Theological Journal – January 30 Authenticity (3)

Paying attention to God is the heart of Christian existence. Duh! Sounds like every Christian platitude, right? I hope by this point you can see that’s not true. Or at least not simple and easy. To counsel someone to undertake paying attention to God is actually to invite them on a harrowing journey into a reality we never imagined.


Attention is not simply noticing something but attending to it, engaging with it, and entering into a mutually reciprocal relation with it. When that “it” is God the reality we encounter is personal to the nth degree and full of grace and truth like nothing else we know. We will not remain unscathed in this journey but the wounds we sustain are divine surgery for our healing.


An early age in the West faced a world filled with gods and spiritual powers and faced the challenge of discern the right god and powers to attend to.  Later as Western culture changed and entered the modern age the challenge was to sustain faith in the face of ongoing challenges to the existence of God and find “places” in that world that nurtured such faith. More recently, since the mid-1960’s, our culture has morphed into a world full of distractions and diversions that the very idea of the reality and presence of God is backgrounded so far as to be out of sight. God is the gorilla walking and dancing through our crowded lives we neither see nor engage. The plausibility of such an encounter is the challenge confronting us here.


Some, at least, want more than our “immanent frame” allows us to imagine we can or should have. These “echoes of transcendence” are a small, still voice calling us to seek more than our immanent frame allows us to hope for or can deliver. All, believer (in whatever) and non-believer are similarly afflicted with the suspicion of the implausibility of an experience of God even though some desire and seek it nevertheless (in a wildly varied ways). Attending to God, then, in our particular context is a matter of identifying where God may be found and how he can be experienced under these conditions.


This seeking takes the form of a search for authenticity, our true selves, in this “hall of mirrors” world we inhabit where all we see is distorted and out of focus and diversions abound in the carnivalesque world surrounding the hall. Where can we find reality, ours and the world’s, and how do we engage it here?


According to Andrew Root (Faith Formation in a Secular Age) Paul’s view of faith can help at this point. In summary:

-he met Jesus on the Damascus Road and was confronted with the reality of his bondage to death for persecuting the church. Jesus came to Paul as a minister and this encounter transfixed his attention on Jesus.

-Jesus came to him again in the person of Ananias who met him in his blindness and befuddlement and cemented Paul’s commitment and attention to him by giving him new life and recruiting him to his service.

-Paul met Jesus again and again throughout his service to him meeting and ministering to others in their deathly circumstances and ministering new life to them and they to him.   

This faith, or what I am calling attention to God, cuts through the fog of diversion and doubt (without dispelling them, they are always with us in Secular 3) and enables us to touch, or better, be touched, by the deepest reality of our lives and make contact with our true, authentic selves. “We experience transcendence,” writes Root, “when we find the fullness of ministering to our neighbors in and through their own death experience. In so doing, we find the real presence of Jesus, meeting our person with his own, infusing our being with Jesus’s own being as we share in the being of our neighbor by humbly acting as her minister.”

Such a view of paying attention to God foregrounds God’s action in our lives and the world. By it we can learn to see God the Gorilla moving in our midst. And by seeing and serving him we can enable others to touch and taste his reality and discover their own true authentic selves. Thus, minister and ministry are the bottom line of identity and vocation as God’s people. God intends us to be and do this work in and through everything else we do and everyone else we meet in life. This is the genuine meaning of the “priesthood of all believers.” 

Tomorrow, some brief, closing reflections on this theme of paying attention to God.