Connecting to the Divine

We begin with a relationship to God. It’s scary, in our culture – or at least in mine – to admit that you even want a relationship with God. I get it. I’m a mathematician. My husband is a mathematician. My best friends are chemists and neuroscientists and math teachers and biostatisticians and scientific thinkers (even when they are yoga teachers!). I am afraid to declare, even to myself in times when I am alone, that I want to have a relationship with God. 

It’s not that I don’t pray. Every time I need help or feel scared, I say the same prayer: thank you God for keeping me safe. But that feels born of need. What about the times when I don’t feel like I “need” anything? Is it ok to want to have a relationship with God then? What does that even mean? 

For me, it has turned out that turning to God filled a need I didn’t even realize I had. Allowing the Divine to fill my mornings has been a gift beyond measure. And it’s not that I had to put aside science – I spent my earliest mornings communing with God, and then turned around and worked as a math person during the workday. I had to put aside my fear, my reluctance, my disbelief that it was even possible to build a relationship with God. 

And I also had to put aside my preconceived notions about what that relationship would be. I began with the notion that humans are “children of God,” at least intellectually. But that notion was rife with problems – I imagined God as a judge, waiting to pounce on my every mistake. I was afraid of God, and hopeful that he would protect me. I wouldn’t say that that feeling of God as judge-and-protector made me eager to spend my mornings in Divine communion. 

A line from CS Lewis changed that for me. I was reading excerpts from The Screwtape Letters, in which a demon is teaching his nephew-demon Screwtape how to seduce a human away from God. Underpinning the whole book is the importance of individual people to God, because one person gets a whole demon-in-training devoted to trying to separate that one person from God. The demon uncle writes to his nephew:

For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if he ever consciously directs his prayers “Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be,” our situation is, for the moment, desperate. 

When I read this, I caught my breath. I had an image of God as judge and protector. But what if God is not that, but something else? What if I could let go of that limited, human image of a “parent” God and allow a different relationship, a different God, to exist? 

Over the first few days of listening prayer, a different relationship did emerge. I didn’t get a sense of who or what God is, but I could understand at least how I felt in relationship to him. Letting go at least temporarily of my image of God as thundering judge, I allowed a feeling of being a beloved child of God to fill my spirit. The idea that God is at least a loving parent came over me. I do not thunder and judge over my children – I love them. I want what is good and best for them. I nurture them. And perhaps I could allow a God who would nurture me. 

But over the course of a few days of living inside that relationship, something deepened. I did not lose my sense of being nurtured, but my own adulthood emerged in the relationship. I realized that while I may be a beloved child of God, I am also an adult in the human world – and that there was a way in which God wanted me to be an adult in my relationship with him. In a very short time, the relationship with God matured. I happened to open a book by Emmet Fox after a couple of those days, and he talks about women deepening the relationship with God into that of a wife. I have to admit I was a little freaked out by that! But the actual relationship didn’t feel “freak out worthy,” it felt like a loving partnership. 

I don’t have good words for this, but in the course of a couple of days, I came to experience God’s love in many different ways – and I came to believe that there are many ways to experience his love that I have not yet experienced, either. These, I look forward to feeling and living. 

And what about our relationships with other humans? 

I recently walked in on the tail end of a conversation between my seven year old and my ten year old daughters. My seven year old was saying, “if you really want that, say a prayer to God. And make sure mom hears you saying it.”

I laughed. But also… our relationship with others is not separate from our relationship with God. He works through others for our sakes, and works through us for others’ sakes. And just as he loves us and wants us to be close to him, he loves others equally. The way you treat any human on earth is the way you are treating God. They are his children, his partners, just as you are. You are neither more nor less special than they are in his eyes. 

To really trust divine love and approval means that you can let go of wanting human love and approval. That was not easy for me. That is not easy for me, and it’s an ongoing practice. I love it when people love my work! I cringe when people hate my work. I cringe when other people feel my awkward humanness and don’t find it adorable but annoying.  But this is not what I want for myself. 

And similarly, if you really trust God, you have no need to blame anyone – not parents or friends or enemies. The harm they may have done to you can be evaporated by God. 

Nor do you have any need to fear anyone. God will shelter you and keep you. 

You need only love those around you; to feel compassion, true compassion, for all humans and the human struggle for love and connection to God. 

But all of this takes time to develop. We’ll get the process started in the first of our days together, but it’s a process that will continue to develop through our whole lives, if we allow time for that development – and ask God to be present with us, always. 

We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.

CS Lewis. 

There are a lot of reasons to develop that relationship with God. But one of the best ones is authenticity. 

I don’t know about you, but I hide myself a lot. I rarely admit my deepest desires – I rarely even admit when I want seconds of dessert. I don’t mean just to other people – I mean, I often can’t even tell myself what I want or who I am in a given moment. Sometimes I feel out of sorts with some situation and I can’t even admit to myself what I wish were different. We hide. We bury the things we don’t like about ourselves – they don’t go away, but we can’t access them and give them room to heal or shift. 
But amazingly, amazingly, when you meet God, you realize you do not have to hide from him. You can’t hide from him. He does not want to know what you think you should be, or what you want to be – I mean, you can share all of those things with him as you wish – but he wants you to be who you are. To want what you want, to be afraid of what you are afraid of. He already knows – it’s not like you’re telling him things he doesn’t know about you. But in the telling, in the sharing of fears and desires and loves and secret dreams – and even pettiness and jealousy and irritations – you are making room for yourself and your own humanity. And in this space, you can breathe and grow – perhaps even into the person you wish you were.