Experience

Christmastide (Friday, 4 January 2019)

1 John 3:7-10. Psalm 98:1, 7-9. John 1:35-42. (Please click the following link for the above readings http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/010419.cfm.)

“We have found the Messiah.”

We all have beautiful ideas about God. We do a lot of "God talk" too. But do we have a genuine experience of God? I think that is the most important life-question that we need to answer ourselves, if not others.

Because that's the great moment in all divine revelation, when beautiful ideas drop in from head to heart, when we move from the level of dogma to experience, when it's not something that we merely believe, but in a real sense something that we know. If we don't encounter God we remain in the superficial level of religion, which leads us to the danger of idolatry and fanaticism.

Without an experience of God, people don't enjoy church services. Many of them stop attending church. Others those who do attend church and have no God experience are faithful to the externals of religion. People the most obedient to commandment and church formulas can very often be the hardest to convert. They've take the symbol for the substance. They've taken the ritual for the reality. They've take the means for the end and become inoculated from the experience of the real thing. That's called idolatry, when we worship and protect the means. It actually keeps us from the journey to the end. Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.

Until people have had some level of inner spiritual experience, there is no point in asking them to follow the ethical ideals of Jesus. Indeed they will not be able to understand them. They will not be able understand religious beliefs beyond the level of formulas and dogmas. Unless we experience healing we can't give healing. Unless we experience forgiveness and love, we can't forgive or love others. Unless we experience and enjoy God, we won't be able to give God to others.

God is available to all of us. Not just to nuns and monks. God is there for us in each and every moment. As Eckhart Tolle tells us in _The Power of Now_, we don't have to be in a perfect place to experience the fullness of God, or we don't even have to be a perfect person to experience God. He is with us, and for us, and even within us at this moment. Perhaps, He's so easily available that we can easily miss Him.

In other words, God is always given, incarnate in every moment and present to those who know how to be present themselves. Strangely enough, it is often imperfect people and people in quite secular settings who encounter "The Presence" (Parousia, "fullness"). That pattern is rather clear in the whole Bible.

Whenever we embrace reality we embrace God, whenever we embrace life as it is then we embrace God. He hides behind our own lives, but perfectly reveals Himself in and within our lives—whether broken or full, whether good or bad.

So we need to find time for God (and for ourselves), and that's the only way we can find our Messiah. To let the moment teach us, we must allow ourselves to be at least slightly _stunned_ by it until it draws us inward and upward, towards a subtle experience of wonder, an experience of awe. And then comes the surrender to this Mystery whom we call God. The spiritual journey, as all religious traditions witness, is a constant interplay between moments of awe followed by a general process of surrender to that moment.

We need such an attitude (variously called as prayer or spirituality or contemplation) that measures life in the light of religious experience. Let us today allow within us a moment or two where we experience awe followed by surrender.