How can I relate to God?

Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash

When it comes to relationships there is a lot to talk about.  

How can we improve interpersonal communication?  How can we develop our perceptions and responses so that we can get good at managing varying expectations? Or how do we manage our emotions better? 

In Lockdown perhaps we have had more time to ourselves to do this. Lockdown may have forced us inward to reflect more on our relationships with other people. As we are easing out of lockdown maybe it is having improved our relationships or started to work on them (to some degree).

But when it comes to talking about a relationship with God, maybe that’s a bit different? I think that no two people have - or can have - the same relationship with God. You may ask Why?

We are all unique with our own personalities and ways of loving and relating that is singular to each one of us. So that said, the way I relate to God and the way you relate to God is different. Different – not better, or worse - just different.

As we know from experience all relationships that last involve work, and effort. Can’t the same be true of a relationship with God. 

It takes effort

But is effort enough when we talk about relating to God?

Or to put it another way - can a relationship with God grow and flourish through effort alone? Or is something more needed?

Believing that God exists involves having faith. 

Faith is not an easy one, even though we exercise it each day. We have faith in the one who tells us that we need to stay in Lockdown because the virus is simply not going to go away. 

Or faith in the fact that the books or clothes we ordered online will eventually turn up on our doorstep at some time in the future.  Or faith that if we eat this, and not eat something else, we will lose those extra pounds. 

But faith in God?

None of us have ever seen God face to face. There may be some of us who believe that yes, we see, and hear and touch him when we receive the Eucharist. But none of us can honestly say that we have stood face to face with God.

Believing becomes seeing

And yet for those of us who believe there is a moment when believing becomes seeing. God actually is there.  He does see, hear, touch me in some way each day. He does love me, even when I forget Him, or abandon him.

When we talk about the quality of a relationship we presume 2 basics. Firstly that the relationship exists and secondly that there is affection, interest or love binding that relationship together.  

Doesn’t relating to God follow the same steps? After all we are talking about how we, human beings relate. The first step is that we ‘accept’ that God exists, and the second, that he loves me for myself with an unrequited love - after all He is God. 

And having done that, we can then maybe talk or think about the quality of that relationship and explore what can I do to improve it?

It might mean shifting years of prejudice, dust in our souls, layers of memories and misconceptions that have accumulated there. Or a simple act of humility - I don’t know it all, I can’t know it all, I’m not meant to know it all, or understand the world and myself fully. But what might happen with a little trusting, with just believing in God for once?

Sometimes the most extraordinary miracles are hidden in the most silent and simple places.

Father, my father, our father

The Gospel accounts tell us that the apostles were with Jesus one day and they asked him simply how to pray. Teach me to pray. And the response from Jesus was simple. “When you pray, say Our Father…

We may or may not know the words of the Our Father but the two first words are enough. Father, my father, our father… What does that mean? Father. Nearly all of us have had the experience of what it means to have a father, to be a child or to have a child.

But to be a child of God. Well, that is different. Or is it?

What does it mean? To believe that God is my father and that he wants my good always. That God loves me even in my weakness and misery. That God wants me to be happy here too, as well as in heaven when we die.

This awareness and understanding of what it entails to be a child of God may take us some time to absorb. It is after all a gift of God. God in his goodness has decided to give it to us.  We have done nothing to deserve it.

Recently I did an online course with the Royal College of Surgeons entitled The Science of Happiness. Over 24,000 people registered for it. Not surprisingly they wanted to find out the secret to happiness here on earth.

Surely authentic joy and real happiness in our lives has a lot to do with who I am and where I have come from?  If each of us could penetrate deeper into what it means to be and to act as a child of God, would we discover happiness? 

Becoming a child of God is a gift and a grace.

Let’s ask for that gift and that grace today. 

Let’s waste no more time! After all, maybe our happiness lies there…