Do Christians believe in the supernatural? The answer might seem obvious, but it depends on what you mean by ‘supernatural’. Usually people mean extraordinary phenomena—ghosts, esoteric powers, inexplicable events. Many popular writers have made good careers out of this ‘supernature’.
Its attraction comes from a wish that reality might be more mysterious than we think; to believe, with Hamlet, that there is more in heaven and earth than our philosophy allows for. We want bounds to be wider and space for surprise.
But for that reason, none of those phenomena are really supernatural at all. Those who believe in them are simply claiming that nature includes more than we thought it did. A ghost in my bedroom has to be considered natural.
Christians have no special view of this ‘supernatural’. It all comes down to evidence. If you can show me a ghost, and prove that it is not mist or hallucination, I will believe in it. You will have shown me that my idea of nature was incomplete.
The Christian supernatural is really nothing like that. It is not a murky realm of odd phenomena hovering around the fringes of reality. God is not a ‘supernatural’ being, like a ghost or the tooth fairy.
In Christian use, supernatural means ‘whatever goes beyond what nature, by itself, could have produced.’ God is supernatural in that sense, because he does not arise out of nature. And so is our vision of God, because there is no natural occasion for it. It does not grow out of our nature as human animals, nor do we need it in order to function naturally in our world.
Christianity speaks of the supernatural in terms of grace. Grace is not the result of any effort on our part. We know grace when we are open to the being of God, to the pure gift of love or hope or faith or forgiveness. In all those moments there is liberation; what we are is no longer fixed and constrained by our nature. We enter a freedom that is not our own.
This supernatural inhabits our world, though its origin is elsewhere. It does not destroy our nature, but fulfils it. And, paradoxically, it may not even be extraordinary: the supernatural of God can meet us at any turn of our way.
Showing posts with label Words on the Way. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Words on the Way. Show all posts
Monday, May 11, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Spirituality
‘Spirituality’ and ‘spiritual’ are words often used today, even in a non-religious setting. People seem more comfortable with them than with ‘faith’ or ‘religion’. “She’s a very spiritual person” is less problematical than “she’s a very religious person”; perhaps because ‘religion’ raises issues of belief, whereas ‘spiritual’ suggests a temperament, a style, a practice.
Was Jesus a spiritual person? He prayed a good deal, but otherwise the word doesn’t seem quite to fit. He wasn’t, apparently, much interested in cultivating his ‘inner life’; there are moments of withdrawal, but mostly we see him looking outward, dangerously engaged with the world. To state the obvious: religion was not, for him, any kind of therapy.
For Christians, a problem with the word ‘spiritual’ is that it implicitly devalues the material. It suggests living a life a few feet off the ground, in a higher and purer realm. But the point of Christianity is incarnation, the refusal to divorce matter from spirit. No more than Christ’s life does faith belong to a separate, ‘spiritual’ world. The Christian project, in that respect, has always been one of de-spiritualisation.
Yet there have always been Christian disciplines of the spirit—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. Christians have always known that, to live close to God, regularity and perseverance are called for. People we think of as ‘spiritual’—St John of the Cross or de Caussade, William Law or Michael Ramsey—have followed a spiritual discipline to the point at which they can share it with others.
But those disciplines all have one aim: to turn more completely to God. That is the heart of Christian (and Jewish) spirituality. In that sense Jesus was a ‘spiritual’ person; not by exuding an aura of other-worldliness, but by living and dying always toward his Father. But that did not involve rejecting the world or the claims of the material. When Lazarus died, Jesus did not offer ‘spiritual’ consolation. He wept, faced the stench of corruption, and brought him back to life. Action can be as spiritual as thought or contemplation.
Spiritualities that turn us toward ourselves—to make us more effective or more satisfied—are, from a Christian perspective, questionable. For us, God is the point. The wealth of Christian spirituality points always in that direction. At the heart of it is the (crucial) turning toward God that Jesus preached and lived and died.
Was Jesus a spiritual person? He prayed a good deal, but otherwise the word doesn’t seem quite to fit. He wasn’t, apparently, much interested in cultivating his ‘inner life’; there are moments of withdrawal, but mostly we see him looking outward, dangerously engaged with the world. To state the obvious: religion was not, for him, any kind of therapy.
