Surprised by God

by Chris E W Green

  SURPRISED BY GOD

  How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

  Chris E. W. Green

  SURPRISED BY GOD

  How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

  Copyright © 2018 Chris E. W. Green. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

  Cascade Books

  An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

  199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

  Eugene, OR 97401

  www.wipfandstock.com

  paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-3565-6

  hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-3567-0

  ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-3566-3

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Names: Green, Chris E. W., author.

  Title: Surprised by God : how and why what we think about the divine matters / Chris E. W. Green.

  Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-3565-6 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-3567-0 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-3566-3 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: God (Christianity) | Contemplation | Theology, Practical | Spiritual life—Christianity

  Classification: BT102 G72 2018 (paperback) | BT102 (ebook)

  The Banjo Lesson by Henry Ossawa (1893) (p. 68) and The Vulture and the Little Girl by Kevin Carter (1993) (p. 43) are in the public domain.

  Christ and the Breadlines by Fritz Eichenberg (1953) (p. 61).

  Christ Sending Forth the Disciples by David Jones (1924) (p. 62) permission given by the Trustees of the David Jones Estate.

  The Christ of the Breadlines by Franz Eichenberg (1955) (p. 61) copyright: Estate of Fritz Eichenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.07/31/18

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  Chapter 1: What to Do When the World Is on Fire

  Chapter 2: How (Not) to Believe in God

  Chapter 3: Saving Desire

  Chapter 4: Practicing the Absence of God

  Chapter 5: Blessed Are Those Who Do Not See

  Chapter 6: God Is Not in Control

  Chapter 7: Christ’s Death Lives in Us

  Chapter 8: What Happens with Those God Loves

  Chapter 9: Turning from God for God’s Sake

  Chapter 10: Loving Obedience

  Chapter 11: The Needs of God

  Chapter 12: How God Becomes Human

  List of Books Cited

  Preface

  I had a very good reason for writing this book: my wife Julie told me to do it. Of course, even with her encouragement, the work proved difficult—and not only because of the normal difficulties of writing and editing. There are always troubles sufficient for every season. So, as I was writing, my maternal grandfather and grandmother, with whom I have always been close, passed away. And I struggled with a series of illnesses. Through it all, however, the effort has been if nothing else an opening of myself to healing. It has been good for me to think and pray through these words; perhaps that is why Julie pressed me to write it.

  Saying it has been good for me to write this book is another way of saying that God has surprised me, again and again. I was raised to think of God in specific terms and to expect God to acts in particular ways. Now, most if not all of those terms and ways are lost to me. But only because God always proves to be more than those concepts and expectations can handle. Even if I am not always pleased to find this happening to me, I am happy that God is beyond all I ask or think.

  Finally, I need to give thanks to those who helped make this writing possible. Thanks, first, to Julie and my children: Zoë, Clive, and Emery. They were not only patient but also relentlessly encouraging in making time for me to write and praying for me to do it well. Special thanks too for all the friends who read and responded to early drafts of these chapters: Hannah Moore, Dusty Counts, Ed Gungor, Mark Aarstad, and Adam Palmer. Without their readiness to take time to read and respond to my work, I would have had a very difficult time discerning what I needed to change or leave alone, what I should add or take away. Their friendship during this time has been a grace, and I am deeply grateful for it.

  Chapter One

  What to Do When the World Is on Fire

  “There is no fear in love.”

  1 John 4:18

  “We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire.”

  —T. S. Eliot

  Christians are called to live Christ’s life in this world, embodying the fullness of his love. And that means we’re called to live fearlessly. Now, we can all find much to be afraid of; at least we could if we lived by sight and not by faith. What Teresa of Avila said of her own age is true of ours (and all other ages) as well: the world is on fire; God seems to have so few friends and so many enemies. But fear is not a Christian affection. As St John reveals, the love of God has no fear in it, and deep-seated fears suffocate our ability to live lovingly with our neighbors (1 John 4:18). The fear of judgment, in particular, keeps us from being gracefully present to those most in need. Somehow, then, we must be delivered into fearlessness by the love of God.

  At birth, we are hurled into trouble. There are evils sufficient for every day and terrors sufficient for every age. We know fear from the earliest beginnings of our lives, long before we are capable of gratitude or humility, wonder or awe. In the words of Job, “mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble.” So how can we possibly live fearlessly? Given the state of things in this world, doesn’t even the desire to live without fear mean we are either naively selfish, concerned only with our own safety and comfort, or foolishly selfless, ready to put ourselves and our neighbors through unnecessary, meaningless suffering?

