Intimacy With God - 8th Sunday After Trinity
Intimacy with God
I often listen to the Sunday service on Radio 4 as I am getting ready to come to the 10am Eucharist at Cotham. The other morning, the person leading the service gave the absolution and then, after hardly a pause, said “well now we are all forgiven, lets sing the Gloria.” Nothing wrong with that of course, but it felt a bit light weight and it made me wonder whether, as well as forgiveness, what we really need is transformation, of which being forgiven is obviously a necessary and repeated first step.
I hope those of you who regularly receive and read Richard Rohr’s meditations will forgive me if I focus in on one that struck me from about 6 weeks ago, entitled “Intimacy with God”. He drew attention to the way in which God continually calls us into an intimate relationship with Him - described in the Hebrew Scriptures as a covenant relationship and illustrated in a startling way in the imagery of the Song of Songs. God longs for an intimate love relationship with each of his human creatures (and maybe with each of his more than human creatures as well!)
“The Bible shows a relentless movement toward intimacy and divine union between Creator and creatures.” writes Richard Rohr. “For this to happen, there needs to be some degree of compatibility, likeness, or even “sameness” between the two parties. In other words, there has to be a little bit of God in us that wants to find itself……it is God in us that always seeks and knows God; like always knows like. We are made for one another from the beginning.”
And it is God who always and dependably initiates this relationship of intimacy. That is the wonder of it all - we only have to respond in gratitude and delight!
So the task of the spiritual life is perhaps simply to believe in the existence of that “little bit of God” in ourselves so that we can respond - believing in our essential goodness, our essential loveableness that God has long ago recognised and which He is increasing, expanding and transforming into the person He has always known us to be. And if we still feel doubtful, St. Paul’s lovely words to the Romans, read in today’s epistle, should convince us!
Sue Parfitt