For Christians, a problem with the word ‘spiritual’ is that it implicitly devalues the material. It suggests living a life a few feet off the ground, in a higher and purer realm. But the point of Christianity is incarnation, the refusal to divorce matter from spirit. No more than Christ’s life does faith belong to a separate, ‘spiritual’ world. The Christian project, in that respect, has always been one of de-spiritualisation.
Yet there have always been Christian disciplines of the spirit—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. Christians have always known that, to live close to God, regularity and perseverance are called for. People we think of as ‘spiritual’—St John of the Cross or de Caussade, William Law or Michael Ramsey—have followed a spiritual discipline to the point at which they can share it with others.
But those disciplines all have one aim: to turn more completely to God. That is the heart of Christian (and Jewish) spirituality. In that sense Jesus was a ‘spiritual’ person; not by exuding an aura of other-worldliness, but by living and dying always toward his Father. But that did not involve rejecting the world or the claims of the material. When Lazarus died, Jesus did not offer ‘spiritual’ consolation. He wept, faced the stench of corruption, and brought him back to life. Action can be as spiritual as thought or contemplation.
Spiritualities that turn us toward ourselves—to make us more effective or more satisfied—are, from a Christian perspective, questionable. For us, God is the point. The wealth of Christian spirituality points always in that direction. At the heart of it is the (crucial) turning toward God that Jesus preached and lived and died.
Resurrection
To non-Christians, and even many Christians, the Resurrection is the most implausible of beliefs. How can a man killed in a military execution reappear, meet with his friends, even eat with them?
Some things the Resurrection plainly was not. It was not recovery from an apparent or sham death. Roman executioners could be relied on to do their job. It was not the resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus did not ‘come back to life’ like Lazarus, to live a few more years and then die when his time came. Jesus was not raised to a life this side of death.
Nor was the Resurrection ‘natural’ immortality. What the disciples met was not Jesus’ immortal soul. Jews of the time believed that the surviving spirit was a shadow, a poor reflection of what had been in life. But the disciples saw Jesus in his completeness; recognisable, and with all his living power.
So what can we say? The Creed does not altogether help us: ‘on the third day he rose again from the dead.’ This suggests that the Resurrection was Jesus’s doing; having been dead for a while, he decided to rise. But if he could do that, how was he dead?
The New Testament insists that (Acts 5, 30) “the God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead”). This was nothing natural; it was unexpected, unprecedented, the act of God himself. And that act vindicated Jesus. In it, God kept faith with him, justified him before the world; not just his cause or his ideas, but Jesus himself, in his full being.
This is why the appearance stories emphasise physicality and the continuity of this raised one with the Jesus the disciples had known. This recognizable identity amazed them almost as much as seeing him alive. Nor was his return a private, mystical, event—‘somehow I feel that he is still with me’—but public, sharable, able to reunite a scattered community.
We can’t explain the Resurrection, because it is unique. There is nothing to liken it to. But for Paul it was the key to our destiny. Raised in this unimaginable way, Christ was the ‘first fruit’, the promise of our own victory over death—not by our nature, or immortality; still less by virtue. But by being taken up in this act of a God who is faithful to all that he loves, even in death.
Some things the Resurrection plainly was not. It was not recovery from an apparent or sham death. Roman executioners could be relied on to do their job. It was not the resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus did not ‘come back to life’ like Lazarus, to live a few more years and then die when his time came. Jesus was not raised to a life this side of death.
Nor was the Resurrection ‘natural’ immortality. What the disciples met was not Jesus’ immortal soul. Jews of the time believed that the surviving spirit was a shadow, a poor reflection of what had been in life. But the disciples saw Jesus in his completeness; recognisable, and with all his living power.
So what can we say? The Creed does not altogether help us: ‘on the third day he rose again from the dead.’ This suggests that the Resurrection was Jesus’s doing; having been dead for a while, he decided to rise. But if he could do that, how was he dead?
The New Testament insists that (Acts 5, 30) “the God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead”). This was nothing natural; it was unexpected, unprecedented, the act of God himself. And that act vindicated Jesus. In it, God kept faith with him, justified him before the world; not just his cause or his ideas, but Jesus himself, in his full being.
