In Lent we should learn again that our whole attitude to prayer will always depend on our idea of God. Ruth Burrows (Sister Rachel of the Quidenham Carmel), author of many books, including the recent Living in Mystery (Sheed & Ward), insists here that our approach to prayer changes once we believe 'in God's absolute unconditional love, not in a notional way but in one which transforms our attitudes and whole approach to life'.

'Who has believed what we have heard?
And to whom has the power of the Lord been
revealed?' (Isa 53:1 )

The evangelist John takes up these words of Isaiah and applies them directly to Jesus: the incredulity, the blindness of human beings that characterises the biblical story of God's dealings with men and women in the Old Testament, reaches its climax in the failure, the refusal to recognise in Jesus the Messiah of God, and, more than the Messiah, the very Son of the God they acknowledged as their God (Jn 12:38).

Privileged as we are, it is all too easy for us Christians to take our faith for granted, confident that we do believe, do 'have' faith, and in this comfortable assurance not allow ourselves to be challenged by the likelihood of there being large areas of non-faith. 'We believe in God', we affirm, Sunday after Sunday. What do we mean? What does the word 'God' mean to us? Describe your 'God'. How do you know who this 'God' of yours really is? When you think about it carefully, from where does your idea or understanding of God come?

Now, the New Testament proclaims—it is the good news it bears—that 'God', however we might conceive of 'God' (and the human heart inevitably, consciously or unconsciously, forms some idea of God to affirm or deny), can be known only through Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ as crucified. This is the revelation that stuns merely human wisdom, all ideas of God that derive from the human mind and heart; the revelation of the divine that to the Jews was an obstacle they could not surmount, a scandal pure and simple (how understandable), and to pagans: ludicrous folly Jesus of Nazareth, in his unprotected, raw humanness, in 'flesh', weak and suffering, and supremely in his terrible passion and death, is clean contrary to human ideas of the divine (1 Cor 1:22-24).

The glorious risen Christ

This may seem a startling affirmation. One hears the objection: 'What about the resurrection? Jesus' earthly life, his passion and death, belong to the past. It is with the glorious, risen Christ who is the image of God that we have to do.' True, Jesus' mortal life, death and resurrection were in historical time, but we have access to them, they became reality to us through the resurrection. After all, we have no way of conceiving of Jesus' risen life. As Luke tells us clearly (Acts 1:9), the cloud took him from human sight. We know the heart of the Risen One, how he is to us, what he does for and in us, precisely through his earthly life and in his passion and death. The Risen One, 'at the right hand of the Father', is Jesus and none other. We know that, within the very heart of the Trinity, in 'heaven', there is that same passion of love for us, that same self-expending outreach, that 'nothing spared', that sheer excess of love which, in the reality of this world and ourselves as we are, found its most expressive form in the denuded, dispossessed man on the gibbet. This is the Christian God, the living God, the God who really is, the God Jesus called 'Father' and whose image he is, that must be surrendered to or denied.

What of ourselves? If we examine our ideas and our attitudes which flow from these ideas, do we not uncover assumptions regarding the Godhead that derive from human wisdom and that we have transposed on to Jesus and so on to Jesus' God and Father? We can and perhaps do create a Jesus in the image and likeness of God, but the God of our human conception. This will always be our natural tendency. We fail, even as the Jews of old failed, to 'see' Jesus, to recognise who he is, fail to know him. Each and every one of Jesus' followers had, progressively and painfully, with many a backward slither, to allow Jesus, his person, his life, his death and his resurrection, to correct, perhaps destroy and then reshape their understanding of God. Theoretical knowledge is not enough. We suffer from the same inbuilt blindness and resistance to recognition as they did. Possibly it is Paul who expresses most dramatically this radical collapse of his God, the God he had served with zeal and passion. We see him literally thrown to the ground and blinded by the vision — of what? The unbelievable! The crucified Jesus as the very wisdom and power of God (Acts 9:1-9; 22:6-11; Gal 1:15-16)! Such a revelation can come only from God. Paul is sure of this; it was none other than God himself who revealed his Son. Such knowledge as this transcends human wisdom. It is 'what eye has not seen, nor ear heard. . .' (I Cor 2 9).

