Dear God, I don’t want to pass the buck but your being
within me hasn’t been discussed too often or too clearly. I hate to sound
critical but this doctrine on the Indwelling has been passed over rather
superficially in my early religious training. I never heard this from the nuns
or the bothers in grade and high schools!
Yet Lord, all the while, deep down I wanted your love
and the reassurance of your love, always trying to earn it. So you can see why
your Indwelling strikes me as strange and foreign. Now I’m being told that I
don’t have to say the prayers the way I was taught and had memorized. No, rather
I should converse naturally, be familiar and relaxed like you’re one of the family
because you Eternal Three, have made
your home within me.
Of course I hesitate. My religious training emphasized
that you were the one who would punish me if I even talked in Church... and as
a youngster I remember confessing it. It was a sin. I was trained to be
meticulously respectful when I came into your presence, as if your presence was
only in my Church. (I remember feeling guilty for a long time when Sister
Janice discovered us in the choir loft, playing the organ one Saturday
afternoon. Who knew she was preparing the sacristy for Sunday Mass! I wasn’t
sure whether I wanted to face her ire on Monday or roast in hell forever?) Now,
I’m being told that your presence is within me! And I’m supposed to be
comfortable with you. I feel as though I should hold my breath.
Dear God, now I’m learning not to think of grace as
the absence of sin but as a gift of your presence, Father, Son and Spirit
within me. And that you are closer to me
than I am to myself and that you want to be for no other reason except that you
love me. That is so beautiful that I really want to hold on to this feeling
forever.
I’m trying to understand that the more aware,
conscious, alert, and attentive I am to your triune presence within me, the more I will find you in all things.
Dear God, I really do want this.
Frankly, I must admit that in the past I hadn’t given
much thought to your presence, your intimacy, you activity within me. What a
love you must have for me! A genuine, boundless, omnipotent, all-present,
eternal, home love within me! I certainly need a mature faith for this. I no
longer can go just gliding along the surface of my old religious practices
anymore, can I?
Thank you Lord.
In
the Name of the Father, from whom we came
and to whom we are going, and to the Son, in whom we find our true self, and to the Holy Spirit, the divine aliveness in our innermost life.
Amen
(John 3:16-18)
(adapted from Ronald T. Haney SJ, God Within You,
Mysticism for the 21st Century, pp. 150-151)
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