Trinity and Humanity

cartoon courtesy of dissenttheblog.blogspot.com

If you’ve ever attended a Christian church, you’ve probably heard an opening prayer or a worship song that goes something like this:  “Father, please be here with us.”  It seems like a simple, honest request, one that God would want to honor.  Guess what?  He already has, even before we ask.

If God dwells in each one of us through the Holy Spirit (“Christ in you, the hope of glory” – Col. 1:27 NIV), then asking for the Father, Son, and Spirit to be with us doesn’t really make sense.  God is ALWAYS with us, each one of us.  The problem is that we don’t recognize it.  Why not?

The explanation is our “old man,” our ego that keeps us wrapped up in our own stories, retelling events, conversations, and hurt feelings over and over in our minds. If you ever stop to think about what you’re thinking about, you will realize that much of the time, you are either worrying about something in the future or agonizing over something in the past. Me, too. This preoccupation with our feelings and our perceived stories makes it difficult (maybe even impossible) to recognize the gentle presence of the Holy Spirit as we move throughout our day.

Ecumenical teacher Richard Rohr offers this solution:

We need forms of prayer that free us from fixating on our own egos and from identifying with our own thoughts and feelings… If we are filled with ourselves, there is no room for another, and certainly not God. We need contemplative prayer, in which we simply let go of our passing ego needs, which change from moment to moment, so Something Eternal can take over.

What Rohr is talking about is contemplative prayer where we talk less and ask less.  Instead, we listen more. We soak up the calm assurance that we are loved, that certainty communicated without words and without need of words. By detaching ourselves from our ego/old man stories, we are able to sense, and even better, to know with confidence, that the Father, Son, and Spirit have our backs.

We are not alone, whether we remembered to ask for God’s presence or not.  We have never been alone, and we will never be alone.  By recognizing our feelings for what they are and by seeing our proclivity to construct stories and be consumed by them, we can make space to see and feel the presence of God with us always.

~by Nan Kuhlman