Where is Your God?

Unprecedented. Unbelievable. Devastating. These are just some of the words I use when I am grasping at ways to describe something that is hard to articulate during this COVID-19 crisis. The coronavirus and the shelter-in-place is leaving so many of us with feelings of uncertainty, fear, sadness for the loss of life, and for many - loneliness. But I think one of the hardest challenges to this crisis is the unavailability of the physical places and people we go to for spiritual support.

Where Do You Find Strength?

What are the places and who are the people who provide strength for you? Whenever I need help - big or small - my mom is always at my house. Now, she can’t be.

Whenever I need a warm hug of spiritual support, I go to Mercy Center Auburn, the retreat center where I facilitate most of my retreats. It has been my consistent place of growth and solitude, especially during my lowest points over the past fifteen years.

And mass every Sunday? That is my sacred space that is always there for me to re-group for the week and experience the intimacy of Christ in the Eucharist.

These are some of the ways I experience God’s love that are unavailable in their typical form. Yes, we are fortunate to have live streaming and video conferencing to see people and experience church services but it is not the same. The week my emails were rolling in with notices of cancellations and closures felt unreal. I felt sad and - for a moment - a little lost.

A Vulnerability Exposed

I titled this reflection, “Where is your God?” because without these services or people to see in their typical form, it can be easy to feel a little spiritually lost, shaken, or just unsure how to practice your faith. It may be even harder for you this coming week as we begin Holy Week.

Recently, Pope Francis gave a blessing and used the storm on the sea of Galilee to describe the COVID-19 pandemic. He said the storm exposes “our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules” and lays bare “all those attempts to anesthetize ourselves.”

Pause and sit with that quote for a while. Many of the people and places we use to ground ourselves in God’s love are not necessarily “superfluous” (although you may be realizing some are superfluous) but our dependence on them “exposes our vulnerability.” Whether we are forced to be at home, working in stressful conditions, or suffering because we or someone we love is sick from the coronavirus, there is an invitation to ask ourselves, “Where is my God?” Am I feeling lost because I have only experienced God outside of myself? Is my God only at church? Only at bible study? Only experienced through a certain friend? How might this challenging time be an invitation to experience God within you? How might this time be an invitation to form a more personal relationship with Jesus? An experience of God within is never dependent on external circumstances or physical structures. God is always available.

Inspiration to Go Within

These reflection questions make me think of the holocaust stories that express a place Jewish people were able to reach inside of themselves that could not be touched or affected by their tormentors. No matter what the external circumstances are, there is always a choice to go within.

Etty Hillesum was the author of confessional letters and diaries which describe both her religious awakening and the persecutions of Jewish people in Amsterdam during the German occupation. In 1943 she was deported and killed in Auschwitz concentration camp. She wrote:

A large group of us were crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives were the same. All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned. What distinguished each of us was only our inner attitude.

Renowned psychiatrist and author of “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Viktor E. Frankl, survived years of horror in Nazi death camps. He wrote:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

I know this inner strength to be true based on my experience of losing my precious 16-year-old son, Peter, to a brain aneurysm a year and a half ago. We spent 25 days in the ICU with his life in the balance. The only thing that sustained me was the time I spent going within. Sometimes going within meant practicing my breathing prayers, sometimes music, and at other times a quick escape to the hospital chapel. When life as you know it shatters outside of you, a Divine sense of stability is always available inside of you. The spirit of God dwells in you. Romans 8:9

Meeting God in the Silence

Meeting God within you requires time in silence. It requires turning off the TV, phone, podcasts, Netflix, and even a good Zoom meeting. And when I mean silence, I don’t simply mean the absence of sound. If you are living by yourself during this shelter-in-place, you may have a lot of silence, but that is not the same as solitude. Intentional time to be with God. Just be.

Author Henri Nouwen speaks to the significance of this movement from external to internal in, “Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life.”

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.

Author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton describes this sacred place within as the "spark of Divinity" in his book, "the Book of Hours." I invite you to read this slowly and prayerfully, inviting God to lead you to this experience of intimacy.

In the center of our being is a point of nothingness

Which is untouched by sin and by illusion.

A point of pure truth,

A point or spark which belongs entirely to God,

Which is never at our disposal,

From which God disposes of our lives,

Which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind

Or the brutalities of our own will.

This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty

It is the pure glory of God in us.

It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.

It is in everybody and if we could see it

We would see these billions of points of light

Coming together in the face and blaze of a sun

That would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

I have no program for this seeing

It is only given. (a grace)

But this gate of heaven is everywhere.

As you enter into Holy week, be open to meeting the “pure glory of God” inside of you. As Merton says, there is “no program for this seeing.” It is given by grace. Allow yourself to be open to the grace by spending intentional time in prayer - however prayer looks for you. You may want to start with this one and imagine the light of Christ encircling you.

Celtic Caim Prayer

Circle me O God 
Keep hope within
Despair without

Circle me O God
Keep peace within
Keep turmoil out.

Circle me O God
Keep calm within
Keep storms without.

Circle me O God
Keep strength within
Keep weakness out

Reflect and Share

What are the situations, places, or people that help ground you that are missing (in their typical form) from your life right now? Are you finding new ways to pray? Has this time been an opening to deeper solitude and connection with God or made it more challenging?