Gotta have Faith… (the life of a Mystic)

One thing I have been thinking about recently is Faith.  For me I have gone on a journey over recent years of questioning my core beliefs and trying to come to new understandings of how I view God and what it means to be a  Christian and living ‘Christ Like’.  Through this journey it is easy to become cynical and cast aside all matters that require faith/belief (Prayer, divine providence etc).  For some of us on this journey it may be necessary to let go of these things all together for a time, then slowly but surely pick up and recapture these matters of faith with renewed insight and enthusiasm. 

Over the last month a couple times the idea of being a mystic or divine providence (seeing God at work and with us in our daily lives) has come up at church.  The idea was proposed that to survive as a Christian we need to live as 'mystics', OR in the words of the immortal George Michael (sorry if you are too young to know who he is) you “Gotta have Faith, a Faith, a Faith…”  We either need to see God in our daily lives or we will begin to lose sight of the essence of our Christian faith.

Jeannie Cochrane who some of you may know, shared the following thoughts on a book she was reading, ‘The Shattered Lantern by Ron Rolheiser’ a couple of Sundays back.  It really helped  me to put into context God in my daily life, hope you enjoy it also…..

“…Before I read a portion of what he (Ron Rolheiser) has to say about having a sense of divine providence, I want to say something about the context in which it is set.

One idea the author is exploring is something he calls practical atheism, by which he means (and I quote) “not that the existence of God is denied but that God is absent from the ordinary consciousness and lives of believers.” So practical atheism means that while we might believe in God, we live our daily lives as if God did not exist. 

He says that the solution to the practical atheism of our time is not finding better proofs for God’s existence but finding a proper way of living, a proper praxis, proper attitudes and habits – one of these being having a sense of divine providence. He says this is achieved by having a proper sense of contingency, or radical dependence on something beyond ourselves.

(pg 166)  Karl Rahner was once asked whether he believed in miracles. He replied, “ I don’t believe in miracles, I rely on them to get me through each day.”  We, too, need to have a vital sense of divine providence in our lives…

(pg 168) Today the concept of divine providence is not very popular.  Our age tends to see it as unhealthy fatalism (“If God wants my child to live he won’t let him die! We won’t take the blood transfusion!”), an unhealthy fundamentalism (“God sent AIDS into the world as a punishment for our sexual promiscuity!”), or an unhealthy theology of God (“God sends us natural and personal disasters to bring us back to true values!”). For the most part, it is good that our age rejects such false concepts of providence. God does not start fires, or floods, or wars, or AIDS, or anything else of this nature in order to wake us up. Nature, chance, human freedom and human sin bring these things to pass.

However, to say God does not initiate or cause these things is not the same thing as saying that God does not speak through them. God is in these chance events, both in the disastrous and the advantageous ones, and speaks through them. Past generations understood this.

For example, my parents were farmers. For them, as for Abraham and Sarah of old, there were no accidents – there was only providence. If they had good crops, God was blessing them. If they had poor crops, well, they concluded that God, for some reasons they should try to grasp and understand, wanted them to live on less for a while. For them, there was no ordinary secular reality. Divine providence was always seen in the conspiracy of accidents that constituted ordinary life. They always tried to read the signs of the times. They stood before every event, good or bad, personal or communal, and asked the question, “What is God saying to us?”

In prayer and discernment, they would always figure out those reasons in the depths of their hearts. This is what mysticism looks like in ordinary life, the mysticism Rahner points to when he says he relies on miracles to get him through each day.  To have a sense of God’s presence in everyday life, we don’t need the kind of miracles that drastically change ordinary reality and prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is a supernatural world beyond our natural world (a miracle in the common sense of understanding.) No. We need a deeper sense that God is already present and acting in the seemingly ordinary events of our lives. We need to read the signs of the times. When we find a penny on the street, we need to feel that God is blessing us. Then we are mystics.”

So what do you all think?  I am sure for some (hopefully most) of you this is second nature and nothing new for your daily lives.  For Others I hope this is helpful and hopeful way to see God in your daily lives.

Here are a couple of questions that may be worth discussing:

·         How do you see God at work in your daily lives?

·         What does divine providence mean for the poor and destitute?

·         How do we remain “radically dependant on God”?

·         What do we think of Rahner’s description of “unhealthy” fatalism, fundamentalism, theology?