The title question is deceptive. Since God is omnipresent, he is always near. The real question is why you are not aware of it. But God is not all that goes missing in the ticking minutes of your life. At any given time, the average human being is only conscious of about five percent of what is happening in his or her physical surroundings. If you are mostly absent from what impacts your senses, how can you be present to the holy and the means of grace?
It’s true that your awareness of God’s presence comes about only by grace, but grace abounds in the created world. You need only pray for the will to train your mind to it, just as the climbing vine is trained to the light. Your senses become servants of this divine mystery when you are no longer slaves to them and all the different ways they lead you astray from truth and goodness. No one put this more clearly than the apostle Paul:
Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer presentyour members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. Romans 6:12-14
In my life, I am blessed with ongoing grace, but only in retrospect can I appreciate the ways I was influenced by that gift. I could hear God’s voice without listening to his message. Like those who fell among the thorns in the parable of the sower, I heard the word “but the cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things” came in and choked the word, and it yielded nothing.
Where was I when God was near? I was working, playing, partying, scheming, lazing, grumbling and raging, too caught up in the world and my own interior noise to pay attention. Only successive shocks and disruptions to this storm of busyness allowed grace to save me, to know this gift freely given by God for no act or merit of mine.
Lay aside scepticism and cynicism and spend more time alone in quiet surroundings. Let your heart be grateful for every blessing and your mind relax from thinking and worrying. Then awareness of God’s nearness becomes easier as your senses open to the light:
~ Feel the touch of God on your cheek or arm or the back of your hand.
~ Hear the quiet voice of God at your ear.
~ Breathe in the sudden scent of invisible flowers.
~ See the small gift he has laid before you on your path.
~ Taste a sweetness on your lips.
These are only some of the most basic of all the ways God has to make himself known to us. Don’t expect everything all at once. Perhaps you are more likely to know him through touch or voice. Be open to him, for one nearness leads to another. Grace comes upon grace until your desire is more and more for God, for good.
What exactly is sin that it is spoken of in company with grace? Sin isn’t a popular topic with most people. They don’t like to think of themselves as sinful. They’re just human, after all. But unfortunately, sin is very much a part of everybody’s life, so let’s take a closer look at it. According to a local saint in my church, the late Father Robert Crouse:
Sin is a failure of love, whether as a perversion of self-love (as in pride, envy, wrath), a deficiency of love (as in sloth), or an inappropriate excess of love (as in avarice, gluttony, lust). Thus, sin is always a matter of will, never of circumstance or accident, and (whether we think of original sin or actual sins) it is always a matter of falling short of our high calling. The grace of God’s forgiveness, freely offered in Jesus Christ, both enlightens our minds to discern the good and liberates our wills to pursue it. That is, God’s grace both strengthens and reorders our loves. Fr. Robert Crouse, Turning to God
The most complete failure of love is hatred. It turns people into objects, beauty into ugliness, truth into lies, good into evil. In its attempt to destroy the objects of its hatred, it causes chaos and terrible injury, and ultimately destroys absolutely the one who hates. Even more at risk of destruction are those who knowingly promote or enable hatred to flourish.
Yet so great is God’s love that even those who will and promote and enable hatred are not immune to his grace, except by choice. This is why you and I are enjoined by Jesus himself to love our enemies and to pray for them. Ultimately, such prayer is the most powerful activism available to a Christian. It is hope incarnate that truth and good will prevail and the energy empowering every temporal work for peace and justice.
Further reading:
McWilliam, Joanne and Dunn, Greig, eds. Turning to God: Anglicans Talk about Sin, Grace, and the Christian Life (Wrestling with God, Book 2). Toronto: ABC Publishing; 2002. (This series was the result of work by The Primate’s Theological Commission, Anglican Church of Canada.)