Reflections for Advent: It is only an absent God that requires faith.

God’s absence is part of our common, in fact normal experience: ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!’  – O that you would demonstrate your power; make your reality known in a way that we cannot ignore. Because we forget you, we misbehave, we ignore you, because you do not impose yourselves on us! (Isaiah, 64.1-9). It is perhaps this experience of absence that makes most people assume that belief in God is foolish, contrary to experience. But, an evident, loud, noisy God, going around demonstrating Her power, would be one that impinges on the freedom we have been given in creation. God has given us self-determination and freedom. Faithfulness is about living hopefully with the seeming absence of God and the silence of God. It is about living as though God were with us all the time, watching us and guiding us.

Remembering a God who is silent, inconspicuous and gentle is the spiritual discipline supreme.

It is only an absent God that requires faith.

For it is our daily remembrance, we might say prayer, that makes us people of faith.

If we forget God, we are faithless. If we remember him, he changes us.

So, when we talk about prayer or worship, or being with others of faith, what we are saying is, do you make time to remember that you believe in God? For it is only the practice of faith that makes it real. He has given us many signs and ways to fine Him if we look: 'seek and ye shall find'. God is there, but we have to start looking. 

The ‘daily examen’, a spiritual discipline of St Ignatius Loyola, which has received much renewed interest as a spiritual pathway, is about actively looking for God. It requires a person to review the day that has passed looking for signs of God's presence and absence. A life of faith is nothing more or less, but the practice of the presence of God.

How would we live, how would we change our behaviour if we believed in God’s presence, if we really thought God was in the room? The act of faith requires an imaginative leap between our experience of absence, death and decay into hope, joy, rebirth, regeneration; between our experiences of the often harsh realities of our existence and the journey into an alternative understanding of human destiny. Then we start to live, meaning we change our behaviour and our attitude, based on that faith. Intentional daily awareness of God’s presence will transform us. We might start helping at the soup kitchen, we might start giving more to charity, we might temper our anger that’s often betrayed us, and we might make more of an effort with someone that’s always threatened or annoyed us. Small tiny steps, small changes in our reality, small things built upon the practice of remembering God.

That is what we are asked to do in the season of Advent, to wake up to God in our lives, to attune ourselves anew to the melody of God. Wake Up! Be alert!

Advent is a season about expecting God’s presence; not only in the past and not only in the future, but also and most importantly in our present. We wait to celebrate the Incarnation – God’s presence with his people and we look forward to the future presence of God, in the second coming, but we invite God’s indwelling with us now. We open ourselves to his invitation.

And when we do, we may experience the noisy God. The God that through our discipline of patient remembering, starts to trust that he can make himself known to us. The absent silent God becomes the ever-present imminent God; we see God in everyone and everything. But importantly that transformation has not come about by God coming down making the water quake and the earth tremble, but through our faithfulness. We have to make that journey where we are transformed inside out, where our faith is really a part of us. Imposed, authoritarian faith is blind; indwelt, experienced faith is full of sight. And, wow, just wait and see what God lets you see!