These three: the control we have over things in our life, the loneliness of our hearts and the transition from word to song (which is also a transition from description to love, from assessment to praise, and from doubt to worship) also contain for us guidelines that assure that we are in fact experiencing an encounter with God, and not something of our own making. I take it as self evident that God created us in such a way as to make the path to him recognizable in our own construction as humans. We shall consider them in order.
As we make the transition from child to adult, our own self begins to wonderfully emerge. We learn to recognize our voice in addition the cacophony of voices in the cosmos, and to learn to love, and to fear, to recognize hope, and to live in uncertainty. We approach whatever it is we view the divine to be with all the needs and expectations born from the creation and exercise of our voice in the world. Carried on by this our unique expectation, we often refer to prayer as the fulfillment of precisely our own expectation. Consciously or unconsciously, we discover a certain need to control the outcome of our religious experiences so that our needs are meet, our fears are relieved, our anxiety sated and our hopes strengthened.
But the encounter with God is something totally different. For in God we find our true selves. We find ourselves as He intends us to be. We find not our voice, so much as the purpose for which our voice exists. We find also that all the fears we had built up around what makes this world a livable place and what makes it a non-livable place become stripped away. This stripping away of our fears feels like a stripping away of our identities, of our very voices -- for we are so used to hearing this fear in our voice that we don't know any other way to talk. Yet it is a gift. In the encounter with God we find that our own voices are given to us, and we find why we are given voices in the first place.
The encounter with God is an experience that restores our hearts from isolation. We may imagine ourselves with Mary at the tomb as she saw the Gardner call her by name and hear our own name spoken as well from His lips. We neither expected this nor created this. Like her, we may be grieving the death of all we had looked to in life for hope. Even the death of everything that we thought God Himself is (or, was, to us). We think it proper to hold in our hearts this particular grief of being unable to find God (or, more precisely, of having been able to find Him but now knowing that He is finally unable to be found by us.) We weep that we are truly and utterly alone. We weep the sweet fellowship we had, and compare it to the bitter stillness of having no ability to pierce the veil that now separates our souls from their creator. Our voice is a lonely voice in the world, and that is precisely our fault.
If we, we who cannot create, would forgive one who had wronged us, how much more shall the mere mention of our name by the Risen One who is love Incarnate restore us? How much more shall He sheer us of our grief? How much more shall He burst the walls of our isolation from Him with love? How much more shall He, by proclaiming our name, proclaim His Name as Lord -- Lord even of us as we run from Him? How much more shall He remove the shame of our running, and, as He did with Jonah, cause in us the ice of our isolation to melt in the fire of His embrace?
The Encounter with God turns our words about God into songs (or hymns) to God. Precisely as those who have been broken into, as those who now no longer either seek to control or to run, we worship. Our words about God no longer take the form of those who describe God as beyond themselves and then stop. We don't use dead words to describe a distant and therefore transcendent God. Rather, we revel with delight (as a bride and groom rejoice in each other's embrace on their wedding night) because the distance turns out not to be spacial but causal. He is not distant in the sense that Seattle and Boston are, but distant in the sense that fire and the heat it produces, or a lamp and the light it produces.
To be encountered by God is to find ourselves who once had been dead to be enkindled. His love burns in us, causing our voice to lose the fear that was unique to itself, causing our hearts to be filled with hope that we did not create, causing our isolation to disappear as something barely even able to be recalled. The Encounter with God is the receiving of a life that is both uniquely ours (indeed, we were created for it) and also the very participation in the life of God.
We can rest assured that we ourselves did not create this encounter, precisely because we couldn't have. We may, to be sure, succeed in creating a certain degree of forgiveness, of love, of peace, of reconciliation with our neighbor, and if we are truly great people, even with our enemy. But who can create life? Who can erase his or her own fears in such a way as to say of their darkness (as the Psalmist said of God) that, "even your darkness is light?" Who can, once he or she has become isolated in their own self, redeem themselves by their own will? Who can succeed in living into the fullness of a life that they cannot imagine? Who among us can uplift them-self into a life utterly beyond their own imagination but, nonetheless, for which they were created all along?
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