Tiny fish in an infinite ocean

If we want to know God, reality, bedrock and ground, absolute origin, ineffable mystery in which we and all that exist as tiny fish in an infinite ocean, we must look at Jesus crucified. Holding up the cross, bidding us gaze into that bleeding, humiliated face, the Holy Spirit's focus is not first and foremost on suffering or even on sin and its consequences, but on a love that is absolute, 'out of this world', 'other', 'what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived'. We must gaze and gaze with fullest attention and then affirm: this is God, this is what God is really like. Through this vision we have the certainty of what is beyond our comprehension, that God is love and nothing but love and love to and for us. It is not enough by far merely to affirm God's loving interest and care - one need not be a Christian to hold that sincerely. What we see in Jesus is a self-gift on God's part which is the fullest content of love. God gives not gifts but God's own self.

'Our soul is so preciously loved of him that is highest, that it passeth the knowing of all creatures. That is to say that there is no creature that is made that may fully know how much, how sweetly and how tenderly that our Maker loveth us' (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love).

Any notion whatever that sets over against Jesus a divine figure of 'wrath' demanding just retribution for human iniquity and demanding it of Jesus in our stead; a Father who imposes this appalling sacrifice on the Son while he remains aloof, untouched, in the realms of the divine, whatever its pedagogical value to former generations, in our day can only be considered as blasphemous. It is the evangelist John who shows us clearly the communion of life, of heart and will, between Father and Son. It is the Father's excess of love for us that, filling the heart of Jesus, drives him to his self-emptying. Jesus keeps nothing back from us, loves us to the uttermost, gives his all and we know that it is the Father living in him who keeps nothing back from us, giving his all. In giving us Jesus he gives us his all.

True faith takes us into the unknown

The principle labour of the Christian is to believe that divine love is the breadth and length and height and depth—there is simply nothing above, below, or beyond it. It is our home; it enfolds us and is our uttermost security in this life, in death, and beyond. We must train ourselves to renounce our natural mode of seeing and evaluating. This must be at the service of faith but must not be taken for faith. Without realising it, we can call faith that assent we give to our own manageable ideas of God. True faith takes us into the unknown. It calls for blind trust, profound humility, and surrender. This is real asceticism, the self-denial Jesus tells us is essential if we are to be his disciples.

If the heart of Christianity is the God who gives nothing less than God's own self there follows the logical conclusion that the fundamental stance a Christian must take is that of receiving. First and foremost we must accept being loved, allowing God to love us, letting God be the doer, the giver, letting God be God to us. But how hard it is for us to do that consistently! We are always reversing the role and are intent on serving God, as we say, on doing things for God, offering God something. This is our natural bent but it must be corrected by the vision of faith. Over and over again Jesus tries to get his disciples to drop this self-important attitude and to understand that, before God, they are only very small children who have no resources within themselves, but must look to their parents for everything, simply everything. It is not their role to give but to receive. Jesus knows that this calls for a radical change of outlook and, more than outlook, a radical change of heart. From always trying to prove ourselves to God (is it not really to ourselves?), we have to become poor in spirit just as Jesus was. Jesus remained always a small child before his Father, always poor and dispossessed. The one thing in himself that he draws attention to is his meek and humble heart. How vividly John shows us the poverty of Jesus living only by the Father, disclaiming any life of his own, any personal resources. He is an emptiness the Father is always flowing into an unwritten melody waiting for him to sing.

Sharing his vision

There are countless incidents in the gospel narratives, let alone in the letters of Paul and John and in the letter to the Hebrews, that challenge us to this change of heart. We find it so hard a lesson to learn! Luke's little story of Jesus in Martha's house (Lk 10:38-42) illustrates the point vividly. Martha, having welcomed her guest, does the obvious, expected thing of preparing a meal for him. Instead of helping her, Mary, her sister, sits down at the Lord's feet and listens to him. Martha is cross with Mary and still more cross with Jesus for allowing her to remain idle while she, Martha, bears the brunt of work. Instead of chiding Mary, Jesus, albeit very gently, chides the busy, well-meaning Martha. He defends Mary for doing the right thing, choosing the better part. Luke is using this incident to stress the point that, in the presence of Jesus—no ordinary guest—the only proper thing to do is to allow him to feed us, to serve us. This is the only service he wants from us.

