can do and become.

As Karen Armstrong concluded, we can all become a buddha, a sage, a Christ. 

For we also have a desire to give and receive love, to care and be kind, to be better than we are.  A hidden urge to give more, rather than take more.   For God is not found as an object to revere or worship but in a way of life. And in this way of life, at every turn there is a chance to respond in a God way, in the supermarket, at work, with our families, and in our relationship with others.  In what we do for a job and what we do in our spare time. A decision to turn away or towards the person or people in front of us.

Buechner argues that even though “our days are often full of frustration and struggle, God speaks to the depths of our very souls with words like “be brave…be merciful…feed my lambs.” Life giving and inspiring.

Even in the great events around the world, we hear the voice of God, in those that resist terror, that fight for justice, that work for peace and who stand up bravely against those that want to divide and threaten. We find it even in the poetry of a 22 yr old African American women who calls us to be the light.

So in every moment of every day we have choices to make, and in those choices the spirit of God can and is sensed, if we are willing to be open, to wait, watch, listen and then act.  This is the miracle of faith, a faith that sees a shimmering  just below the surface of things (thanks Carrie Newcomer). A faith, as Armstrong says, we are to embody in our own lives.

Not a bad thought, really….

Amen

(To finish this reflection we listened to Amanda Gorman, the young African American poet who spoke at President Biden’s inauguration and her poem.  I know its directed to the US, but well, I think it is a God moment if ever there was.)

Note: “Message in the Stars”, found in “Secrets in the Dark”, Frederick Buechner.