by gskern » August 22nd, 2005, 12:58 am
Steve:
Thanks for sharing your story and your thoughts (and to the others, as well, thank you...)
Couple of things I want to add:
1. "Communication" is a two-way street, wherein the Speaker sends a message, and the Receiver receives it and gives Feedback in conjunction with the message. That 2-part "cycle" is Communication (or, at least, so say the books I studied as part of my Bachelor's in Communications).
This definition goes right to the heart of my troubles with this whole idea of personal interaction with God: I pray (out loud, using my tongue and teeth and lips and breath), and I hear a big BLANK in the room around me. And what I MIGHT suppose is God speaking to me, IN MY MIND, of course, could just as easily be explained as my Mind "responding" to itself.
2. But here's the deal:
Every single Great Saint, and Jesus Himself, has made Prayer a key component (perhaps even the most critical component) of their everyday lives; indeed, we're commanded to pray without ceasing -- non-stop! -- as easily as we breathe the air. Lewis himself noted somewhere that more than anything else about the Faith, Prayer baffled him the most. And yet there it is: We CANNOT be TRANSFORMED outside of the centrality of Prayer in our daily living.
And this isn't just about Prayer, although that is where I, personally, hear most strongly the deafening "silence" of God... It's also about a yearning to see, as Donald Miller says in his book, "Blue Like Jazz", "the lines in His face"... It's about the sop we hear from some Christians suggesting we can "walk and talk with God", as if one could ACTUALLY and LITERALLY stroll the City Zoo with Him in the shade of a Fall Sunday afternoon...
If there ARE Christians who have quite LITERALLY spoken TO and have LITERALLY heard back God's ACTUAL voice (and I've not met a single one, personally), then they are RARE indeed...
The overwhelming majority of us, then, must bear the burden of our deep and intense desire for God every day until we finally DO see Him, finally DO hear His literal voice, and finally ARE compelled to kneel and bow and (with fear and trembling) be "inspected" by Him...
Until then, I can think of at least ONE application for this intense longing for God: The moment of Temptation. When The Deceiver is "whispering in my ear" (not a literal voice, mind you), I need to RECALL that intense longing for God, and to once again dwell on the GLORY He made me to reflect... I need to remember, in that moment, that my strongest and deepest Joy lies in being "as a dog before its master", as Lewis said, having "pleased [Him] whom I rightly loved and rightly feared"...
No direct, immediate, personal, LITERAL experience with God? No bother; it's most definitely coming, and in the mean time, I am absolutely COMPELLED to believe in the FACT that God is, indeed, in this room with me at this very moment, and that He delights in me... In ways I cannot quite understand, I believe He is changing me, directing my thoughts, responding to my requests for Wisdom and for Provisions and for the Needs of others, preparing me to be "a real ingredient in the divine happiness..."
I must be patient in the midst of the process.