God is Ready – Are you?

When I entered the Jesuit novitiate, I was baffled about what it meant to have a “relationship” with God. We novices heard about that a great deal, and I was stumped: What was I supposed to do to relate to God? What did that mean? My biggest misconception was that I would have to change before approaching God. Like many beginners in the spiritual life, I felt that I wasn’t worthy to approach God. So I felt foolish trying to pray. I confessed this to the assistant novice director. “What do I need to do before I can relate to God?” I asked. “Nothing,” he said. “God meets you where you are.”
That was a liberating insight. Even though God is always calling us to constant conversion and growth, and even though we are imperfect and sometimes sinful people, God loves us as we are now. As the Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello said, “You don’t have to change for God to love you.” This is one of the main insights of the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola: We are loved even in our imperfections.

But there is another way of understanding this. Not only does God desire to be in relationship with you now, but God’s way of relating to you often depends on where you are in your life.

God also meets you in ways that you can understand, in ways that are meaningful to you. Some-times God speaks to you in a manner that is so personal, so tailored to the circumstances of your life that it is nearly impossible to explain it to others.

In the Beauty of the Lilies

Here is an example from my own life: At one point in my Jesuit training, I spent two years working in Nairobi, Kenya, working with the Jesuit Refugee Service. At the beginning of my stay, cut off from friends and family in the States, I felt a crushing loneliness. After a few months of hard work, I also came down with mononucleosis, which required two months of recuperation. So it was a trying time.

Happily, I worked with some generous people, including Uta, a German Lutheran lay volunteer with extensive experience in refugee work. After I had recovered from my illness, our work flourished: Uta and I helped some refugees set up about 20 businesses, including tailoring shops, several small restaurants and even a little chicken farm

It was a remarkable turnaround—from lying on my bed, exhausted, wondering why I had come here, anguished that I would have to return home, puzzled over what I could ever accomplish, to busily working with refugees from all over East Africa, managing a shop buzzing with activity and realizing that this was the happiest and freest I had ever felt. Many days were difficult. But many days I thought, “I can’t believe how much I love this work!”

One day I was walking home from our shop. The long brown path started at a nearby church on the edge of the slum, which was perched on a hill that overlooked a broad valley. On the way into the valley I passed people silently working in their plots of land, who looked up and called out to me as I passed. Brilliantly coloured, iridescent sunbirds sang from the tips of tall grasses. At the bottom of the valley was a little river, and I crossed a flimsy bridge to get to the other side.

When I climbed the opposite side of the hill, I turned to look back. Though it was around five in the afternoon, the equatorial sun blazed down on the green valley, illuminating the long brown path, the tiny river, the people, the banana tree, flowers and grass. Quite suddenly I was overwhelmed with happiness. I’m happy to be here, I thought. After some loneliness, some illness and some doubts, I felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. It was a surprising experience. Here was God speaking to me where I was—physically, emotionally and mentally—and offering what I needed on that day. What was it, precisely? A feeling of clarity? Of longing? Of exaltation? It’s hard to say, even today. Perhaps all of those things. But it was especially meaningful to me where I was at the time.

Anytime Time, Anywhere

God speaks to us in ways we can understand. God can also meet you at any time, no matter how confused your life may seem. You do not have to have a perfectly organized daily life to experience God. In the Gospels, for example, Jesus often meets people in the midst of their work: Peter mending his nets by the seashore, Matthew sitting at his tax collector’s booth. But just as often Jesus encounters people when they are at their absolute worst: an adulterous woman about to be stoned, a woman who has been sick for many years, a possessed man not even in his right mind. In each of these situations God said to these busy, stressed-out, worried, frightened people, “I’m ready to meet you if you’re ready to meet me.”
If God meets you where you are, then where you are is a place to meet God. You do not have to wait until your life settles down, or the kids move out of the house, or you have found that perfect apartment, or you recover from that long illness. You do not have to wait until you’ve overcome your sinful patterns or are more “religious” or can pray “better.” You do not have to wait for any of that.

God is ready now.

James Martin, S.J., is culture editor of America. This article is an edited excerpt from his new book - The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything