Holding Ourselves Apart

When we brought our newborn daughter home from the hospital, the first few days seemed like a taste of Heaven. This little mite soaked into my chest when I held her, the most completely intimate cuddle I had ever experienced.

No more than a week later, things changed. She was still a warm little taste of Heaven, but she was already managing, somehow, to hold herself apart. She still cuddled, but it was as an increasingly autonomous, separate entity.

Not for the first time I find myself reflecting on how my experience as a parent can teach me something about how God experiences His own creation and, especially, us.  We were, after all, created in His likeness so that we might connect with Him far more intimately than the hills and plains and the myriad other forms of life.

Continual Surrender

Parenthood is a process of continual surrender. A baby is completely dependent on the parent. But a parent’s job is to slowly surrender the control fostered by that initial dependency.

Of course, the child helps with this by grasping at independence within days of being born. It is a rare parent/child combo in which the parent’s pace of relinquishment and the child’s reach for independence do not come in conflict. (And sometimes it does so spectacularly.)

This is a natural progression of a human relationship. And if parent and child live long enough, the pattern reverses.  As the infirmities of age accumulate and progress, the parent becomes more dependent on the child

Human relationships with God, however, tend to be more complex and individualized. They do not follow the same sort of predictable patterns. There may even be as many exceptions as there are rules when it comes to the progress of a human’s relationship with God.  Part of this comes from the many variables in how families introduce children to God (or fail/refuse to do so).

Biology is not the single determinant of how people relate to their growing children. But biology does play a stronger role in the parent/child relationship than it does in how people relate to God.

Relating to God is vastly more open to free will than familial relationships. Familial relationships carry both biological and early imprinted psychological imperatives.  But these imperatives are not necessarily present in our relationship with God.

A Crucial Difference

There is a crucial difference in the development of the relationship between parent and child and an individual’s relationship with God.  The progress and health of a relationship with God is not based on how much God successfully surrenders control of a human over time.  It is based on how successfully the human surrenders to God over time.

This is difficult, to say the least. Our nature impels us toward independence, even as newborns. Within a week my daughter was attempting to hold herself apart.  Her experience of her mother and I was primal, immediate, and physical.

Some people’s experience of God may be on some level like that. For most of us, however, our experience of God is considerably less primal or immediate as that between an infant and parent. And it is rarely physical at all.  (The exception here would be sacramental encounters, but these are in a whole different category.)

Direct encounters are entirely at God’s will and discretion. We have no power to initiate them. However, we can, perhaps, cultivate the kind of circumstances resembling those of reported direct encounters.  We can prepare ourselves for them and pray for them earnestly, but they are still not ours to command or initiate.

Remember that we formed the habit of holding ourselves apart in infancy. As such, it is not something we can abandon easily or without considerable effort.

Reaching Intimacy With God

A Google search of the phrase “intimacy with God” returned about 57,800,000 results (in .18 seconds, no less).  Obviously there is considerable interest in the topic. And it appears that there is also no shortage of people willing to opine, advise, and comment on it!  Even a short survey of this material would take an incredible amount of time. I suspect though, that there would be considerable redundancy and repetition.

I also suspect that most of us already know the chief obstacle in achieving intimacy with God is the same as that which led my infant daughter to begin to hold herself apart at such an early age.  It is our own deep, innate desire to pull away, to assert our own independence, to be distinct and independent in our selfhood.

My reading of the lives of Saints and mystics suggests another snag we cannot overcome.  While we can work at preparing ourselves for an intimate encounter with God, the initiative is entirely God’s. But there is no shortage of material available for those who wish to devote themselves to the process of becoming ready for such depth.

It is important to note, though, that throughout this essay I have written from the perspective that it is we who hold ourselves apart. Perhaps I should support this perspective a bit more instead of taking it as a given.

Holding Ourselves Apart

I think my experience with my infant daughter speaks to something true and possibly tragic about the human experience. We claim to want and can be observed to seek to achieve intimacy in our lives. But we usually do so on our own terms.  We hope to preserve our safety, our autonomy, and our individuality in our intimate relationships. I think that a large part of our pulling away is done in the service of keeping ourselves intact and preserving our independence.

This is a healthy instinct. We all have had unhappy experiences with people who have “bad boundaries.” So no matter how much we might desire intimacy, we have deep needs for safety and for keeping our individuality intact. At the proper levels, this is a good thing.

At the same time, our beliefs tell us we are safe in God’s keeping.  Our Faith says that God will not rob us of our individual, unique selves, but return them to us in better condition than when we offered ourselves up. But our life experiences, and our deep instincts toward survival, work against any kind of complete surrender.

No matter how much we might trust God (let alone another human being) our instincts make us hesitant.

But those who advise others on achieving intimacy with God – at least those whose reputations inspire any kind of trust – are very clear from the beginning that God is in charge of any real progress. We can only prepare ourselves for intimacy and petition for it.  We can also work at adopting the kind of disciplines of prayer, study, and habit that we are advised contribute to intimacy. But in the end, it is God who acts.

It is God who reaches out to draw us in. It is God who knows what we can bear, what we can accept, and what will give us growth and peace. And He knows, too, what might destroy us or bring us to grief and harm.

A Precautionary Observation

Over the years I have come to notice something about people yearning for closer encounters with God. Their appetite may at times exceed their capacity. People on fire after a moving retreat experience, or people in the grips of a fresh conversion or re-conversion experience, sometimes seem to want to hurl themselves into the deepest end of the pool of human-Divine experience.

I sympathize as often as not, but I am grateful that God answers to his own wisdom and not our desires of the moment!

A woman I knew in the early days of my adult conversion had a standard response to people who expressed a desire for deep, immersive spiritual experiences, such as that which Paul experienced on the road to Damascus.

”God,” she would say, “does not use a cannonball on a sparrow.”

When I look at the lives of those people whose encounters with God were dramatic, profound, and life altering one thing stands out.  I notice that they are often called to work at things that are really hard – not to mention sometimes being dangerous and painful! We should keep this in mind.

Of course, I would not want to dissuade anyone from seeking a deeper and fuller relationship with God.  But there may be cause for gratitude when the answer to some of our prayers in that vein is “no” or “not yet.” God will not give us more to work at than He will provide us resources to accomplish our call.  After all, He knows our frailties and our weakness far better than we know ourselves.

When we cease to hold ourselves apart, let us first and at all times trust God to govern our progress into deeper intimacy and action according to His own understanding and plans.

Prayer

Father in Heaven, help me grow in love and service to you and to your Son, our Lord and Savior. Help me learn to seek your embrace instead of pulling away, and grant me the wisdom and maturity to put my progress in your hands alone, trusting in you to regulate my growth instead of attempting to force myself into my own vision of holiness and intimacy. Please give me patience, humility, and a heart open to the guidance and discipline of the Church. Bring me, in your own good time, to be the person you have intended me to be since before the time you formed me in my mother’s womb. All of this I ask for the praise and glory of your holy name, and not for the gratification of my own vainglorious pride. For yours is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, now and forever.  AMEN!