“Art” isn’t used much as a verb
anymore. My dictionary quickly dismisses the verb as the “archaic
present second person singular” of “to be,”
then gives an expansive definition of the noun beginning, “skill
acquired by experience, study, or observation.”
However, whenever we begin the Lord’s Prayer with the
words “Our Father, who art in heaven,” that archaic
verb can be a powerful reminder that our God is a present
tense God.
A present-tense
God
Within certain intellectual circles it has long been
fashionable to announce that the Christian concept of God is
outdated. Modern science (or psychology or philosophy), so we
are told, has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the God
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ is an unnecessary hypothesis (or an illusion or
an incoherent notion).
Today’s liberal theology, not yet willing to completely
abandon the idea of God, stammers that well, yes, the human
race has outgrown the God worshiped by Christians and Jews for
thousands of years. What we really need, it suggests, is to
re-imagine a kinder, gentler deity, one more in tune with the
reigning psycho-social paradigm.
For such as these, the God of the Bible is a past-tense God.
Meanwhile, some strands of conservative Christianity, rightly
rejecting efforts to relegate God to the dustbin of history,
focus so intently on the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the
joy of heaven that God seems to be almost entirely future
tense.
Both groups would do well to recall that when Moses asked God’s
name God replied, “I AM WHO I AM … This is my name
forever” (Ex. 3:14-15). When Jesus told certain Jews “before
Abraham was born, I am!” (John 8:58), their response was
to pick up stones to stone him, for they correctly understood
that Jesus had identified himself as the God who calls himself
“I AM.”
And in Revelation 1:8 God declares “I am the Alpha and
the Omega … who
is, and who was, and who is to
come, the Almighty.”
When we pray to “Our Father, who
art in heaven,”
we confess what Christians have always believed: God eternally
exists. “When we position ourselves in God,” writes
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “we say that all times are
present to his eternity.” Both parts of his statement
help us understand the significance of praying to the
present-tense God.
Our position in
God
To begin with von Balthasar’s second point, to say that “all
times are present to [God’s] eternity” is to
acknowledge that the God to whom we pray is present with us at
every moment of our existence, wherever we are, whatever we
are doing. Theologians speak of this attribute as God’s “omnipresence.”
Although some find this doctrine troubling, God is no more
constrained by our understanding of space than he is by our
ideas about time. Just as the God whose name is “I AM”
transcends our understanding of what it means “to be,”
so his attributes of presence, knowledge and power
immeasurably exceed our finite grasp of those concepts. What
we can know, with absolute assurance, is that the One to whom
we pray has always been, will always be, and is at this moment
present to his people.
Von Balthasar’s first observation, that we are
able to “position ourselves in God,” is true only
because God has already drawn us into his own life through the
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (II Cor. 5:17-21).
Because of this, Paul says, our lives are “now hidden
with Christ in God (Col. 3:3), and he speaks often of our
being “in Christ” (see, among many, Rom. 8:1;
12:4-5; I Cor. 1:2; 15:19-22; Eph. 1:13; 2:6; Phil. 3:14; Col.
2:9-10).
Yet although we are “in God,” and although we know
that God is always present with us, there are times when God
seems far away. Why is this so, and is there anything that we
can do about it?
Coming near to God
Indeed there is.
It is one thing to accept the intellectual proposition that
God is always present everywhere. It is quite another to know
the presence of God. That we are in God is God’s gift. We
can do nothing to attain this status; we merely receive it as
God’s gift.
But once God has established this relationship with us, he
gives us tremendous latitude about where we position ourselves
relative to him. Just as one can be physically close to a
spouse while being emotionally distant, still legally married
yet barely in relationship, so we can choose a position closer
to or farther from the God in whom we live and move and have
our being.
Throughout each day we make any number of choices that affect
our position in God. We may begin each day with prayer.We may
set aside a block of time to read the Bible. We may choose to
attend Sunday school, prayer meeting, and Bible study. Or we
may sleep late, read the paper, surf the Internet or watch TV.
Obviously, some of these activities are likely to leave us
closer to God than others.
That we do not always feel close to God does not mean that we
are no longer in Christ. Our feelings must never be allowed to
trump the facts of our faith. But feeling far from God may
well mean that there are aspects of our relationship with God
that need our attention. “Continue to work out your
salvation with fear and trembling,” Paul instructs the
Philippians. “Come near to God,” says James “and
he will come near to you.”
The art of knowing
God
“Precepts,” writes Simone Weil, “are not given
for the sake of being practiced, but practice is prescribed in
order that precepts may be understood.”
Coming near to God and continuing to work out our salvation
exemplify precepts that cannot be fully understood apart from
their practice. Only because we are already in Christ can we
obey the command to draw near to God. Only as we work out our
salvation do we learn why we are called to do so. The skills
we acquire by study and experience progressively enhance our
study and experience of God.
And here a wonderful linguistic synergy emerges. “Art”
is a rarely used form of the verb “to be.” In the
Lord’s Prayer, this form reminds us that God is, and that
God is always present with us. But “art” is also “skill
acquired by experience, study, or observation.” And there
is an art to experiencing the presence of God.
In the devotional classic
The Practice of the Presence of
God, Brother Lawrence notes that “when we are
faithful to keep ourselves in His holy presence, and set Him
always before us … by often repeating these acts, they
become habitual, and the presence of God rendered as it were
natural to us.”
One of the best ways to keep ourselves in God’s holy
presence is to pray, to converse with God (which means both to
talk and to listen) throughout the day, to pay attention to
God’s presence with us each of in our daily activities.
Cultivating the habit of attending to God in all that we do is
a practice commended by the saints of the Church, from Paul to
the present. “Absolutely unmixed attention,” writes
Weil, “is prayer.”
Of course, giving undivided attention to anyone or anything
does not come naturally to most of us. We are easily
distracted by an endless barrage of baubles that have
conditioned our attention to flit about in constant search of
novel stimulation.
One way to break our addiction to novelty is to pray the Lord’s
Prayer slowly, focusing intently on every word, even such
archaic verbs as “art.” To pray the Lord’s
Prayer even once a day with utterly undivided attention is, I
suspect, a discipline mastered by few.
But it is a skill we can acquire, an experience that is open
to us, a practice that would aid us in the art of knowing God.
For
Discussion
1.
Why do some view the God who has revealed
himself to us as a past-tense God?
2. What is the
significance of God revealing himself, to Moses and
John, as "I am?"
3. What are some
of the ways in which we position ourselves closer to, or
farther from, God?
4. . How can
praying the Lord's Prayer aid us in the art of knowing
God? |
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Additional Resources
Brother Lawrence, The
Practice of the Presence of God (Old Tappan, N.J.:
Fleming H. Revell, 1958); Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence
and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of
Gregory of Nyssa (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995);
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London:
Routledge, 1987).
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