God's first and only instinct is to love us

Modern Pieta by American Conrad Albrizio, who died in 1973

God’s first and only instinct is to love us and for us to experience that love. We have been made by Him and for Him. He made us to enjoy His love and His life for ever.

What about sin? Judgment does not come from God but rather from our own choice. It is not God who dumps us; it is we who abandon Him.

It is not God’s judgment that we are to fear. Rather it is our own choices because they can bring us closer to Him or push us away from Him. It is our own choice to live in integrity and wholeness or not.

But it is the living in a world of love that is most important. The Father gives us His Son (John 3:16) and the Son gives us the Spirit, allowing us to share in their community of love. We become a new creation so that we know the inner peace and radiant joy of the new life lived in the power and love of the risen Jesus. (Easter is still fresh in mind and heart, giving rise to this reflection.)

Iraneus in the second century left us with this insight: “The glory of God is the human being fully alive”. The excitement of looking to serve God, to enter into a personal relationship with the God who somehow created everything that is essential in our lives, allows us to avoid being dazzled by the world’s accomplishments, instead seeing that there are more important elements of the human experience.

Everything in life falls into harmonious place when we align our lives to the God-given order, which allows us to work with grace in creating a better version of ourselves. Paul saw that in part the process entailed this: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things” (Letter to the Philippians 4:8).

Truth. “Whatever is true” — in the absolute sense — is the key! “The truth will make you free” (John 8:31), and that is the whole point of what has been passed down to us by those who have had to withstand times of martyrdom and persecution to do so: “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11). The joy comes through being on the right path — “I am the Way” — for human thriving.

Peace can be found in this life, even when difficulties threaten to overwhelm us. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid” (John 14:27).

A peaceful heart and mind germinate from two gifts of God: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), and “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).

When we believe deeply that God is God, and I’m not, we can willingly enter into the relationship that God offers us with tremendous love and supreme mercy.

See also 

Jesus is God intent on sharing love in word and action

Jesus had a night-time dialogue with the Pharisee Nicodemus (John 3).  Nicodemus, while accepting in principle what Jesus has said about being born again in the Spirit, now wants to know how it can be brought about.

Jesus accuses Nicodemus and his fellow leaders of a lack of spiritual insight and a refusal to accept his testimony as coming directly from God.  “If you do not believe when I tell you about earthly things, how are you to believe when I tell you about those of heaven?”

Jesus does not speak simply on his own initiative.  He speaks of what he shares with the Father.  It is the Father’s words and teaching that he passes on to us – he is the Word of God.  His is not just a speaking Word; it brings all things from nothing, calls the dead to life, hands on the Spirit, the source of unending life, and makes us all children of God.  To experience all this we need to have faith in Jesus as truly the Word of God and to live our lives in love.

But the Word is not always easy to understand and it requires, above all, an openness to be received.  It is this openness that Jesus is challenging Nicodemus to have.  People respond to the Word in so many ways.  Some believe fully, others go away disappointed in spite of the many signs.  One is reminded of the parable of the sower (Mt 13:1-23).  To which ground-group do I belong?

And, up to now, only the Son has been “in heaven”, that is, with God.  (“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…”).  It is from there that he has come and “pitched his tent among us”.  He is in a position, therefore, to speak about the “things of heaven”, that is, to speak of everything that pertains to and comes from God.

The only solution is to put all our focus on Jesus.  “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that all who believe may have eternal life in him.”  This is a reminder of the incident in the book of Numbers where, as a punishment for their sins, the Israelites were attacked by serpents.  God told Moses to erect a bronze serpent on a pole and all who looked at the serpent were saved.

Jesus, in a much greater way, will also be “lifted up” both on the cross and into the glory of his Father through the Resurrection and Ascension.  And he will be a source of life to all who commit themselves totally to him.

To what extent are we “looking at” Jesus? Is he the centre of our attention in all that we do and say?

Let our constant prayer be: “Lord, grant that all my thoughts, words and actions be directed solely to your love and service this and every day.”

Reflection for Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter

By Fr Frank Doyle SJ, Living Space: https://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/e1023g/

Together in reshaping society after virus meltdown

 Poverty soars as virus exposes our collective frailty. Photo source: World Bank

The coronavirus pandemic has the potential to lead to an increase in inequality in almost every country at once, the first time this has happened since records began. The virus has exposed, fed off and increased existing inequalities of wealth, gender and race. Over two million people have died, and hundreds of millions of people are being forced into poverty while many of the richest – individuals and corporations – are thriving. Billionaire fortunes returned to their pre-pandemic highs in just nine months, while recovery for the world’s poorest people could take over a decade. The crisis has exposed our collective frailty and the inability of our deeply unequal economy to work for all. Yet it has also shown us the vital importance of government action to protect our health and livelihoods. Trans-formative policies that seemed unthinkable before the crisis have suddenly been shown to be possible. There can be no return to where we were before. Instead, citizens and governments must act on the urgency to create a more equal and sustainable world.                                                                – Oxfam Briefing Paper, January 2021

Christian leaders have been making the same point as this British aid organization. The overall message is that the global human society cannot just go back to the way things were before the COVID-19 virus exploded in our midst. These leaders are putting the world’s elite on the spot, just as much as they are challenging ordinary people to grasp the opportunity to push for an end to unjust systems in all societies, and especially accept changes that ensure protection of the poor, and of the planet as well.

As recently as last Sunday, Pope Francis had this message for all people of good will:

Now, while we are looking forward to a slow and arduous recovery from the pandemic, there is a danger that we will forget those who are left behind. The risk is that we may then be struck by an even worse virus, that of selfish indifference. A virus spread by the thought that life is better if it is better for me, and that everything will be fine if it is fine for me. It begins there and ends up selecting one person over another, discarding the poor, and sacrificing those left behind on the altar of progress.

