Many of us have been brought up to see God as one who chooses us, or who calls us, a demanding God who selects us for some purpose. We are not sure what his plan for us is. We worry about our response. We worry about becoming indifferent. We worry about thwarting his will for us. But always we feel there is an insistent call: to improve our lives, to change our ways, to be of more service to others.

What torment this can lead to! Some people are scared of coming close to God in case he asks for more, demands more, or demands more than we are prepared to give.

If this is our notion of God we can become discouraged in prayer. We may feel we are failing to pray properly. We blame ourselves. We feel we are not making enough effort, that we are not concentrating, or that our faith is not strong enough. Because we feel that God is calling us to put our best efforts into pleasing him we try to make a greater effort. If we fail again, we lose heart. And then we are in a vicious circle.

The popular idea of a ‘choosing’ God, the theologian Urs von Balthasar tells us, is at odds with the God he finds in the writings of Augustine. The God he meets there is before all else a God who draws us to himself to give rest to our restless hearts, the one who wishes to bring us into his peace.

Augustine’s God is simply the God who comes to us, indeed who has already come, to give rest to our troubled hearts and minds. God of course does choose people, does call people, but this is not where Augustine’s relationship with God begins. ‘You made us so that we long for you, and our heart is restless until it rests in you,’ Augustine writes in his Confessions (1.1).

‘God is delight,’ he declares, ‘and we rest in delight with him, called home from the noise that is around us to the joys that are silent. Why do we rush about to the top of heaven and the bottom of earth,’ he asks, ‘looking for him who is here at home with us, if only we could be at home with him?’

So prayer for Augustine was not an encounter with a choosing or judging or demanding God, a God up there, or out there. Prayer for him, first of all, was an invitation to rest in the God who dwells in our hearts.

Taking Augustine as one of our guides into deeper prayer changes our notion of God and can liberate us from the mistaken feeling that we are failing or not doing enough in our prayer life. It is not our own efforts that will lead us into prayer. We cease from effort and allow God to do all.

An extract from Finding Your Hidden Treasure

© 2010 Benignus O’Rourke OSA

Published by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd

© Photo: Ian Wilson OSA

Get the book: www.theaugustinians.org