Friday, May 22, 2020
Kim Salathé
When in your life have you experienced the nearness of God?
Jeremiah 29:12
"Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you."
“Prayer oneth the soul to God.” ~Julian of Norwich
Hello Everyone. I miss you all terribly and am looking very much forward to the day when we will be together again in person. In the meantime, these “Daily Reflections” from Saint John’s have truly become a special part of my week. I so appreciate and look forward to hearing something new each day from a member of this amazing community. Being offered the chance and deciding to take the time to reflect on one of Nathan‘s questions myself (though terrifying at first!) has turned out to be a gift as it has helped me realize some important insights and gather a bit of clarity. Special fruits, it turns out, born of this great practice called reflection.
Before this crazy time of self-quarantine and social distancing, I would have answered this reflection question with great enthusiasm and ticked off all the different ways and in all the different places I count on feeling the blessing of God’s nearness. I would have told you how I love to find God in nature and in the parks and mountains and beaches that surround us. In the pews at Saint John’s on any given Sunday morning. Practicing yoga. Hiking. Making art. Listening to live music, indoors and outside, alone or with hundreds of other people. I would have told you that I experience God’s nearness and presence in quiet conversations with those who are closest to me, and sometimes, with those I don’t even know. How I experience God in conscious and random acts of kindness and compassion that I bestow on others and that others bestow on me. In hugs and tender embraces. In shared laughter and tears. In smiles and kind words. And on and on and on but always, and in some way or shape or form, usually with people and usually outside.
But suddenly, about two months ago, all these places and all these people that I had come to rely on to satisfy my need for encountering God’s presence were no longer available to me. I couldn’t take a walk on the beach or hike on any trail I wanted to in the White Mountains or look forward to a hug or a cup of coffee or glass of wine with a friend or loved one. The world had changed but my need for God’s presence had not.
Yet somehow (and this is what I realized when reflecting on Nathan’s question), I have slipped into a new way of experiencing God’s presence and I’m beginning to wonder if it might not be the way God has been waiting for me to discover all along. It seems that my past techniques necessitated an intermediary of sorts. A person or a place. In some ways, for me, while seeking God in the “first person”, my techniques had put Him in the “second person” position. But now I had no intermediary to facilitate. I was stuck.
With no way around it, no “second person” person or locale available to me, I needed to find a way to go directly to the source Himself. Simply put, if I had any chance of experiencing Him in the way I need to, I needed to put God in the “first person”. So I started to pray. I just started. Just me and, hopefully, God. Simply and quietly at first. Sitting on a special carpet in my office. Just saying hello and telling Him that I love Him. Somedays our “conversations” (again, mostly me just telling Him stuff) are long and somedays they are short. Somedays they are happy and filled with gratitude and thanksgiving and somedays they are a bit sad but always hopeful. Somedays I feel that I hear from Him. Quietly but directly. Somedays I don’t. But every day, nowadays, when I pray in the hope of feeling God’s presence, I feel good and blessed. I have a new and developing tool in my “nearness to God tool box”. When all my other tools for feeling God’s presence become possible again I will be very happy but I will also remain grateful for this new tool and the ways it is grounding me during our “new normal”. I drew a picture in my journal of an image that came to me after a recent prayer session. I’ve attached it here for you to see. For me, it illustrates the power of this new line up. Prayers, especially thankful ones, definitely have a way of keeping me near to His presence.
