It has been along time since I  have been here.  I don't think I am alone in noticing that spirituality is cyclical, it strengthens and wanes, just like everything else in nature.  One who claims to be in a constant state of spiritual bliss is either telling a fib or has reached a supernatural state of nirvana that not many have lived to see.  I find that when I am in the low part of the cycle, when I need to meditate and pray and find that special closeness to God, is the time when its the most difficult to do.  I am happy to say, however, that persistence pays off!  One of those happened today in fact.

This morning I was reading the selection in the Anglican Cycle for daily prayer, or the Daily Office.  It was the story from the the book of Acts (Ch.12) where Herod has Peter imprisoned, presumably to behead him as he had just done with James, the brother of John.  In the night, the Angel of the Lord comes to Peter and frees him by causing his shackles to fall from his wrists, then leads him past the outer guards and through the gate "which opened for them of itself".  Peter was free.  Just prior to this action we are told that the entire church was praying for him.
 
I am faced once again in this reading with a remarkable story of miraculous deeds attributed to prayer and the appearance of the Angel of the Lord.  My 21st Century brain has to attempt to process all of this in light of what I know, or at least, what I have been taught and what I have taught myself about how things work in the universe.  And, it is precisely at places like this where many will exit the bus of religion, because they think it is trying to take them to some type of land of Oz.  I used to blindly accept the magic of these stories and think to myself, who am I to be so arrogant as to challenge the reality of the power of God?

But there is another way, a way that takes me to the core of my being and that leaves the Godly miracle completely intact.  By seeing what this scripture is saying, rather than by looking for the proof of the written action, these stories take on a powerful dimension that enables me to see straight to what the Holy Spirit is all about.  Perhaps the people of year zero needed to have a miraculous story to believe in the God of Jesus, or maybe, they just needed a story, period.  They were all about stories after all.  And they were far more clever about understanding the meaning and function of stories than we are today.

Here is what this is for me.  I am imprisoned on an almost daily basis by something.  Usually something very worldly- money, self doubt, what other people think my favorite football team- stuff that in the long run doesn't really matter.  It is not the literal chain and shackle of imprisonment, but these things can take on the character of the real thing, stopping me dead in my tracks and making me go in directions much darker than I would like.  But here is the point, the point of most religion, really.  The Angel of the Lord is always here, always ready to remove those shackles, often miraculously, and to have the gate of the prison open of its own accord allowing me to walk right out to freedom.  Like waking from a nightmare and being so relieved to realize that I was just dreaming. 

This is what God does.  For me at least.  God is the miracle worker, the angel who removes the chains and provides the light for me to able to walk out of the darkness.  It is a long walk  more often than not, and it is strewn with heartache and fear, but there is always freedom beyond the gate.  The writer of Acts knew that.  I know that.

God is.....

My wife and I enjoy reading the meditations of the late Rev. Oswald Chambers in his book My Utmost for His Highest each morning. (At least on the mornings when no alarm is set and we don't oversleep.)  The reading for January 9th turned out to be one of those thought provoking entries, in that it deals with the ubiquitous Holy Spirit and how it preserves us through the trials of life.  The key for us this morning was Rev. Oswald's instruction to read Psalm 139 in connection with his commentary. We did.

Psalm 139 is labeled in the The Harper Collins Study Bible, NRSV, as"The Inescapable God". The first 18 verses describe God as the all knowing, all seeing and all encompassing spirit.  "Where can I go from your spirit?", he asks, "..where can I flee from your presence?"  The psalmist makes the famous assertion that it was God who formed him and knit him together in his mother's womb, that it is God who laid out the plan of his days as written "In your book".  And finally comes the plea to "Search me, O God and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts."

There must have been something in the coffee this morning, because after this we picked up  Day by Day from the Forward Movement, and read in the meditation on Acts 19:2, "I much prefer the word Spirit to God.  The latter has been anthropomorhphized from an unseen but undeniable force into male qualities:  the white-haired old man and the blue-eyed suffereing son.  God is boxed into a certain form we think we can know and understand."

I believe that the Psalmist and the authors of today's meditations are all saying the same thing, and it is a thing I have felt to be true in my soul since the occurrence of the transforming moment of enlightenment I had as a youth-  We can never know or understand God on our terms, we can not put God in a box and claim to know who or what he really is.  God has made life as God is, and has made our understanding as it is- infinite and mysterious.  One knows there is God, but there is no way to define God with anything other than descriptions that are limitied by the number of nouns and adjectives we have in a our vocabulary.  A mystical experience, a sacremental moment, communion with the Holy Spirit, are things felt and experienced, but always inadeqately described.

The psalmist makes clear that God transcends anything we can know or think.  That God is part of everything, living and dead, animate, inanimate.  God is the air, the rocks and the sea; God is our thoughts, our happiness and our sadness.  God is the dark space between the stars and the planets. We are all a part of the fabric of God and God is a part of all that is, both seen and unseen. God knows us so well because we are all fundamentally the same, we are driven by the same inteligence, the same madness. 

Can anyone ever prove God?  Why is there a need to when God simply is?  Trying to make a literal being out of such an ephemeral concept is foolishness, and the results of such foolishness are always in our face, every day.  Look no further than the newspaper or the evening news.

God is.  I pray that we can allow him to be that.  Only then can we be like him.