The Presence of God
When I first sit in meditation, I renew my faith awareness that in some manner I can’t grasp or understand, God is already perfectly present, all about me and within me. I remind myself that God is not dualistically present, as if God were invisibly here alongside me. Rather, God is here as the reality of my very reality; God is loving me into the present moment; my very being is flowing from God as a gift of God. My very life is flowing from God as a gift from God; the present moment is flowing from God as a gift from God. It’s flowing from God as the concreteness of this very moment that I am sitting here. It’s not a theoretical abstraction; it’s the ultimate nature of the very concreteness of this moment of me sitting here.
Therefore, I seek in meditation to sit quietly, to become as attentive as I can be to the immediacy of God in me and beyond me in the present moment. So if I am sitting with my eyes lowered toward the ground, I see my hands in my lap and the floor. If a car goes by outside, I hear that. I try neither to cling to nor reject whatever occurs, so that I might realize God’s presence in all that occurs. I try to stay with the immediacy of all that is occurring moment by moment, and so, too, with all feelings that come up within me. I try not to cling to or reject unpleasant feelings, nor do I cling to pleasant ones, but try to be open to God’s presence in the mystery, the gift, of all my feelings.
As soon as I realize I am starting to drift away into daydreaming or thinking my thoughts, I simply return to this sustained awareness of being immediate and open to God in the present moment. I find that sitting like that is a way of coming to a profound sense of God as the living source of myself, others, and all things….
At some point, we can begin to realize that every moment of our lives is, deep down, just like that. Every moment, deep down, is God loving us into the present moment, making the immediacy of each moment, each beat of our hearts, to be a divine gift. Meditation for me is a way of opening myself to the direct experience of this God-given godly nature of our lives….
The mystical traditions of the Christian faith have their basis in the mysterious desire, prompted by the Spirit, not to wait until one is dead to begin experientially to enter into the divine union that awaits us in eternity. The whole process of meditation and contemplative prayer embodies the desire to experience, even while in this earth, the influx of a wholly spiritual, divine realization of God, beyond anything the egoself can experience or comprehend….
I think contemplative prayer helps the process of spiritual formation by grounding the entire process of awakening to God, already perfectly present, already perfectly given to us in life itself. In contemplative prayer we seek to discover at deeper and deeper levels of awareness that everything we could possibly attain from God—that God himself—has already been given by God in Christ. All is being given in the ongoing, moment-by-moment mystery of creation itself, in which God is giving himself to us in and as the miracle of our very existence as persons. Contemplative prayer is a way of opening ourselves to the intimate experience Jesus spoke of in proclaiming that the coming of the Kingdom has already occurred: the kingdom of God is within us….
From “Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God” (2000)
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