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God is now here
Fr Chris Thomas, director of the Irenaeus Project and a member of the Emmaus Family of Prayer in the Liverpool diocese, reflect on the way God often reveals his face in unexpected places.
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When I was a young deacon I received a phone call from a woman I'd got to know very well. She was at Mass every day and very involved in parish activities. She told me that her daughter had been badly beaten up and would I meet her at the hospital. I went along and found the woman sitting by her daughter's bedside. She was incandescent with rage. Her daughter was lying in the bed badly bruised with a huge slash to her face. As soon as she saw me the mother jumped up from her seat and began to berate the person who had hurt her daughter. This good Catholic woman screamed that she wished the government would bring back hanging and if they couldn't do that, the perpetrator should have his hands cut off or, at the very least, be beaten up as badly as her daughter had been. The daughter said nothing. She just lay there until the mother turned on her and said 'it's all your own fault anyway. If you didn't sleep with men for money this wouldn't have happened." It turned out that the girl was a prostitute and one of her punters had done this to her. I remember taking the girl's hand and asking her how she felt. She looked at me without an ounce of anger or bitterness in her face and said it probably wasn't his fault, and that something must have happened to him to make him so angry. Gospel moment I was amazed and overcome as I looked at the girl. It was a Gospel moment for me as her compassion and forgiveness for the one who'd hurt her shone out in her eyes. It was an experience of the real presence of God in another human person and it was powerful. Over the years since it happened I've often reflected on it and the ways in which God reveals Godself. This is often not in the expected, the good practicing Catholic mother but in the unexpected, the daughter whose lifestyle seemed a million miles away from Gospel values. God is in all things but often it's our eyes that are veiled and fail to see. This has challenged me to look for the presence of God in the unexpected and, as a practising Christian, to recognise that I must allow the God who lives in me to shine forth as a witness to others of the reality of God. This is often a difficult task, as the prostitutes' poor mother found. We think God is in some people and not others I think that most of us live with a dualistic image of God. We believe that God is in some things but not in others. That God is in heaven and occasionally deigns to visit God's people or that God is present when good things happen but not when bad things happen. Or that God is only in us when we're good but not when we're bad. We look at others and think God is only in those people who are living according to the precepts of the Gospel and not in those other people who aren't. As though we can judge within whom God has chosen to live or not. The Good news is that God is everywhere and in everything. Jesus came to show us that God is present and that even the very air we breathe has been touched and imbibed with the presence of God. God is with us not just when we're good or when good things happen. God is present. I began to realise that in more than just an intellectual way when someone told me what the allied troops discovered on a wall in one of the bunkers at Auschwitz. Some one had scrawled in desperation on the wall 'God is nowhere.' A line had been drawn between the "w" and the "h" so that the sentence read "God is now here." The God who is always coming to us Advent is a time when the Church invites us to focus on the God who is in all things, the God who is always coming to us. It's a time when we can face those things within us that would stop us recognising the ever-coming God, in ourselves, in the people around us, in the very air that we breathe. It's a time to open our eyes and see. Use the month not just to get caught up in the preparations for Christmas but to stop and take time to pray, to read the Scriptures, to reflect. Advent is such a precious time to reflect on the presence of God that it's a shame to waste it all on worrying about presents and food buying so that it gets lost in the melee that precedes Christmas. Take the chance this advent to recognise the God who is coming to you. Find that God within yourself. Recognise that God within others whoever they may be. Rejoice and be glad for Yahweh our God is in our midst.
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