Catholics recently made changes to the English wording of the Mass.  The priest says “The Lord be with you,” and where the congregation once responded with “And with you,” they now are supposed to say “And with your spirit.” I confess these changes don’t matter much to me.  Perhaps the change was necessary to redefine the relationship between priest and congregation, or because God might not hear these prayers if they were not said exactly right.

These invocational prayers, along with expressions like “God be with you till we meet again,” reflect a theological assumption that God is absent unless called.  God is elsewhere, doing important things with important people, and won’t pay attention to us insignificant folks unless we raise a ruckus.

Neither the form nor content of invocational prayer matters to me because of the Quaker doctrine of the Light Within.  We conceive of God as being always present, at the core of our being.

Not that we cannot be distant from God.  I am busy doing important things with important people, and have built barriers between my self and God.  When we speak of Quaker worship as “waiting”, it is not us who wait, but God who waits for the barriers to come down.

It is when I set aside important things, dissolve the barriers, and sink into the still depths of my soul, that I find God already there.  Only so can we discover our relationship to God, revealed in some unexpected way each time we invoke ourselves to be present. 

At least, this has been my experience.

            -Eric E. Sabelman

              1 January, 2012