Surely God was in this place, and I did not know it!

In my work as a priest and as a chaplain, I have become convinced that we are meant to become friends with God.  The most important thing I learned from my Jesuit training was that God communicates directly with us and we communicate directly with God.  When people say they have never heard God, they usually mean that they don’t know where to look or how to listen.  Their feet may be on holy ground, but they think it is just dirt.  They may be standing in the house of God, but they sigh and think this is just Kroger’s.  They may be right in front of the gateway to heaven, but they think this is just a silly old ladder.

 

This week's reading from Genesis begins with one of the most famous encounters of God and a human being. Fearing for his life, Jacob leaves Be'er-Sheva and heads toward his mother's family in Haran. Along the way, he stops for the night.  No place special, just another spot in the road. While he sleeps, Jacob has a powerful dream, a vision and a conversation with God. First, he sees a ladder that is planted on earth but reaches all the way to heaven. As Jacob watches, angels go up and down the ladder. Then Jacob hears God, who is "standing beside him," promising to be with him as He was with his fathers; pledging to give him the Promised Land and abundant descendants to inhabit it and protection wherever he goes. On the run from his brother, alone and frightened in the dark with only a stone for a pillow--God assures Jacob that he need not fear, because God's protective presence and promise will not waver and only God is true to his Word. But Jacob is shocked and awestruck.  How could God care about him out of all the people in the Universe?  While he was fleeing from his brother, he had no idea that God was with him, that God had searched him and known him—even when he was in his Mother’s womb as our psalm today tells us.  Most of all Jacob had no idea that God wanted to be his friend.  When he woke from his dream he said surely God is in this place and I did not know it.

Secondly Jacob had no idea that God would show him visions in dreams.  He dreamt about a ladder to heaven and saw the angels of God ascending and descending on that ladder.  When Jacob stopped dreaming and came to his senses, he said this is the gateway to heaven.

Thirdly Jacob had no idea that this ordinary spot, where he stopped because he was tired and where he picked up a stone to sleep on that night was a special place of God’s presence.  And when he awoke and came to his enlightenment, Jacob shouts aloud how awesome is this place.  This is surely the house of God!

Jacob is like us taking things for granted:  our ordinary life, our ordinary experience, and our ordinary situations.  Things that are so ordinary can’t be the very presence of the Almighty, can they?  Have we ever had a Jacob awakening in which we discovered God is in this place even though that was the furthest thing from our mind?  Have we ever had a Jacob awakening from our dreams, and said this is the gateway to heaven?  Have we ever had a Jacob awakening that we standing on holy ground and know that we are surely in the house of God? A Jacob awakening could happen in the beauty parlor, in Kroger’s, on the beach, at the Grand Canyon.  It could happen anywhere, because God is everywhere.

It is part of my job as a priest to try to help people pay attention to every thing they experience: to notice what happens when they catch a rainbow trout, hit a hole in one, visit a friend in the hospital or nursing home, when they have a good day at work or a bad one, and when they are just home cleaning the tile in the bathroom.  All of our experiences are the place where God meets us and speaks to us, the job we hate and the job we love.  Our tedious housework, the meals we cook, and the walks we take, the yard work we do. The friends who we are glad to hear from and the sister who drives us to distraction.  The rainbow trout that miraculously bites and stays on our line, the full moon that turns blood orange because some one has been burning brush down the road. God is present in all these things, the ordinary and the extraordinary. And God wants to be our friend and if we want to engage in a friendship with God, we need to take time to become more aware of what is happening within us as we go through your day. If we never take the time to notice what happens to us in our daily lives, then we can never discover the presence of God in us and for us.  The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Every second, every hour, every day—every place and always—we are in the presence of God.  If we pay attention to all the ordinary things in life, we will discover the grandeur of God in the simple, the mundane.  The birds, the clouds, the deer that shoots across the road in front of us, the storms of nature and the storms of our emotional life!

 You know when we hear the term “religious experience” we think of something esoteric, foreign, even odd, something only experienced by holy people. But if it is true that God is communicating with each one of us at every moment of our existence, then every experience can have a religious dimension. We can find God in all things, in the May flies and the stars above because God is creating it all right here and right now.

The bread on that “table” over there, the ordinary old bread that we break, “is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” So said Paul and so we believe when we see with our eyes of faith. The ordinary becomes a miracle.  Let us look on each and every experience of our lives with faith eyes, and we will find God and know that he is our closest friend. Amen