The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

It’s odd what one thinks about on holiday and what the clergy think about might seem very odd. I suppose it may have been because I was at an altitude of about 1900 metres above sea level that I was pondering what it means to get closer to God. In a sermon he preached while I was away Fr Jim talked about living out our faith so that we are ‘truly close to God and God is real for us.’ He also said that if you don’t feel like that the only answer is ‘to pray, to open ourselves to God in quiet humility.’ But what might we then expect to feel or experience, what does it mean to get closer to God?
Many of us I suspect have expectations of what it ought to mean; we may well think of it in terms of some inner, private experience. We might expect to feel some kind of inner certainty about what we should do, or what we should believe, almost as though God were talking to us. We might expect to experience particular feelings of calm or peacefulness, or some inner excitement or surge of energy; we might even wonder whether we could experience some kind of vision as some of the saints are supposed to have done. Might real prayer result in some sense of the presence of Jesus either in his humanity or in glory?
If our expectations are anything like that then it may be that we are in for as big a disappointment as Peter must have felt in our Gospel reading when Jesus begins to speak about his Messiah-ship in a way that confounded all Peter’s expectations of what a real Messiah ought to be like. Peter expected something triumphant, glorious, invincible; what he was shown was a vision that bore no resemblance at all to his idea of successful faith. So perhaps our vision of what successful prayer and coming closer to God might mean may need some unpicking too.
I’ve already referred to our assumptions about the visionary experience of the saints; what I didn’t mention may seem odd in an age obsessed by personal experience, but up until the 16th century one definition of a saint could have been that they paid little attention to such inner experiences. They certainly didn’t see them as essential, important or something to be expected – they could take them as demonic delusions as well as gifts from God – all depended on the effect such experiences had on their life with others. They would certainly have believed that you could be a saint and never have any unusual or special inner experiences as a result of prayer.
To some extent this emphasis on experience dates from the turn inwards associated with Descartes in the 17th century. If you associate your identity with the inner workings of your mind then you are bound to give your unique experiences a special authority. ‘I think therefore I am’ leads to ‘God exists because I experience him’, ‘God loves me because I feel it’. And then very easily the converse can become true; God doesn’t exist because I’ve never had a personal experience of him. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could think differently but in earlier centuries there are many signs that they did. And it may be that those long ago Christians can help us to gain a different understanding of what ‘feeling close to God’ might mean.
In some ways we might feel that things were easier for them then because everyone took it for granted that God was all around them – that the world was indeed ‘charged with the grandeur of God’. From the 5th to the 15th centuries at least Europe was Christian, the church was increasingly omnipresent, people took God for granted as an essential part of their lives – they did not need special inner experiences to reassure them of God’s existence. That did not mean, however, that God wasn’t perceived to be active in certain distinctive ways – it’s just that the ways God was said to act were not so much private and personal as mutual, communal and practical. Spirituality was not about the cultivation of an inner state of mind, it was about the cultivation of relationship in the image of the Trinitarian relationship.
On this basis prayer can be seen to be about three things: firstly prayer is intercessory; it is about the communal and personal expression of need; God this is what we want to happen, this is what we commit ourselves to making happen in whatever way you will; secondly prayer is a disciplined use of time and silence. Wasting time in silence becomes essential to the way in which you use your time and your tongue when you are not praying – more of that in a moment. Thirdly prayer is the communal act of worship – the time which the community spends together strengthening its corporate life by singing and praying and taking bread and wine together to incarnate the life of Jesus in our life and our relationship with the world around us.
So if that is what prayer and spirituality are properly about what experience of closeness to God might they be expected to bring about? Perhaps our curious and quaint sounding reading from the epistle of James could be a good starting point. You can experience God when you experience biting your tongue – metaphorically that is. We live in a church so obsessed by sexual sin that it fails to notice that large parts of early Christian tradition clearly thought that not being able to curb one’s tongue was a far greater sin; the tongue according to James is ‘a restless evil, full of deadly poison’. So James would perhaps say to us, ‘You will experience God when you experience a Christian community in which there is no gossip or back biting, where people are not quick to judge or take offence, where they think before they speak and where what they speak is kind or funny or thoughtful or inspiring and never harsh or thoughtless or defensive or self obsessed’. And the community which is like that is a community learning to value time spent in silence wherever and however it can be found. For silence trains the tongue in the language of God, the Word.
When Jesus talks about the spiritual life he tends to talk about losing something rather than finding it. Jesus speaks of what is found is the other side of a sense of loss, as though God is there in the moment when we realise we’re looking for the wrong thing; God is there when we let go of our illusory needs in order to see our real source of fulfilment. Isaiah, almost as if he were anticipating the way of the cross, speaks of God being there even at the very moment when one’s self image is being deconstructed by mockery and disgrace. Such language is not intended as a permanent picture of the truly spiritual life but it does show that God’s presence is never to be associated with our feelings of being control or in possession of something. Closeness to God is more likely to come not in some seemingly supernatural or unique experience. The reality of God is made known to us when we feel most deeply connected with the world that is always there around us. God is most likely to be there in moments of self forgetfulness, looking out of a train window and noticing the darting forward of an adventurous child, or the intensity of a couple’s good bye or the reflection of the setting sun on a snow capped mountain, experiences which invite you into a certain kind of living. As our psalmist says this morning, ‘I will walk before the Lord in the presence of the living.’ To be close to God, is to walk with your neighbour in the intensity of simply being alive.