SO NEAR AS THE LORD

PRAYER PAUSE

Wednesday 22 March 2017

SO NEAR AS THE LORD

Pause. Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading: “And indeed, what great nation has its gods so near as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call to him?” (Deut 4:1, 5-9)

Reflection. “Near to us”? That may have been their experience but what of ours? In a Lenten meditation, Karl Rahner observes that today, “we are suffering from a sense that God is far away. God is distant.” He continues, “Today’s atheism becomes then the wilful refusal to mature in the dark purgatory of a debris- covered heart.” We want a God we can bring up on our screens, one we can easily access and one we talk to and about as if we had some kind of control of our relationship with him. But this is a God of our childhood, near and cosy. We are supposed to have moved on from there. God is indeed near to us but we do not realise it in our “debris-covered” lives. And we don’t want to search for him. We haven’t time.

Prayer. Lord, help us to be still. Teach us to search for you in the midst of the pressures and distractions of our day. Amen.