Letting God Love Me More

The issue – if I can call it that – of what we can do when God seems to be absent in our lives, has been presented to me frequently in the past week or so.  This is true in my personal life and with a couple of people raising that with me.  This has also come up a few places in the messages I receive regularly from different sources.  There are times when God does not seem to be making God’s presence known to me.  These raises (or perhaps begs) the question, how can I help God to be more present in my life?

One of the Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr from last week was on point: 

Seeking to experience God’s love more fully, spiritual director Colette Lafia asks a monk with whom she is friends, “How do I let God love me more?”:  

Without missing a beat, Brother Paul answered in his joyful tone, "God cannot love you more. God already loves you infinitely. You just need to become more aware of [God’s] love … by becoming more present to it. It’s like hearing birdcalls. By paying attention and delighting in it.”  

The Advent Reflection by the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine was also applicable:

If we aren't paying attention then that narrow space between pleasure and anxiety can trip us up, and just like a crack in the pavement, cause our steps to stumble and our resolve to falter. Henri Nouwen reminds us, "The Lord is coming, always coming. When you have ears to hear and eyes to see, you will recognize him at any moment of your life. Life is Advent; life is recognizing the coming of the Lord." SSJD Advent Reflection 2025

This brought to mind the line from Leonard Cohen’s song, Anthem, “there is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.”

I have believed – known - for quite a while, that God is always present n our lives.  God makes Godself known to us in many ways.  However, because of who we are and how God created us to be - ironically – we are blind and deaf and dumb to many of these ways.  Due to who and how we are, we are not open to many of the ways in which God is present to us.  This is, in part, because of our personalities and in part because we are often unavailable to God presence in our lives.  If we quiet ourselves and pay attention, we may be able to discern more clearly God’s presence in ways that are familiar to us or even ways that are not familiar to us.  For me, I am not usually attuned to the outer world around me – walking in nature does not do much for me but I am working on that. 

I will close with another message that I received this morning from Richard Rohr:

Marabi Starr offers this stirring description of the Dark Night of the Soul, in which God moves from dynamic presence to loving absence:

Say what’s secretly going on is that the Beloved is loving you back. That your first glimpse of the Absolute was God’s first great gift to you. That your years of revelation inside his many vessels was his second gift, wherein, like a mother, he was holding you, like a child, close to his breast, tenderly feeding you. And that this darkness of the soul you have come upon and cannot seem to come out of is his final and greatest gift to you.

I would disagree on one point.  It is not a case of God {the Beloved} loving us back.  It is a case that God always loves us, and we have to opportunity to love God back.  It is not a question of God being more present in my life?  The question is, how can I be more aware or God’s presence in my life?  When I do, how can I respond? 

I hope we can be blessed to do that on our journey.