This is why the appearance stories emphasise physicality and the continuity of this raised one with the Jesus the disciples had known. This recognizable identity amazed them almost as much as seeing him alive. Nor was his return a private, mystical, event—‘somehow I feel that he is still with me’—but public, sharable, able to reunite a scattered community.
We can’t explain the Resurrection, because it is unique. There is nothing to liken it to. But for Paul it was the key to our destiny. Raised in this unimaginable way, Christ was the ‘first fruit’, the promise of our own victory over death—not by our nature, or immortality; still less by virtue. But by being taken up in this act of a God who is faithful to all that he loves, even in death.
Incarnation
Christianity is founded on the Incarnation. That is what distinguishes us from the other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam. For them, it is incompatible with the nature and majesty of God. But for Christians, it is the truest revelation of God’s nature.
Not that the Church has had an easy time with Incarnation. It took four hundred years to arrive at a working definition, and ever since there has been drift to a more spiritualised, less earthy view of Jesus. Much of the time Christians have treated him as appearing human whilst really being something else.
None of that is surprising. Religions prefer gods to stay where they belong—up above, remote from the sufferings of our world; for how else can they control things? They have their place, and we have ours. Gods should obey the rules.
To say that the Son ‘came down from heaven’ is one way of saying that this rule has been broken; and the New Testament echoes to the shock. For Paul, the Almighty, the nameless ‘I am’, the Lord of the Hosts of Heaven, has suddenly turned up poor alongside us (Phil 2, 5-8). John preached the immediacy of “that which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and touched with our hands” (1 John 1, 1).
This changes God for us; not just his ‘character’—once distant, now friendly, once judgmental, now gracious—but the whole idea of how God is. He no longer exists as the remote ruler of worlds, exercising power from his unreachable realm of glory. He exists as the active presence of grace in our world, a presence seen most fully in Christ.
The Incarnation frees both God and us. It frees God from confinement to his relentless ‘aboveness’, and it frees us from subjection to whatever is ‘above’ (as Paul says, we are no longer slaves but members of the family). It does so because in Christ we see God as action that has come close, that enters the texture of our lives. How do we know it is God? Because it breaks through the hopeless inheritance of our world, the determinism of evil and its consequences. Christ is that action; he does what we cannot do. He breaks all the rules that alienate God from us and us from ourselves. And that is more than any human being can do.
Not that the Church has had an easy time with Incarnation. It took four hundred years to arrive at a working definition, and ever since there has been drift to a more spiritualised, less earthy view of Jesus. Much of the time Christians have treated him as appearing human whilst really being something else.
None of that is surprising. Religions prefer gods to stay where they belong—up above, remote from the sufferings of our world; for how else can they control things? They have their place, and we have ours. Gods should obey the rules.
To say that the Son ‘came down from heaven’ is one way of saying that this rule has been broken; and the New Testament echoes to the shock. For Paul, the Almighty, the nameless ‘I am’, the Lord of the Hosts of Heaven, has suddenly turned up poor alongside us (Phil 2, 5-8). John preached the immediacy of “that which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and touched with our hands” (1 John 1, 1).
This changes God for us; not just his ‘character’—once distant, now friendly, once judgmental, now gracious—but the whole idea of how God is. He no longer exists as the remote ruler of worlds, exercising power from his unreachable realm of glory. He exists as the active presence of grace in our world, a presence seen most fully in Christ.
The Incarnation frees both God and us. It frees God from confinement to his relentless ‘aboveness’, and it frees us from subjection to whatever is ‘above’ (as Paul says, we are no longer slaves but members of the family). It does so because in Christ we see God as action that has come close, that enters the texture of our lives. How do we know it is God? Because it breaks through the hopeless inheritance of our world, the determinism of evil and its consequences. Christ is that action; he does what we cannot do. He breaks all the rules that alienate God from us and us from ourselves. And that is more than any human being can do.
Hope
When times get hard, hope becomes an issue. Barack Obama tapped into this in his campaign: hope, possibility, release from the past. These are politically powerful words, but they are also Christian words. With faith and love, hope stands at the centre of St Paul’s account of the spiritual life (1 Cor 13:13).
