God speaks to us in the depths of our being, not off the top of our heads.
Gerard Hughes
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God speaks to us in the depths of our being, not off the top of our heads. The depths of ourselves are not in our reasoning and ideas. If we are to find God, we must learn to listen to those depths, to the emotions and feelings which we experience in prayer and out of it, and use our minds and intelligence to help us understand what those emotions and feelings are saying to us.
Gerard Hughes
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God is not so much interested in whether we are religious or not, but whether we are alive.
John Taylor
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Image: Meg Hitchcock (American, 1961–), Amazing Grace, 2013. Letters cut from the Bhagavad Gita
“Finding God in all things” means first of all nourishing your capacity to notice what is going on in your life at present.
Noticing often requires courage- so Jesus says to us “Do not be afraid”.
The underlying reality is that there is “un-reconciled pain and unexhausted compassion, the history of men and women and the history of God with us”. (Rowan Williams)
We are invited to honour our everyday experience as the place of encounter with our God. Nothing we experience is alien to our God – not even our worst moment.
Try and carve out a small block of time in your day and reflect on your life and your experience –
with its joys and sorrows, its knowing and unknowing, its pain and its contradictions.
Listen to your reality of doubt, pain, confusion and at the same time stay with these words of Julian of Norwich:
God did not say: “You will not be troubled” or “You will not have bitter labour” or “You will have no discomfort”, but “You will not be overcome”. God wills that we pay attention to this truth and that we may be ever strong in faithful trust, in well-being and woe.
As you get in touch with your reality – remembering that if you want God to be real you must be real as well – though it will often feel like a poor place.
Yet – as Jesus shows us – it is the place of grace, love, and compassion.
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My fall into inconsistency was nothing but the revelation of what I am. I am thrown into contradiction: to realize it is mercy, to accept it is love, to help others do the same is compassion.
Thomas Merton
Knowledge of God without knowledge of our own poverty makes for pride.
Knowledge of our own poverty without knowledge of God makes for despair.
Knowledge of Jesus Christ lets us be present both to God and to our own poverty.
Blaise Pascal
Image: Meg Hitchcock (American, 1961–), Subhan’Allah: The Lord’s Prayer, 2013. Letters cut from the Bible and Koran. The Islamic prayer translates as “God is perfect” or “Glory be to God.”
Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty.
Thomas Merton
The images in this post come from the American artist Meg Hitchcock, who painstakingly cuts typed letters out of printed religious texts and rearranges them to make images of religious texts from other faiths.
Hitchcock says “I’m not a theologian by any means, but it’s really in my heart that I experience this knowledge; the sensation that God is something, but that no one knows what God is. There is no one answer and every path is legitimate, including the Christian path. I weave them in and out of each other conceptually – that’s pretty much the point behind my work, in that God is found speaking poetically in the threads, not in the overall picture or the overall tapestry.“
To read her whole interview go to this site.
The music accompanying this blog post may seem an unusual choice, but it draws together some of the ideas. The words of the song and the voice of Oumou Sangare speak of the joys and sorrows, the knowing and unknowing, the pain and contradictions of our lives and experiences.
Bela Fleck, the banjo player, created a documentary called Throw Down Your Heart, which captures his travels to explore the banjo’s roots, following him across Africa as he collaborates with local artists along the way.
Her thoughts go far away,
For those of us without fathers,
Her thoughts…. go out to them”
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation click on the link below.
