With God

People often ask me about the safety of being quiet in contemplative prayer. How do we know what voices we are listening to? How do we make certain that we aren’t either lying to ourselves or listening to evil spirits? How do we know that we are being guided by God? 

These are good questions. I have had to work through them myself. It seems that these questions come from a religion focused more on self instead of God. Thinking more about what I need to do to be safe in contrast to focusing more on the character and love of God.

I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us (Romans 8:38-39, MSG).

This is a verse which seems to speak to part of these questions. It captures part of God’s view of us. We will never be separated from the love of God. The Message translation speaks about this love based on an embrace with Jesus. It brought to mind another verse from John 1. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1, NRSV). 

John is speaking about the Logos (Word) as Christ. The Greek word translated as with shows an intimate face-to-face relationship.(1) This is the embrace we are invited to experience, to enjoy, to dance within, and to be an invitation towards. 

As we live life, it seems there is much that gets in the way of living freely within this embrace with God. Both Jesus and Paul spoke about being one with God - this is the intimate face-to-face relationship we are invited to experience. So what gets in the way? 

It seems we place many barriers in the way and believe they protect us. Imagine a wall of our own making blocking our ability to experience God’s love. We aren’t really separated from God’s love but we are unable to experience God’s love as safe and true. Let me explain.  

Spiritual writers talk about a true self and a false self. Our true self is who we are created to be. We are all created with an Imago Dei, Image of God (Gen. 1:26-27), in us. This is who we have been created to be. 

As we grow and live in the world, we learn to protect ourselves by placing a false self around us. This false self is anything we want to be perceived as - beautiful, rich, smart, athletic, kind, a good Christian, even weak and needing to be rescued. We use these labels to define ourselves as we strive toward who we think we need to be, instead of freely living who we are created to be. 

Even though some of these labels are good attributes, manufacturing these identities in ourselves becomes difficult to sustain. It is more like we are pretending to be what we ought, instead of living from a grounded place of freedom and acceptance of who we are. The false self isn’t necessarily bad. It is only an illusion that keeps us from living out of God’s loving embrace. From this false self, we are actually living “rightly” in our own strength. 

So the barriers, the false self, we put in place get in the way of experiencing God’s intimate face-to-face relationship. Love doesn’t feel like love coming in or out of these barriers. The love that is real becomes distorted. ​

We all have these barriers. As I love another, the love is distorted through my barriers as well as through theirs. It can get very messy living as humans together. That is where grace, defined as acceptance and belonging, comes in. Believing we are all doing our very best and accepting we will all do this living together, very imperfectly. 

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Now, let’s go back to the verse we started with from Romans. If nothing can separate us from God’s embrace of love, then when we experience God’s embrace as unloving, what do we do? For me, I have begun a practice of noticing my own barriers that tend to distort God’s love. 

First, that requires me to actually pay attention to what doesn’t feel settled inside of me - allowing those feelings to come. I need to be open to my own feelings instead of rejecting them as negative or bad. This requires a trust in God’s intimate embrace of love and allows God to show me the fears, lies, or doubts I have accepted as lived truth. These falsehoods have power and take up energy or space in my life as strongholds. They control my behavior more than I would like to admit.

In allowing God to touch these places, I can live from the freedom of being loved and accepted by God, regardless of anything. This can help me live with an ever-deepening singleness of intention toward God. From this place, I can begin to be absolutely convinced (Paul’s words) of my security within God’s intimate face-to-face embrace with me. From there, I can grow deeper in living within a singleness of intent toward God. 

You can see this is a cyclical dance as we learn to love and be loved by God. As we realize we are more secure in God’s love than we knew, we are invited to be ever more trusting in prayer. This means trusting ourselves and God in God’s desire to go to any length to communicate with us in relationship. God is trustworthy in God’s fierce love for us, each one of us.​

So why is contemplative prayer safe? It is safe because of who God is. God is for us and desires to meet us in prayer. Our desire for more of God is actually meeting God’s fierce desire for us. We can trust God to meet us in this space, regardless. It isn’t about fixing ourselves but allowing ourselves to surrender to our own belovedness and to accept God is for us. 

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      (1) Cleon L. Rogers Jr. and Cleon L. Rogers III, The New Linguistic and Exegetical Key to the Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Pub. House, 1998), 175.

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