But what can we hope for? Doesn’t the world, in the end, defeat hope? As we get older, don’t we live more from memory than from hope?
Christian hope is not holy optimism (properly caricatured in Life of Brian by “Always look on the bright side.”) It is not the assertion that, against all the odds, things will somehow come right; that God will fix things for us. Optimism can, and will, be defeated by events. But hope cannot be defeated.
How can we know that? Some words of Vaclav Havel may help: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” So hope has less to do with events than with the meaning of events. If bad things can be held within a frame of meaning, then there is hope.
But what if we can’t see any meaning? What if we are faced with pure pain and raw destruction? What frame of meaning could the prisoners of Auschwitz look to?
At such points we have a choice, the choice faced by Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, when he knew that, by all usual standards, he was finished, and only torture and death remained. There was no frame of meaning. He could, quite reasonably, have despaired. Instead he trusted in a meaning that he couldn’t see, that wasn’t within his power. “Nevertheless, your will, not mine…”
Paradoxically, hope embraces the worst, whereas optimism denies it. For that reason, Christian hope is difficult; rather than an easy confidence in God as the insurer of last resort, it is most real when (as for Jesus) God seems to be doing nothing at all. It goes with the hard recognition, very alien in our culture, that we don’t make the meaning of our lives. It is inseparable from faith; and faith is inseparable from love, because, in the end, we only trust what we love. So, whatever our losses, these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
But what can we hope for? Doesn’t the world, in the end, defeat hope? As we get older, don’t we live more from memory than from hope?
Christian hope is not holy optimism (properly caricatured in Life of Brian by “Always look on the bright side.”) It is not the assertion that, against all the odds, things will somehow come right; that God will fix things for us. Optimism can, and will, be defeated by events. But hope cannot be defeated.
How can we know that? Some words of Vaclav Havel may help: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” So hope has less to do with events than with the meaning of events. If bad things can be held within a frame of meaning, then there is hope.
But what if we can’t see any meaning? What if we are faced with pure pain and raw destruction? What frame of meaning could the prisoners of Auschwitz look to?
At such points we have a choice, the choice faced by Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, when he knew that, by all usual standards, he was finished, and only torture and death remained. There was no frame of meaning. He could, quite reasonably, have despaired. Instead he trusted in a meaning that he couldn’t see, that wasn’t within his power. “Nevertheless, your will, not mine…”
Paradoxically, hope embraces the worst, whereas optimism denies it. For that reason, Christian hope is difficult; rather than an easy confidence in God as the insurer of last resort, it is most real when (as for Jesus) God seems to be doing nothing at all. It goes with the hard recognition, very alien in our culture, that we don’t make the meaning of our lives. It is inseparable from faith; and faith is inseparable from love, because, in the end, we only trust what we love. So, whatever our losses, these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Faith
Quite often today the word ‘faith’ follows the word ‘blind’. Faith, some think, is blind because it claims knowledge where there is no knowledge and certainty where there is no certainty, in disregard of evidence, reason, or common sense.
Part of the problem is that we use the word ‘faith’ in different ways, as in ‘the Christian faith’ and ‘my faith got me through’. The first really means ‘the content of Christianity’, something more like ‘belief’, what might be set down in a creed. The second has less to do with belief—in difficult times we don’t worry too much about the Procession of the Holy Spirit—than with trust. I trusted God to see me through.
Faith is different from knowledge and from belief. It isn’t new information, nor is it dogmatic statement. And not all those who believe necessarily have faith. St James pointed out that the devils in hell didn’t do too badly on the belief side (James 2, 19). Nor do all those with faith necessarily have belief. Graham Greene, for one, thought that faith lingered even when belief had gone.
But faith must have some object. It can’t be a free-floating, undirected, self-justifying mental state. We have faith in something. As Christians, we have faith in Christ as the realisation of God for us. The object of our faith is not abstract—a truth or principle—but embarrassingly specific: this man at this time.
Nor does faith, by itself, make its object true. Willed faith directed at Christ does not make him any truer than he was before. The truth of faith does not arise from us. Faith is a response to what is worthy of faith.
