Theories abound, well-meaning, but ultimately trite and foolish. When it comes to communicating with or even sensing God, though, we feel knocked back on our heels. To recognize who we are as a result of our past can give us a wider understanding in order to be fully present in that moment. But that’s just the baseline, something that most of us take for granted, like gravity or sneezing with our eyes closed. That we do all of this in seconds, without even breaking a sweat, is testament to the commonplace extraordinariness of communication between humans, surely one of the most complex aspects of our species. Sure, we’re processing the signals we encounter, decoding while we encode, taking in the feedback - both verbal and nonverbal - and trying to see the moment through the eyes of our partner all of this in the wider context of our social, political, and psychological sensitivities.
When we speak, then, it is our entire experience of life to that point that shapes our responses to the person in front of us. I have mentioned this to my students in ethics courses as a way of suggesting our links to our past and our debts to those who have gone before us. Our ancestors hover over and behind us our past experiences and actions are melded into our bone marrow our thoughts and words spring from the rivers of tradition and culture that water our singular desolation at times when we feel most alone. There is a Native American perspective that when we talk to one another we are surrounded by everyone and everything that has brought us to that moment. “Just as clairvoyants may see the future,” says Abraham Heschel in God in Search of Man, “the religious man comes to sense the present moment.” Is this an extra-sensory perception? Something that only one in a hundred are born with, those with a second sight, the fortunate few who travel always in the assurance of being surrounded by the divine? “It is primarily, it seems, an enhancement of the soul,” says Heschel, “a sharpening of one’s spiritual sense, an endowment with a new sensibility…Things have past and a future, but only God is pure presence.”(142) Yet thousands of years of spiritual tradition and writings insist that this is where God is, here, in the present moment. It’s a Venn diagram rather than a line or a point. It’s no wonder we find it difficult to be in the present moment: we can’t see its edges. That is my recollection of a quote I heard several years ago attributed to Ram Dass, an American guru in the Hindu tradition. It is not a terra incognita, an unknown land it is a forgotten land, and our relation to God is a palimpsest rather than a tabula rasa. We do not have to discover the world of faith we only have to recover it.
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