Friendship with God

Friendship with God was a major theme of my retreat. It sounds good, doesn't it? Who better to be friends with than God Himself, Source of the universe, Creator of all, the engine that drives reality?

Well, I'll tell you, there's hardly anything scarier than that friendship. In "Man and His Image" Fr. Barthelemy posits that the Fall itself was driven by fear of God's friendship; that Eve's sin lay in considering God a watchful, vengeful, jealous overlord, rather than a loving Father. He sees the whole story of salvation as God's plan to reveal His true nature to us and draw us back to Him.

My growth in the Faith, such as it is, has hardly breached this subject. I worship God because of the beauty of the Truth, the self-evidence of the Faith, because God is super-evident and worship of Him is the natural thing for a man to do; worshipping God is what makes us men.

But I can't see God as my Father. I can't feel Him as a friend, somebody to share my day with, somebody to spend every moment of every day with, for all eternity. I know it's true in my head; any child reading the Bible knows that God is deeply involved in His creation. But in my heart I can't make it so.

The last few weeks I've been praying very hard about this. My mental prayer is very visual and I've been visualizing walking with Him, talking with Him. It's very difficult to picture making eye contact with Jesus; the concept that He would focus his attention on me is too scary to contemplate. But I can tell you, driving awareness of a personal relationship - a friendship with God into your soul - that makes the world a different place to live. Living in the world as a friend of God is totally different than living in a world where I can skate by beneath God's attention.

Back when I started to turn towards God and away from sin, the major effort was to allow consciousness of Him to sink into my soul. That was world-changing enough, it is hard to describe how hard it was to turn away from my ego and worldly satisfactions to face the living God - and impossible to articulate the joy and freedom that grew and grew so long as I faced Him, away from myself.

But all that was just the beginning. I always pictured God as a semi-abstract Force that I could send my love to, and ask for help from, and ask to irradiate my soul with His energy and Spirit, but I could never picture Him as a living soul personally interested in me. In these last few weeks when I was really concentrating on personalizing my love for Him (to coin a phrase), it really touched some part of me that I can't really describe.

Then the backlash hit. My old self, my old man is still there, that part of me that is a mocker, that discounts every good feeling, that discounts the possibility that God - the living God, the pure Good, He who Is - could find anything worthwhile in me - sinner that I am. The mocker came out in force this weekend. The body blows from the struggle left their mark... I prevailed to the extent that I was finally able to turn my back on sin (again) and subdue the mocker (again) and turn back to God (again). But that personal feeling is gone, a candle snuffed out in the maelstrom.

Well, the major lesson from my struggle against sin is just not to give up. No matter how often our adversary prevails, just get back up, go to church, pray, go to confession, pray, and repeat that interior conversion every single day. My brain knows for a fact that God does want me very much; I just have to let that knowledge sink into my self, day after day after day.

That's the wonderful thing about growth in the Faith - it never stops.