Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows himself everywhere, in everything–in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.–Thomas Merton

We can’t do anything about God’s freedom to withdraw his presence from us, except to keep on walking through the dark night. But we can do something about our inability to be fully present to the God who is always there.

What is keeping us from being more present to the God all around us? Rolheiser points to three contributing factors.

1. We are self-centered/narcissistic. We have reduced life to phrases that begin with the word “my”.

He says, “When we are excessively self- preoccupied, we tend to see nothing beyond our own heartaches and problems. Our sense of reality shrinks accordingly and it is not then surprising that we have trouble believing in the reality of God since we have trouble perceiving any reality at all beyond ourselves.”

2. We?re obsessed with productivity and pragmatic activity. We trust the scientists and are skeptical of the mystics.

3. We are impatient/restless. We have no capacity for delayed gratification
Our lives are saturated with so many other experiences that we have no room left for an authentic experience of God.

It’s possible for us to structure our lives in such a way that God becomes unnecessary and therefore is no longer a felt reality.

It’s easy to blame God and wonder why he hides himself the way he does.

What if God is not the one who is doing all the hiding? What if, like Adam and Eve in the garden, we?ve hidden ourselves from God?

Here?s a question I?ve been asking myself lately: Have I ordered my life in such a way that I?m actually hiding from God?

It’s entirely possible to say I believe in God and I believe Jesus is His son who died for my sins and never really feel the presence of God in your life. We can affirm the theory of Christianity without experiencing the presence of God in such a way that it makes a difference in the way we live.

The truth is, for too many of us, God is not a felt reality.

Why is this so? Ronald Rolheiser gives two possibilities.

1. God has hidden himself in order to purify or mature our faith. The spiritual masters talk about how God withdraws his felt presence in order to get our attention or to teach us a lesson. St. John of the Cross calls this the “Dark Night of the Soul.”

2. We are blind to God’s presence. God is always present, but we are not always present to God.

So which one do you think it is most of the time?

What if a scientist told you that atoms exist? Would you believe him, even though you have never seen an atom yourself? What if he told you he could teach you how to manipulate atoms in order to release incredible amounts of energy into the world? If this is something you wanted to do, would you do what he told you to do?

What if someone told you that they consistently experience the felt presence of God? Would you believe him, even if you had never felt the presence of God yourself? What if he told you he could teach you how to structure your life in such a way that you could experience presence of God in the same way and release all kind of spiritual energy into your life? Would you do what he told you to do? Or would you balk because you don’t believe that one person can tell another how to feel the presence of God because that seems too formulaic or predictable? After all, God’s presence is a subjective reality.

Consider this quote from Ronald Rolheiser:

In a pragmatic society, science alone is given the right to establish facts. Its findings are considered objective. What is proposed by other disciplines, with a different method of knowing–metaphysics, philosophy, mysticism, poetry, or theology–is considered to be purely subjective, a matter of personal faith and blind option. Thus, for example, no one, professional scientist or lay person, has ever seen an atom. Yet none of us doubts its existence. Science not only assures us that atoms do exist, it positively manipulates them to create nuclear energy. Who can doubt their existence? Likewise, no one, professional mystic or lay person, has ever seen God in the world. Yet, we doubt God’s existence despite the fact that mystics assure us of that reality and we see in the lives of many believers fairly concrete evidence that they are experiencing something real in what they claim as an experience of God. They, too, like scientists, are splitting atoms which release energy. However, in a technological society, we see and understand only one kind of energy, pragmatic. This reduction, as we shall see later, is a debilitating impoverishment.