  We have to find a way to move toward fearlessness—without deceiving ourselves. But how? We have to allow ourselves to be shown a reality truer than our experiences. Like Teresa, we have to look away from the world to God for the world’s sake. In times of crisis, we need to turn aside to God as Moses did, averting our gaze from all illusions of mastery and control, as well as from all specters of futility and meaninglessness, fixing our attention on the God revealed in the gospel. As Maximus Confessor reminds us, human life is lived in the shadow of death; only if we know the God who lives with us can we rightly pass through the valley of the shadow of death without dread of the evils. Fear is a way of apprehending reality, a way of receiving the world, and only by looking to God instead of the world can we be freed from it. To that end, we have to learn contemplation.

  ***

  We are already familiar with God. At least many of us are day in and day out saturated with Christian images and sounds. We easily recognize descriptions of the divine nature (God is one, holy, good, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent). We are sure we know how to call on God, and we are quick to profess our confidence in him and desire for him. But if we want really to be freed to live the lives we’re called to live, lives authentically devoted to doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly before God, we have to penetrate the veil of that familiarity, pressing toward a transfiguring vision of God as he is revealed to us. It is not enough to know the divine names or to have a felt sense of the divine presence. We need to grasp—or, better, be grasped by—a vision of the divine nature and character. We have to come to know as fully as possible with life-determining force what God is really like.

  But how is it possib
le for us, as the finite, broken creatures we are, to know what God is really like? Even our own wisdom is incomprehensible to us; how much more God’s wisdom? Thomas Aquinas can help us here. In this life, he insists, we cannot know what God in himself is like, not even by the grace of faith. Until our transformation with all things at the end of history, there remains between God and us such an absolute difference that we simply are not capable of knowing God as he essentially is. But Thomas is quick to add that this does not mean God cannot be known now in any sense. God by nature is supremely knowable, and because he is good, he desires to be known by creatures in ways fitted to the reality purposed for us. In fact, it is precisely the mode of our knowledge of God that makes us what we are. As we are being made capable of knowing who and what he is, he is transforming who and what we are so that we are brought into the fullness of the purpose given to us from the foundation of all things.

  Given that the above is true, we can perhaps identify three such modes of knowing. First, there is the knowledge of God that comes naturally to us, which is something like an intuitive, existential sense of our creatureliness, a fractured awareness of being in relation to an absolute and mysterious otherness. From time to time in the course of our daily lives, we become aware of the fact that we are answerable to this mystery that lies at the limits of our existence. At other times, we sense, however vaguely, what Simone Weil’s describes as a “longing for an absolute good . . . a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.” That’s not to say that every one of us thinks about that longing and recognizes it for what it is. But it is to say that we know God in some sense just by experiencing that longing, however we name it.

  Second, there is the knowledge of God given by grace through faith, which teaches us to identify God rightly, selecting him out from all the so-called gods as the true and living one. By the Spirit’s gift of faith and Christ’s patient presence to us, we come over time more and more fully to adore God’s nature and to trust his character. This graced, faithful knowledge is both intellectual and affective, doctrinal and experiential. It fulfills the longing created by our natural knowing of God as in secret, hidden ways it also takes us out beyond the sheerly intellectual or affective, effecting a kind of stilling or silencing of our thoughts and feelings in communion with God.

  Finally, there is the knowledge of God given in the final transformation of all things. In that moment, according to Aquinas, God unites himself to us and us to himself so that we come to know God as we are known by God. We see God as he is, and in this way become like him. It is only the work of the Father as witness to Christ that moves us from the first to the second mode of knowing God. In the same way, it is only the appearing of Christ, which is the Spirit’s fulfillment of history, that moves us from the second to the third. In the fullness of time, we move from the glory of image to the glory of likeness, from the glory of faith to the glory of sight.

  ***

  To reiterate: so long as we live by sight and not by faith, we will be troubled with fears of all kinds, real and imagined. And so long as we are troubled by those fears, we will remain incapable of loving our neighbors freeingly or faithfully. If we believe we are responsible to manage our own futures, if we feel we can and should control what happens to us and to those around us, if we remain at the mercy of our own passions and the pressures of the powers of this age, then we are sure to live—and to cause others to live—from terror to terror and not from grace to grace. So, in this time before the fullness of times, only contemplation frees us for worldly living.

  But perhaps I’ve still not quite made clear what it means to contemplate God. It means, as Rowan Williams has said, “to look to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction.” It means allowing God to be God for me, making room for “the prayer of Christ, God’s own relation to God, to come alive in me” so that I am opened up compassionately to my neighbor. In contemplation, the Holy Spirit broods sweetly over my spirit, slowly and secretly freeing me from “slavery to cravings and fantasies,” making me permeable to Christ so that his character begins to alter mine, filling me with the goodness of his own Spirit—joy and peace, gentleness and self-control. In contemplation, in other words, we open ourselves up to the sanctifying work of God, a work that takes time and happens almost entirely below the level of our conscious awareness. In Joseph Pieper’s phrase, contemplation is “a knowing which is inspired by love,” a knowing that God creates in us just as we give ourselves, heart and mind and soul, to considering God as he is and all things as they are in him.