But how do we know what is worthy of faith? Why this person rather than that? Why Jesus rather than Jim Jones of Jonestown? Isn’t faith so risky that we had better avoid it and stick to reason?
But faith doesn’t require the abandonment of reason. Reason, judgment, still work on, informing faith even though they do not produce it. That is why there can be such a thing as ‘reasonable faith’. “By their fruits ye shall know them”, said Jesus (Matt 7, 20), inviting us to exercise our judgment; and that excludes Jim Jones. Not blind faith but reasonable faith shows us what is trustworthy; and as we live in faith, the evidence of that trustworthiness grows.
Part of the problem is that we use the word ‘faith’ in different ways, as in ‘the Christian faith’ and ‘my faith got me through’. The first really means ‘the content of Christianity’, something more like ‘belief’, what might be set down in a creed. The second has less to do with belief—in difficult times we don’t worry too much about the Procession of the Holy Spirit—than with trust. I trusted God to see me through.
Faith is different from knowledge and from belief. It isn’t new information, nor is it dogmatic statement. And not all those who believe necessarily have faith. St James pointed out that the devils in hell didn’t do too badly on the belief side (James 2, 19). Nor do all those with faith necessarily have belief. Graham Greene, for one, thought that faith lingered even when belief had gone.
But faith must have some object. It can’t be a free-floating, undirected, self-justifying mental state. We have faith in something. As Christians, we have faith in Christ as the realisation of God for us. The object of our faith is not abstract—a truth or principle—but embarrassingly specific: this man at this time.
Nor does faith, by itself, make its object true. Willed faith directed at Christ does not make him any truer than he was before. The truth of faith does not arise from us. Faith is a response to what is worthy of faith.
But how do we know what is worthy of faith? Why this person rather than that? Why Jesus rather than Jim Jones of Jonestown? Isn’t faith so risky that we had better avoid it and stick to reason?
But faith doesn’t require the abandonment of reason. Reason, judgment, still work on, informing faith even though they do not produce it. That is why there can be such a thing as ‘reasonable faith’. “By their fruits ye shall know them”, said Jesus (Matt 7, 20), inviting us to exercise our judgment; and that excludes Jim Jones. Not blind faith but reasonable faith shows us what is trustworthy; and as we live in faith, the evidence of that trustworthiness grows.
Believing
Can you go to church without believing? Of course you can, and more people than we think do. But for many, belief is the price of entry, and a price that they are unable or unwilling to pay. So what does belief involve?
‘To believe’ has a familiar and ordinary sense. We say, ‘I believe that the flight arrives at 8.50’. Used like that, it means we are uncertain about a fact. But the uncertainty can be cleared up. I can look at the website, and then belief is replaced by knowledge.
The Church doesn’t use ‘believe’ in quite that way. It isn’t an inferior kind of factual knowledge. It isn’t to do with uncertainty about something that might be settled one way or another, if only all the evidence were in or we argued long enough. It’s worth noticing that the creeds don’t talk about believing that, but about believing in; not that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
This makes a difference. It suggests that statements of belief are not facts in the usual sense, neutral descriptions of the world. Suppose they could be established as facts: would that be the end of belief? No, because believing in is more than acknowledging a factual truth. Of course, something must be true for belief to be possible. But the kind of truth that is the object of belief can’t be separated from commitment.
People say of (usually ex-)politicians, ‘I believed in him.’ Not that he existed, or even that he was a good politician. More: I invested something of myself, some trust. That is why people so often feel betrayed.
But people don’t commit themselves to belief for no reason. You need to be shown something, something that speaks to the truth of where you stand in your life, in the lives of others, and in the world. That is the truth that we live from, deeper than the neutral truth of fact. For Christians, what we have been shown is Christ. It is Christ that makes belief possible. It is through what we are shown in Christ that we can believe in God (not the other way round). And since showing is the point, belief begins, not in argument and proof, but in a readiness to look.
‘To believe’ has a familiar and ordinary sense. We say, ‘I believe that the flight arrives at 8.50’. Used like that, it means we are uncertain about a fact. But the uncertainty can be cleared up. I can look at the website, and then belief is replaced by knowledge.
