The Inner Life, Attentive to God

Yesterday, at our church prayer and abiding night, we were led through an experience of encountering Jesus. We were asked to imagine a safe place and to meet Jesus there.

Two young children were there, participating in their own way. And when asked where they encounter Jesus, they both said, “On the inside.”

Many Christian spiritual teachers through history have suggested that the deepest centre of the human person is also the place where we encounter God.

Fifth century Bishop, Saint Augustine, wrote in his Confessions that the God who fills heaven and earth cannot be contained by creation, yet every person’s very being is a participation in and presence within that God.

“Why do I request you to come to me when, unless you were within me, I would have no being at all?” (Book 1, Ch. 2)

The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart hinted at this when he urged people to carry the same inward attentiveness from prayer into the ordinary turbulence of daily life. What follows below is a meditation based on this idea of inward attentiveness. This article is adapted from portions of Thomas Kelly’s book A Testament of Devotion.

The Inner Sanctuary

Meister Eckhart wrote, “As thou art in church or cell, that same frame of mind carry out into the world, into its turmoil and its fitfulness.”

Deep within us there is an inner sanctuary of the soul. It is a holy place to which we may continuously return. Eternity rests at our hearts, pressing upon our time‑torn lives. It warms us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home to itself.

Yielding to this summons and gladly committing ourselves both in body and soul is to experience true life. It is light within, the very presence of God in us, that illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of humanity. It is a seed stirring toward life, if we do not choke it.

Here is the slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the life we clothe in earthly form and action.

And he is within all who call upon him.

Living on Two Levels

There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once.

On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. The life of the ordinary, practical, and perhaps mostly necessary.

Yet at the same time, deep within, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship, holding a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.

The secular world today values and cultivates only the first level. It assumes that this is where the real business of humanity is done, and it often scorns or smiles with tolerant amusement at the cultivation of the second level. Such inward attentiveness is treated as a luxury, a vestige of superstition, or an occupation for certain temperaments.

But those who have encountered the living God know that the deeper level of prayer and attentiveness to the divine is the most important thing in the world. It is at this level that the real business of life is determined.

The secular mind is an abbreviated mind. It builds upon only the part of human nature that is seen and judged by others, while neglecting the most glorious part of our nature.

The God-encountered mind, by contrast, involves the whole person. It embraces our life in time within its true setting in the Eternal Lover. It keeps close to the fountains of divine creativity. In humility it discovers joys and stability, peace and assurance that remain largely incomprehensible to the secular mind.

When God Takes Hold of the Soul

Some people come into holy obedience through the gateway of profound mystical experience.

It is overwhelming to fall into the hands of the living God. To be invaded to the depths of one’s being by the divine presence, suddenly uprooted from every earth‑born security and assurance. You may feel carried by a storm of unbelievable power that leaves the old proud self utterly defenseless, until one cries with the psalmist:

“All your waves and your billows have gone over me.” (Psalm 42:7, NRSV)

Then the soul is swept into a loving centre of indescribable sweetness, where calm and unspeakable peace, and a ravishing joy quietly takes over the heart.

The inner attentiveness to God becomes increasingly real, and whatever realness we thought we knew before becomes dim, transparent, and small. As C. S. Lewis puts it in The Great Divorce, “Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.”