The Living God: Mid-Week Reflection

REV. DAVID STODDART

A senior parishioner shared something quite poignant at a recent contemplative prayer gathering. She noticed that she and others her age often have a sense that something is missing, a hole that is not being filled. They try to fill that hole in many ways, she observed, but sitting with God in contemplative prayer is filling it for her—and filling it abundantly. Her observation echoes comments I have heard before from others, and it speaks to a crucial truth for all of us.

At some point, “extrinsic” religion, a religion focused on outward forms, just won’t be enough. Subscribing to a set of doctrines and going through the prescribed rituals will not satisfy our deepest needs and desires. People can go to church for decades, for their whole life, and then wake up and realize that saying certain words just because they have always said them or their parents always said them just won’t suffice. Just showing up on Sunday morning out of habit or cultural conditioning will not fill the hole. When that moment comes (and the sooner the better), we are primed to move from believing things about God to experiencing the reality of God.

And we can experience that reality because God lives in us and is calling us to wake up. This is the great good news of our faith: we are one with God in Christ, our human nature joined with nothing less than the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. And we don’t make that happen: it has been done for us and given to us. Each and every moment of our lives we are glowing containers of divine life. At church or at the grocery store, in the office or in bed, we are filled with God’s Spirit, loved and cherished beyond measure.

Christian religion has one purpose: to awaken us to that truth so that we can live joyfully and generously. That’s why we come to church: to remember who we really are and embrace our God-given identity. Worship and prayer, ritual and sacrament, are wonderful gifs: they all point us to this end, but they are just that—a means to an end. To borrow an expression from the Buddhists, they are like a finger pointing at the moon. We want to see the moon in all its splendor—not get distracted by the finger pointing us to it. Frederick Denison Maurice, a 19th century Anglican priest and writer, looking around at the church of his day, once said “We have been dosing people with religion when what they want is not that but the living God.” I want people to come to church, but I really want them to come for the right reason: not to practice rote religion, but to discover the living God at work in the world and alive within them.