Do you remember when you first became aware of God? Can you remember when you first experienced the presence of God? Can you remember before you were cognizant of a sense of the divine, the holy, the sacred? For some of us, it may be like trying to remember when we first knew that we were a girl or a boy. All I can say is that I have always known that I was a girl. I don’t remember becoming aware of that because that sense was always there.
For many, the same is true with our sense of God. It has just always been there. Maybe our ideas and images and concepts and experiences of God have changed, but the fundamental presupposition that love is at the heart of things, all is connected, and there is an “other” dimension to our life experience, these things point us to the sacred, to God. God is responsible for life and we are alive, so we are immediately connected to God, creation, and one another through the fact that we are alive. When does this connection start? When do we become aware of it?
In Psalm 22, the psalm that we will be reflecting on this week, the writer has a beautiful description of this sense of God. The writer addresses God saying, “It was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast. On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.” [Verses 9 and 10, New Revised Standard Version] Here we see the wonderful image that God is part of us and our experience from the beginning of our lives and throughout our lives. There is no life apart from God.
This makes God a natural part of who we are. Like breathing. Or our hearts pumping blood through our bodies. It is simply part of who we are. God is part of us and cannot be separated from us, nor can we be separated from God.
Sometimes we think that our spiritual life should be something “different” from our ordinary lives. Or that our faith should give us “unusual” experiences. Or that something “special” should be going on because we are religious. It may be that faith in God is just a natural part of who we are and so is part and parcel of our daily life experience which has come to seem ordinary and expected. Religion is about helping us see and appreciate what is already there and give thanks!
So, don’t worry if you are not having some kind of special visions, or mystical occurrences in your life. That does not mean that you are not trusting God or that you do not have faith or that God is not with you. It may just mean that your faith is an integrated, natural part of who you are. As it should be!
Prayer
God, help us to affirm the gift, the sacred, the holiness, in the everyday living of our days. Our breath, our blood, our lives are manifestations of divine love. May we learn and grow in faith just as our bodies progress on life’s journey accepting the natural flow of life’s rhythms. We are held ever in the arms of divine love. Amen.
Lakewood United Church of Christ 