“Please,
God...”
We plead for God to intervene, even “just this once...”
But I don’t think that’s how God works: the Holocaust would have been a good time to do so. No, God doesn’t stop the tyrant, or nudge the car on the icy road. God is not a Big Guy with a magic finger he deploys now and then (but not always).
God is the Love at the heart of all being, as constant as gravity, infinitely attentive, and can’t be more present or active than right now.
When we ask for God’s help, what we mean is to align ourselves with the great power of God’s grace already at work. Like musicians in perfect tune, we create harmonics, notes that sound though none of us is producing them. Our harmony with God creates an energy field that does indeed change things.
In troubled times it takes great concentration to align ourselves with grace instead of force, with love instead of fear.
We begin by allowing ourselves to be loved, along with all the rest of Creation, and then we fall into that love, and let that love flow through us into the world.
I think that’s what we mean when we pray,
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net, October 28, 2024 ? How do you pray
“Please, God...”
Re-Source #2: Meet the Wants of This Age — “Who is God?” — “Please, God” — January 2025
God in a Red Dress
Reflecting on the inauguration of Donald Trump, Michael Higgins,1 Canadian theologian and writer, ended his blog as follows:
“Trump likes God on his side and feels in his bones that God saved him from an assassin’s bullet and that, as a consequence, he is the Chosen One. I think God might have a different view. My God, at least.”
It poses a question for all of us to ponder: who is ‘My God’? Jesus challenges his disciples in a similar way: “Who do you say that I am?” Perhaps we could add the word NOW to our question about God? Our image of God evolves over time, shaped by so many factors. The following extract from an article2 written in 2006 invites us to reflect on our own experiences and images of God and how they shape what we think and do.
“In my earliest memories of God, she is wearing a red dress, and dancing in an overgrown garden. She’s beautiful and entrancing, in a wild, glorious, untamed way. She would invite me to dance too, in my imagination. And I longed to, but I was a little shy. She was so alive. She was life. Glorious, rich, feisty. God.
I don’t know where she came from in my imagination. Unsurprisingly, she bore no resemblance to the God of my Sunday School teachers or of my parents. I knew enough not to talk about her, and after a while she was overtaken by the sensible, rational, and somewhat more prosaic version of God. She never disappeared though, she was just relegated to a back cupboard in my imagination, to appear and be dusted off years later when I found Anna Oneglia’s painting of a woman in a red dress, dancing, in a London gallery. I recognised God immediately.
In my meanderings through Christian theology, it was a relief to discover this statement from Sallie McFague:
‘There is a power at work in the universe, on the side of life and all its fulfilment’3 It was the first theology I’d read that made sense of the God I knew — God wearing a red dress, dancing in the garden. It’s the God whose presence I recognise in the world — and even in the Bible (though sometimes cunningly disguised in the Sunday School curriculum of my childhood) — a power who is on the side of life. Irrepressible, relentless, unstoppable.”
1Michael Higgins: Professor Emeritus of Sacred Heart University, Affiliate Professor of Graduate Studies at the San Antonio Oblate School of Theology, Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought, University of Toronto.
2 Cheryl Lawrie: Australian poet, artist, working in the areas of justice, community services, prisons
3 Sallie McFague (d. 2019), best known for her analysis of metaphor at the heart of how Christians may speak about God, applying this to ecological issues, writing on care for the Earth as if it were God’s “body.” Distinguished Theologian in Residence at the Vancouver School of Theology
RESOURCE #2: Meet the Wants of This Age —Who Is God — “God in a Red Dress” — February 2025
Anna Oneglia
Tomáš Halík, The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2024. Translated by Gerald Turner.
Reviewed by Patsy McDonald, SHCJ
Effective communication is a mysterious thing. At its simplest, it can involve providing information, facts, thoughts. When it comes to communicating something about which one cares deeply, whether in teaching, preaching or even conversation, the process is more like striking up the music, or perhaps awakening the slumbering spark that the other may not even have known was alive in her.
The Afternoon of Christianity is communication of the latter sort. Its sixteen relatively short chapters will resonate with those who, having spent much of their lives trying to live faithfully and fully humanly in a world and church they thought they knew, now find themselves in a situation where the pace and scope of change are so dizzying that the temptation is either to cling on desperately to received ‘certainties’ or to abandon all such—and perhaps to resent or isolate themselves from the efforts of those who, in equal sincerity, make the other choice.
Halík’s theology is, as he says, a phenomenology of divine self-revelation that people experience (in different ways, and certainly not only ‘believers’) in acts of faith, accompanied by love and hope (p. 17). This involves skilfully and in an engaging manner guiding readers on a journey that reminds them of the complexity of their lives, both as individuals and as members of society at all levels, from the interpersonal to the global and beyond. He is addressing Christians, of course, and uses traditional ideas and terminology but often recontextualises them to enable readers to let go of some of their narrow, sometimes defensive, positions and to recognise broader possibilities as offering more life-giving potential. Faith (what it is and is not), culture (including art and music), history, secularisation, populism, non-belief, globalisation, the signs of the times, Christian identity, sacraments (particularly baptism), the turn to spirituality, and, throughout, the church— all, and more, are explored in ways that draw attention to available resources and potential hazards, thus enabling readers to reconsider and reevaluate their situation, personal and institutional.
So Halík is offering a basis for hope that can release energy in those who might have reason for thinking that, in the actual or impending loss of so many landmarks on which we had come to rely, all was at an end. There is to be an end, certainly, but it is eschatological, and the immediate task is to move into the ‘afternoon’ of his title (after the noonday crisis that he sees as lasting from late medieval times to post-secularism), aware that the movement is always towards God who is variously known to people (through hints and guesses—the result of grace) and is somehow present with us in all things. Read it!
RE-SOURCE #2: The Wants This Age: Who Is God? — The Afternoon of Christianity — December 2024
Selected quotations: The Afternoon of Christianity
by Tomás Halík— Czech Catholic priest, philosopher, theologian, scholar
U. of N.D. Press 2024
The Afternoon of Christianity—2
No single religious experience, no single understanding and expression of faith in the course of history can exhaust the fullness of God’s mystery. (14)
“Jung compared the human lifetime to the course of a day ... The morning of life is youth & early adulthood .... Then comes the noonday crisis ... a time of fatigue; of sleepiness .... also a chance to address a part of our being that we have ... neglected .... But the afternoon of life—mature age & old age—has a different & more important task than the morning of life—a spiritual journey, a descent into the depths. The afternoon of life is a kairos ... a time to complete the lifelong process of maturing.” (31)
“To answer the question of whether or not they believe in ‘”God, many people today feel the need to add a “but”; I also answer that question by saying, “I do—but perhaps not in the God you have in mind.” (7)
The crisis of contemporary Christianity is not just about Church structures but about faith itself....The Church & its theology have a hermeneutical mission: it is charged with the task of reinterpreting the message entrusted to it so that its meaning is not distorted by the changing cultural & social context.(68)
“If we are seeking some measure of the authenticity of faith, let us not look for it in what people profess in words but in the degree to which faith has penetrated and changed their existence, their hearts. Let us look for it in the way they understand themselves, in their lived relationship with the world, with nature and people, with life and death. Belief in the creator is not affirmed by what one thinks about the origin of the world but by how one treats nature; belief in a common Father is affirmed by accepting other people as brothers and sisters; belief in eternal life is affirmed by how one accepts one’s own finiteness.” (15)
I believe in a God who is the depth of all reality, of all creation, who encompasses it and at the same time infinitely transcends it … (16)