The Church doesn’t use ‘believe’ in quite that way. It isn’t an inferior kind of factual knowledge. It isn’t to do with uncertainty about something that might be settled one way or another, if only all the evidence were in or we argued long enough. It’s worth noticing that the creeds don’t talk about believing that, but about believing in; not that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
This makes a difference. It suggests that statements of belief are not facts in the usual sense, neutral descriptions of the world. Suppose they could be established as facts: would that be the end of belief? No, because believing in is more than acknowledging a factual truth. Of course, something must be true for belief to be possible. But the kind of truth that is the object of belief can’t be separated from commitment.
People say of (usually ex-)politicians, ‘I believed in him.’ Not that he existed, or even that he was a good politician. More: I invested something of myself, some trust. That is why people so often feel betrayed.
But people don’t commit themselves to belief for no reason. You need to be shown something, something that speaks to the truth of where you stand in your life, in the lives of others, and in the world. That is the truth that we live from, deeper than the neutral truth of fact. For Christians, what we have been shown is Christ. It is Christ that makes belief possible. It is through what we are shown in Christ that we can believe in God (not the other way round). And since showing is the point, belief begins, not in argument and proof, but in a readiness to look.
Annunciation
‘I must try to sort out what I believe’, ‘I must try to read the Bible’, ‘I’ll make the effort to get to church more often’: in seasons such as Lent when discipline is to the fore, these effortful resolutions can strike us as what’s needed, even if we do little about them. It’s as though faith grew from trying; as if by thinking or studying or praying harder we could finally make God real for ourselves.
But we can’t, of course, make God anything; God is what God is. We don’t draw him down by effort, however religiously worthy. It’s worth recalling that the story of our faith begins, not with theologians or Bible classes or even prayer groups, but with the Annunciation, with the angel telling Mary that she is to have a child. Whatever we make of the Virgin Birth, this is plainly a story about God taking the initiative.
We are familiar with that Annunciation from many works of Christian art. But there are many annunciations: God telling Abraham to leave his home and Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, Jesus declaring the coming of the Kingdom and his new life in the Resurrection. Annunciation, with or without the capital letter, is the dynamic of our faith. In what happens between God and us, he speaks first. We don’t construct him from the ground up.
But when God declares himself, it is our part to respond: ‘the angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary, and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.’ God offers his life, and we take that life into ourselves. That is the pattern; not working harder on God-things, firming up the God who slips through our fingers.
Nevertheless we have to hear our annunciations, which may be very quiet, and certainly unexpected. There has to be a readiness to listen, and a place in ourselves that God can enter. Rather than effort, it is learning to leave effort behind, to be open and quiet, to notice when God has something to say. We probably won’t see an angel. But in those moments when we feel a joy not our own and a peace we haven’t earned, or when we love someone unlovable or see sense in the senselessness of our lives, we feel God’s approach and hear the beating of his wings.
But we can’t, of course, make God anything; God is what God is. We don’t draw him down by effort, however religiously worthy. It’s worth recalling that the story of our faith begins, not with theologians or Bible classes or even prayer groups, but with the Annunciation, with the angel telling Mary that she is to have a child. Whatever we make of the Virgin Birth, this is plainly a story about God taking the initiative.
We are familiar with that Annunciation from many works of Christian art. But there are many annunciations: God telling Abraham to leave his home and Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, Jesus declaring the coming of the Kingdom and his new life in the Resurrection. Annunciation, with or without the capital letter, is the dynamic of our faith. In what happens between God and us, he speaks first. We don’t construct him from the ground up.
But when God declares himself, it is our part to respond: ‘the angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary, and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.’ God offers his life, and we take that life into ourselves. That is the pattern; not working harder on God-things, firming up the God who slips through our fingers.
Nevertheless we have to hear our annunciations, which may be very quiet, and certainly unexpected. There has to be a readiness to listen, and a place in ourselves that God can enter. Rather than effort, it is learning to leave effort behind, to be open and quiet, to notice when God has something to say. We probably won’t see an angel. But in those moments when we feel a joy not our own and a peace we haven’t earned, or when we love someone unlovable or see sense in the senselessness of our lives, we feel God’s approach and hear the beating of his wings.
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