Experience Jesus. Really: Finding Refuge, Strength, and Wonder through Everyday Encounters with God

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendour! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.2 There is something wonderfully childlike about this; they have one foot in nature and the other in the unseen part of God’s

So when the fifteenth-century mystic Thomas à Kempis offers the following invitation, he is speaking of an experience that is completely accessible to every human being: WE ARE ASSURED THAT CHRIST NOW LIVES WITHIN US, WHICH MEANS THAT WE CAN ALSO EXPERIENCE HIS PRESENCE DEEP WITHIN OUR OWN BEING.

Paul writes that in God “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We are surrounded with the presence of God. We swim in it every day, which fits the “amphibious” idea of human nature and experience.

“Hearts unfold like flowers before thee, opening to the sun above,” as Henry van Dyke wrote in a lovely, poetic phrase.

Do you understand that to make Jesus and his Kingdom practical is to strip it of all wonder, mystery, and power? It’s like asking for the mechanics of falling in love, enjoying sunlight on the ocean, comforting a frightened child.

We cling to the belief that practical information is the way to salvation. But information is continually contradicted, undermined, laid waste—leaving us feeling fragile, vulnerable, and cynical.

A friend asked me this week, “Yes, but how do I love God? How do I take refuge in him? I mean, practically speaking?” It is the question of the person discipled by the Internet. As soon as you hear the demand for the practical, in simple, clear immediate steps, you know you are talking to a Disciple of the Internet.

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or . . . will not exist at all. KARL RAHNER

They knew nothing of how sunlight on our skin produces vitamin D in our cells (do you really?). But they bared their skin to the sun anyways and rejoiced in God for his goodness. So Patrick prayed, I arise today Through the strength of heaven: Light of sun, Radiance of moon, Splendor of fire.1