  How does this knowing happen in us? What part do we play in its happening? Is there a way that we can intentionalize our participation? How do we yield to the Spirit? Above all, we attend to the revelation of God given in the Scriptures and the church’s reading and performance of those Scriptures until our attention becomes a kind of ceaseless prayer, until the communion that is God’s own life as Trinity begins to happen among and between us—in ways we can see and ways we cannot see. As we are attending habitually to who God is, faithful attention begins to come alive in us. And just as our lives are being opened to God’s, we can trust that we are being delivered from the fear that dehumanizes us and thwarts our vocation.

  We will not be delivered from it all at once, of course. And no doubt our expectations will be disappointed again and again. But if the church has witnessed faithfully to the character and nature of God, then we can be sure that as we allow God’s own relation to God to happen in us, our humanity, our creatureliness, will be renewed so that we can care for others without oppressing them. This is the heart of the matter: nothing is as humanizing, as sanctifying, as contemplating the beauty of God and the glory he shares with our neighbor.

  ***

  Contemplation is not just one kind of thing Christians do. It is, instead, basic to everything we do. Of course, silent, contemplative prayer is at the heart of the contemplative life, and we all would do well to practice it. But contemplation is not reducible to a form of regular, meditative prayer any more than it is simply identical with theological reflection. Instead, contemplation is a mode of orientation to life, a manner of engaging and receiving reality, a way of apprehending as gift everything that comes to us. Contemplation is attentional living. It is attending to God in all things, at all times, and to all things, at all times, in God.

  If we hope to live this kind of life, attentive to God in the midst of our worldly experiences, we need to learn as well as we can the revealed truth about the divine nature and character. Of course, contemplation cannot be reduced to the ideas we have about God. It should go without saying that the goal is not merely to hold orthodox opinions, whatever that might mean. But contemplation is inseparably bound up with the ways we think of God, even if it remains distinct from our thinking about God and finally transcends it altogether. Our worship and our witness, our speaking to God and for God with and for one another, our participation in God’s work in the world, depend at every point on faithful teaching and learning of the truth about who God is and what he is like.

  To be sure, there is a knowing of God that exceeds anything we can think or feel about God. But movement out into the divine mystery runs along the way opened up by doctrine, and by the constant consideration of the nature and character of God. Our convictions about God matter. And these convictions cannot truly be ours, cannot be integrated transformingly into our lives, apart from shared reflection on what it is that we think about God as we are attempting to perform the gospel. The more our beliefs about God come into line with the truth, the more available we make ourselves for the deep transformation necessary to see everything transfigured in the light of the character of the divine life.

  All that said, we cannot forget that contemplation is always only gift and never an achievement. It happens always only as God freely awakens us to God. As Thomas Merton says in his book on contemplative prayer, “True contemplation is not a psychol
ogical trick but a theological grace. It can come to us only as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.” The living God cannot be controlled or directed. The fire must fall on the altar; we cannot summon it. We can and should, however, posture ourselves for the awakening God has promised. In fact, that’s how we know contemplation is beginning to take shape: we find ourselves being opened up to the happening of God in us, being brought slowly but truly into alignment with God’s love of God and God’s love of us, coming to know as we are known, becoming transparent to Christ as he has made himself transparent himself to us. We can and should, then, again and again ask ourselves why we love God and what it is in God that we find lovely, because in asking those questions we keep ourselves open to the possibility of answers that can surprise us, answers that can help us know how best to yield to God’s work in our lives.

  ***

  This way of looking to God in the midst of our lived experience of the world may not come easily, because many of us remain enslaved to the “practical.” We’ve been trained to expect—and so to demand—truths that make instant, easy sense for us, truths that in some way immediately improve the quality of our lives. But as St. Augustine told us long ago, humans aren’t just for using things. We are meant to enjoy God and neighbor, and to find ourselves through losing ourselves in God’s enjoyment of our neighbor.

  Contemplation of the divine nature and character, then, is a form of rebellion against the tyranny of the practical, and precisely in that way it is a refusal to live fearfully. Contemplation moves us beyond thinking of God as useful, as if he were a resource we draw on to make our lives what we have been told they should be. It reminds us that we are meant for more than getting things done and having things done to us. St. Thomas Aquinas described salvation as basically nothing more or less than reflecting on the divine essence now and always. If that doesn’t sound very appealing, it’s because we don’t yet understand as we’re meant to understand how beautiful and beautifying this God really is.