By Kathy Berken
On Deck
What is God’s name? Sounds like a silly question, but it is what Moses asked God when he encountered the Divine Voice in the burning bush in Exodus (3:4-6, 13-14). God calls Moses and tells him to stay back and take off his shoes, for where he stood was holy ground. God continues: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Moses wants more: “What name should I give the Israelites when I tell them that the God of their fathers has sent me?”
And what does God tell him? “Tell them this name: ‘I am who I am.’ Tell the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
In Hebrew, this is translated as YHWH, a name considered too sacred to speak. However, Scripture scholars suggest “Yahweh” as a close pronunciation, a word derived from the Hebrew verb hayah meaning “to be.” God’s name is YHWH or I AM.
Although none of us can fully understand or describe the true nature of God, we can experience what God meant when he told Moses that his name “I AM” means “to be.” God is described in the present tense as the eternal, infinite Being.
What does this mean for us? The Trappist monk Thomas Merton spoke of God as “Being” in terms of contemplative prayer. To experience the presence of God, he wrote, is “spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant source.” It is precisely in contemplation that “You start where you are and you deepen what you already have. And you realize that you are already there. All we need to do is experience what we already possess.”
As a follow-up to last month’s column, we draw a religious/spiritual parallel between Merton’s description of contemplation and the original 1939 version of the film, “The Wizard of Oz,” appropriate for our study of spiritual practices. All four main characters went to the Wizard searching for a brain, heart, courage, and a way home. He told the scarecrow, tin man, and lion that they already had these things; they just had to experience them for themselves. Although the Wizard could not help Dorothy, the Good Witch Glinda told her that she needed only to click her heels together and repeat “There’s no place like home” for her to return to the place she never really left.
The message is clear: we already have what we have been searching for. Father Merton might have said, “Don’t search for God, don’t look for God, don’t try to find God.” That is because, just as the characters in the film discovered, God has always been with you. All we need to do is simply become aware of God’s presence. As St. Augustine famously wrote in his “Confessions,” “God is closer to you than you are to yourself.” And Jesus told his disciples, “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).
Imagine a school of fish on a quest for water. The wise fish becomes aware of the ocean, just as Dorothy was already and always home. So it is with us. Perhaps, as we begin to understand and experience God’s presence as always within us and everywhere around us, we can change our language to reflect this awareness. Rather than our spiritual practices be a way to find God, those practices can help us be more aware of God’s infinite presence within us, as the fish is immersed in the ocean.
A few metaphors to imagine the Divine Presence include: God is not the music, but the space between the notes. God is not the dancer, but the dance itself. God is not the masterpiece but the inexpressible awe.
(Kathy Berken is a spiritual director and retreat leader in St. Paul, Minnesota. She lived and worked at L’Arche in Clinton — The Arch from 1999-2009.)
