God Makes It Hard to Love Him

Plus: Galli Report updates. Original video from 1920s China.

Photo by Stefan Widua on Unsplash

Last week, I mentioned one reason we’re suspicious of talking about loving God; we’re leery of practicing a self-centered piety that marginalizes neighbor love. Still, we hesitate to give more attention to Jesus’ greatest commandment for other reasons. Some of them are on us; but some are not.

One reason is the age we live in. Charles Taylor calls it the “secular age.” In previous times, belief in God was simply assumed, and if one didn’t believe, you felt compelled to justify atheism or agnosticism. Today the opposite is the case: Believers feel compelled to justify their faith (to themselves and sometimes to others). It is the rare believer who has a deep and abiding sense of God’s existence and presence and feels no compulsion to do this.

This means we live day to day in a world that has sidelined God. God isn’t part and parcel of education, the arts, medicine, business, the legal system, government, and so on. One can operate in any sphere and be relatively successful without ever thinking about God. In fact, you may be looked upon with deep suspicion or hostility if you try to introduce God into the workplace.

Indeed, you don’t even need God to be religiously successful. It has always been true that many honor God with their lips but not in their lives (Mt. 15:8), but I suspect the temptation is more fierce today. One can run a church or a religious nonprofit quite well without God.

I am familiar with many Christian ministries and churches. In all that I’m aware of, the people in them are devout; chapel or group prayer is a weekly event, and there is occasional talk about how they are on mission for God. But they manage their ministry very much like a business. This in fact is a mantra in many such places. It’s a way of saying, “We are serious about our work.” Such ministries/companies, especially at the executive level, spend lots of time preparing budgets and reading spreadsheets. They read books on the latest management techniques. They follow HR practices as dictated by the state. They have corporate lawyers who help them process government forms and warn them of potential lawsuits.

I’m not saying any of this is wrong or that it automatically compromises our faith. There are sound reasons to employ the best business practices in a Christian ministry. But that doesn’t take away from the reality that each of these enterprises could be equally successful from a human standpoint if all talk of God and prayer ended tomorrow. And we know this deep down.  It’s why in such companies there is ongoing anxiety about not trusting God enough or losing the faith vision that started the ministry and becoming, well, just another business. It’s also why many of the most talented people in such companies move on to secular companies seamlessly and find success there as well. We just don’t need God to engage in most contemporary enterprises successfully.

Successfully, that is, by the standards of our time. The values that rule such enterprises are those that rule all of contemporary life: expertise, technical innovation, rational decision making, and growth—all grounded and summed up in one passion: efficiency. Let me be clear: These values are not evil and, in fact, are often necessary in advanced capitalist and technological societies trying to meet the needs of millions of people. But we also have to recognize that these values work against many spiritual values.

A cursory reading of Scripture reveals that a relationship with God is not a steady upward march of spiritual enlightenment; instead, it ebbs and flows, grows and shrinks, experiences successes and failures. Israel’s mercurial relationship with Yahweh—from the exodus to settling in Canaan to exile from the land and return—is the classic paradigm of the spiritual journey. Furthermore, God seems indifferent to what culture counts as expertise—note among many examples, the anointing of David, who was seemingly the least qualified among his brothers to become king (1 Sam. 16).  

Anyone minimally acquainted with the dynamics of the spiritual life understands that efficiency is not in the equation. Prayer and contemplation, as well as love for the marginalized, are utter wastes of time from the standpoint of immediate results that clearly make a difference. Long stretches in the faith journey show little-to-no evidence of obvious growth. And there are moments when the very ground of faith seems to be pulled out from under us: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

So, one reason we struggle to give our all to loving God is this: We live in a world that discourages us from thinking about God as an ever-present daily reality.

The Elusive God
And yet even in the best of times, we see another reason we are challenged: God deliberately makes it difficult to find and know him.

We often chalk up our failure to love God to our sin, selfishness, and various idolatries. That is right as far as it goes. But we also must recognize that God has not made a life with him all that easy to pursue.

“Truly, you are a God who hides himself,” writes Isaiah (45:15). To be sure, God certainly is one who reveals himself—to Abraham, to Moses, in the Law, in the Prophets, and  most completely in Jesus Christ. But God is also one who hides himself. Who withdraws his manifest presence from Israel for centuries. Whose proofs of his existence, like the beauty of the creation, can also be explained away, often convincingly, with science. Whose commands to love the neighbor are left so general that it’s often hard to know exactly what that means in a given situation (e.g., do you forgive once more and take in an adult child addicted to drugs, or is this a time for tough love?). Who sits in silence as we petition him about a matter of life and death. Who never seems to show up when we spend time in contemplation. Who appeared to abandon his only begotten Son on the Cross.

To be sure, we affirm God’s omnipresence, that is, his presence everywhere and at all times even when we do not perceive it. But let’s be frank: He often deliberately fails to make his presence known in a way that we can perceive it. In my experience, this is God’s usual way. Most days and weeks and months, God is nowhere to be felt or experienced.

In addition to God’s evasiveness, there is the issue of God’s being. God is categorically different from us. Even to say he “exists” is to suggest he shares with us this thing called being, or shares it in a way that his being and our being have a great deal in common. I’m getting out of my depth here, which is precisely the point. All analogies and metaphors for God—father, judge, light, love, beauty, goodness, omnipresence, and so on—are just that. They are mere pointers to a Reality that fails human words and categories. It’s why many are attracted to apophatic theology, which argues that who and what God is not is the surer path to knowing this Reality. This approach, however, is not emotionally satisfying and leaves us with a vague and abstract conception of God: The One Beyond Knowing.

In short, the longer you travel the journey of love toward God, the more elusive and mysterious God becomes.

A Challenging Journey
The reply, of course, is that this is where “faith” comes in. We trust God even when we have no palpable evidence of his presence, or when we recognize the complete inadequacy of our language about him. Yes. But that doesn’t take away the psychological reality that we don’t sense his presence most of the time, and when we do, we often have no idea what’s going on. And that means it requires an extraordinary act of the will to continue to pursue him in faith with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

To be sure, there is no act of the will toward God that is not prompted and strengthened by the grace of the Holy Spirit. But let’s be honest. Cooperating with God is psychologically exhausting. And many days, it’s easier to just go through the motions of religion than it is to seek God with everything in our being. As I said, this is often due to our own sin. I’ll ruminate on such in later essays, because our sin takes many forms that we should be aware of.

But for now, let’s note the mitigating circumstances when we struggle with loving God. We needn’t beat our breast about these difficulties. We should simply be aware of the external challenges that make this journey so trying. In part, it’s the era we live in. But it’s also due to the will and nature of the One who paradoxically hides himself and calls us to love him without reserve.

Updates on This Newsletter

Of course, the very week I decide on a change of direction to things divine, I start finding fascinating cultural commentaries! And I can’t resist sharing them. So when I run across an article or two I find insightful, I’ll post it on Tuesdays in a newsletter edition I’ll continue to call The Galli Report. This will happen occasionally but not weekly. Peripheral Vision will be a regular Friday event.

But nothing is going to be published next Tuesday or Friday as I’m spending a week with my son fly fishing in New Mexico.  

Finally, the visually alert will recognize that though the title of this Friday edition has changed, the logo has not. In part, I want to signal some level of continuity. In part, I am not quite ready to start using a new logo. All things in their time.

Another China

This week’s video glances back in time to 1920s China. Quite a contrast to the China we know today. Thought this was timely given the location of the Olympics.

Grace and peace,

Mark Galli