Peter, although he had been long in intimate relationship with Jesus, still found the lesson hard to learn. He remonstrated with Jesus kneeling before him to wash his feet (Jn 13:6-8). Jesus insisted that it must be so; if he wanted to be Jesus' disciple he had to accept the fact that Jesus, and that means God, is our servant. Jesus makes it clear that he does not like his true disciples to think of themselves as servants of God. They are to see themselves as beloved, as friends, as familiars in his company, but this means sharing his vision, his knowledge of his Father which must radically change their whole outlook. Then they will glimpse, with awe, with trembling gratitude, something of the divine self-abasement in pure love to us. It is out of depths of humility and love, ever aware of being served by divine love, that the disciple turns to serve others. 'Do as I have done', Jesus says (cf Jn 13: 1 3- 17).

For me, it is not without significance that Luke relates the Martha and Mary story immediately after the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:2937). We can see that the Samaritan, consciously or not, was listening to God, looking at God, and therefore recognised him immediately in the wounded man and set to to minister to him, for we minister to God, serve God, only in our neighbour. The priest and Levite were, like Martha, intent on serving God. Presumably they were hastening on their way to the Temple to perform their respective religious duties. Seeing the stricken figure they may well have thought it a corpse, contact with which would involve a ritual uncleanness that would prevent them from carrying out these duties. They pass by.

Each of us must be Martha and Mary at one and the same time. Only if we have the heart of a Mary will our service of others be selfless. Not only the service of our neighbour but what we call our religious practices will be shot through with self-seeking unless we are always little children at our inmost centre, expecting God to be utterly good to us. It is well to check our motives in regard to our celebration of the Eucharist and the other sacraments. Do we see going to Mass and going to confession merely as religious duties, obligations imposed on us'? Why, really, do I go to Mass? Why do I go to confession ? Would I be afraid not to go? And if so, of what? Do we have an anxiety about our confession? What we have to understand is that in the sacraments Jesus comes to us, immediately, directly, to heal and transform us and bring us into full union with himself and his Father. We receive the sacraments, not to give something to God but to allow God to do and become everything for and to us. How simple the ritual! What more simple and true than to hold out an empty hand to receive the fullness of life; and, having admitted our lack of love, the meanness of our response to love, to hear then the voice of the Son of God (cf Jn 5:25) through the Church calling us to life and freedom? 'Absolve' is, I believe, the same word with which Jesus commanded the 'community' present when he summoned Lazarus from the tomb (Jn 11:44) to unbind his imprisoned limbs.

Absolute, unconditional love

Maybe we have undertaken some Lenten penance. What is our motive? Is it because a good Catholic always does something for Lent? Do we assume that penance is a good thing, that God is pleased when we do hard things for him? All this hardly fits the God Jesus shows us and what God longs for us to do is to live in the truth Jesus reveals. This means believing in Gods' absolute, unconditional love, not in a notional way but in one which transforms our attitudes and whole approach to life. We cannot hope for this real knowledge without effort on our part. 'Think', says John, 'think of the love the Father has for us . . .' (I Jn 3:1). What can be more important for a disciple than constantly to reflect on the truth of God, on this unspeakable, incredible love with which we are encompassed? But how often do we do so? In the light of all this, surely we see that no Christian may dispense with prayer and maybe we have to change our whole conception of prayer, seeing it as a time, short or long, when, so to speak, we have to entertain God with holy thoughts, worthy sentiments and words.

When we feel that our performance is hopeless, we get discouraged and conclude that, whatever be the general truth that prayer is needful, for me at any rate, no doubt because of my inadequacy, it is a waste of time and I had better do something really useful for God. Once again, we are forgetting the truth that God is the doer and giver. Christian prayer is nothing other than being present to God so that God can give to us. The only thing that matters is that we believe this and stay there, regardless of how we feel or don't feel. I suggest that the most profound expression we can give to faith is to set aside an inviolable time each day, no matter how short, when we each deliberately affirm God's or Jesus' absolute love for us now, here, and stay there in blind trusting faith, receiving it. This will mean learning the precious lesson that, in fact, we have no inner resources; learning to live happily without any assurances from within ourselves but casting our whole weight on to infinite love. This is to glorify God for it glorifies God's true nature which is love.

If we knew the gift of God! 'Lord, that I may really see! That I may really listen! I do believe, but, oh Lord, help the areas of unbelief!'