William A Barry - Experiencing God in the Ordinary

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Imprimi potest: Very Rev. John J. Cecero, SJ

Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright 1993 and 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-8294-5034-7

Based on the print edition: 978-0-8294-5033-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955328

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To Mary and John Power,

Signs of Gods Presence in So Many Ways

On a recent retreat a man said, I had come to believe that I had achieved all the insights into God I would ever have and had become rather content to rest on these insights only to have Jesus tell me, Were not finished yet. He realized that he had been presumptuous. Jesus was reminding him that God is ever greater than any insights we might have. As he told his story, I felt a bell ring for me; through him God seemed to be telling me that we are not finished either. Since you have picked up this book, it may be that God is telling you that he is not finished with you. This little story gives you some idea of what I will be talking about throughout the book. It is an instance of my experiencing God through the words or actions of another human being.

Often, we think that we must go to some specific place to find God. Even that last phrase, to find God, may get us off on the wrong foot. These words can give the impression that God is lost and weve got to find him. But this universe is Gods dwelling place because the act of creation is ongoing. If God were to stop creating the universe, there would be nothing except God. Indeed, it may be that God would not be God if he were to regret creating our world and give up creating. God is, in some mysterious way, present everywhere in creation. We dont have to find a special place where he is.

Truth be told, there are places that may make it easier for us to recognize the presence of God. Something about a particular placesay, the Grand Canyon or a mountain range or a lovely seascapegrabs our attention in such a way that we forget our cares and concerns, and God can penetrate our consciousness. Such natural or human-made scenes are called thin places by the Irish. It seems that in such places the membrane that separates us from Gods presence is thin enough that God can break into our consciousness more easily.

That being said, I want to underline that everywhere can be, and often is, a thin place for us. Our God is a lover of the ordinary, you might say. As you read and pray, I hope you will come to agree, having discovered for yourself how often you have been surprised by God in your ordinary, daily life.

I urge you to take seriously your own experience as you go through this book with me. I will be sharing experiences I have had, experiences others have shared with me, and stories I have picked up in newspapers, novels, poems, and books. I hope that these various experiences will remind you of events and experiences in your own life that you can see, at least in retrospect, were instances of meeting God in the ordinary events of life.

If you join me, we will embark together on a journey of learning more about the Mystery we call God. I hope that you will take my invitation very seriously, expecting to be surprised by what we discover together and following your own leads to experiences and movements of heart and mind that go beyond any I point you to. I approach this project with a hope that I will, in the course of writing, be surprised by God and discover new insights. Perhaps you can engage in this reading with the same hope. Thus, together we will come to know more about God and ourselves through paying attention to our experience.

Throughout I will encourage you to talk with and listen to God. If this kind of conversational prayer is strange to you, you might be helped by reading either of two books on prayer Ive written: God and You: Prayer as a Personal Relationship (New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987); or Praying the Truth: Deepening Your Friendship with God through Honest Prayer (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2012).

During the past Easter season (2019), I was struck by how ordinary the various appearances of the risen Jesus actually were. There is nothing at all written about Jesus resurrection itself. We are told only about his empty tomb. When Jesus does appear, he is unrecognizable at first, even to his closest friends.

Moreover, the appearances are rather ordinary: he walks along with two disciples on the road to Emmaus; Mary Magdalene thinks he must be a gardener; he enters the upper room and asks for something to eat; he stands on the seashore and tells the disciples who have caught no fish to try the other side of the boat; on the shore he has some fish already cooked and tells Peter to get some more from that catch. In most cases, his friends finally recognize him by some familiar word or gesture: he says Marys name; he breaks bread and hands it to the two disciples who met him on the road to Emmaus; he helps the disciples catch fish; he shows his friends the wounds in his hands and side.

Admittedly, its way out of the ordinary to meet, alive and well, someone you saw die in a horrible way. Still, in these accounts of the risen Jesus, there are no big displays of power or majesty or glory; there is nothing newsworthy, you might say, in these stories. A publicist would have nightmares with the ordinariness of it all, wondering how he is to get the story across to the larger public.

Once I began thinking about the everyday-ness of the Resurrection stories, I realized that the whole of Jesus life is rather ordinary. God became a human being, and all we know of the first thirty or so years of his life is a few stories from his birth and another from the time he was about twelve. Even the three years of his public life are not especially spectacular. Israel was not the center of things in any sense most people of that day would accept. Like many other small and large countries, it was controlled by the Roman Empire. In this small and out-of-the-way land, Jesus gathered a few disciples around him and tried, without much success, to get them to understand who God is and what it meant for Jesus himself to be the promised Messiah. He cured a number of peoplewhich, in that time and place, was not out of the ordinary for a holy person. Like many a prophet and preacher before and since, he announced the imminent coming of the kingdom of God and got into trouble with the leaders of his own religion. After three or fewer years of public life, Jesus of Nazareth was handed over by those leaders to the Roman governor to be crucified as a common criminal. To most observers of the time, Jesus was simply another failed, would-be leader. A publicist would have little reason to make Jesus story known. Even after the Resurrection, Jesus appeared only to his followershe made no dramatic or miraculous appearances that might wow and convert people in the general public.