The present pandemic, however, reminds us that there are no differences or borders between those who suffer. We are all frail, all equal, all precious. May we be profoundly shaken by what is happening all around us: the time has come to eliminate inequalities, to heal the injustice that is undermining the health of the entire human family! Let us learn from the early Christian community described in the Acts of the Apostles. It received mercy and lived with mercy: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44-45). This is not some ideology: it is Christianity.

With that last sentence Francis is saying it is not communism to share, that solidarity is at the heart of Christian life and our relationship is as a family facing God, who we call “our Father” for good reason. Francis dwells on this point:

[…] a small part of the human family has moved ahead, while the majority has remained behind. Each of us could say: “These are complex problems, it is not my job to take care of the needy, others have to be concerned with it!”.

[…] To everyone: let us not think only of our interests, our vested interests. Let us welcome this time of trial as an opportunity to prepare for our collective future. Because without an all-embracing vision, there will be no future for anyone.

His final plea is this: “Let us show mercy to those who are most vulnerable; for only in this way will we build a new world.”

Such strong words about the need to act now to create a truly human society, to have that “new world” arise from a global community that was already ill even before the virus overwhelmed the lives of so many families, are no flash in the pan for Francis. He has produced two encyclicals (letters) that plead for attention to the global environment and the economic systems that impact it – 2015’s Laudato Si’ (Praise…); and 2020’s Fratelli tutti (subtitled "on fraternity and social friendship").

Again recently, Pope Francis used his traditional Easter Urbi et Orbi (City and World) message to declare his solidarity for those who are the least in society, urging practical steps to bring the multitudes – including many in the middle class in developed countries – back from the brink of enslavement within a revived “normal”:

The Easter message [Jesus’ death but also resurrection] does not offer us a mirage or reveal a magic formula. It does not point to an escape from the difficult situation we are experiencing. The pandemic is still spreading, while the social and economic crisis remains severe, especially for the poor.

The crucified and risen Lord is comfort for those who have lost their jobs or experience serious economic difficulties and lack adequate social protection. May he inspire public authorities to act so that everyone, especially families in greatest need, will be offered the assistance needed for a decent standard of living. Sadly, the pandemic has dramatically increased the number of the poor and the despair of thousands of people.

                                                                                     Photo source: World Bank

Practical steps that the pope might have in mind are offered in a letter that the Vatican presented to the spring meeting of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund, held online last week.

The pope told the members and advisers of these powerful groups:

It is my hope that your discussions will contribute to a model of “recovery” capable of generating new, more inclusive and sustainable solutions to support the real economy, assisting individuals and communities to achieve their deepest aspirations and the universal common good.

The notion of recovery cannot be content to a return to an unequal and unsustainable model of economic and social life, where a tiny minority of the world’s population owns half of its wealth.

For all our deeply-held convictions that all men and women are created equal, many of our brothers and sisters in the human family, especially those at the margins of society, are effectively excluded from the financial world.  The pandemic, however, has reminded us once again that no one is saved alone.  If we are to come out of this situation as a better, more humane and solidary world, new and creative forms of social, political and economic participation must be devised, sensitive to the voice of the poor and committed to including them in the building of our common future (cf. Fratelli Tutti, 169).

As experts in finance and economics, you know well that trust, born of the interconnectedness between people, is the cornerstone of all relationships, including financial relationships.  Those relationships can only be built up through the development of a “culture of encounter” in which every voice can be heard and all can thrive, finding points of contact, building bridges, and envisioning long-term inclusive projects (cf. ibid., 216).

A spirit of global solidarity also demands at the least a significant reduction in the debt burden of the poorest nations, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic.  Relieving the burden of debt of so many countries and communities today, is a profoundly human gesture that can help people to develop, to have access to vaccines, health, education and jobs.

The pope also raised the matter of “the ‘ecological debt’ that exists especially between the global north and south”, where, having despoiled their own lands, rich nations suck resources from the developing nations, often with catastrophic consequences for the local people. In effect, he says: “Experts, use your brains to work out ways to right this injustice”. He suggests that it was up to developed nations to pay this debt:

…not only by significantly limiting their consumption of non-renewable energy or by assisting poorer countries to enact policies and programmes of sustainable development, but also by covering the costs of the innovation required for that purpose.

The importance of focusing on achieving the common good gets much of the pope’s attention:

Central to a just and integrated development is a profound appreciation of the essential objective and end of all economic life, namely the universal common good.  It follows that public money may never be disjoined from the public good, and financial markets should be underpinned by laws and regulations aimed at ensuring that they truly work for the common good.

 A commitment to economic, financial and social solidarity thus entails much more than engaging in sporadic acts of generosity.  “It means thinking and acting in terms of community.  It means that the lives of all are prior to the appropriation of goods by a few.  It also means combatting the structural causes of poverty, inequality, the lack of work, land and housing, the denial of social and labour rights… Solidarity, understood in its most profound meaning, is a way of making history” (Fratelli Tutti, 116).

Also, in light of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent concern that the likes of banks and hedge funds are gambling with other people’s money, it is not surprising that Francis highlights the need for thorough reform in these fields:

It is time to acknowledge that markets – particularly the financial ones – do not govern themselves. Markets need to be underpinned by laws and regulations that ensure they work for the common good, guaranteeing that finance – rather than being merely speculative or self-financing – works for the societal goals so much needed during the present global healthcare emergency.

Finally, Pope Francis expresses a heartfelt wish:

It is my hope that in these days your formal deliberations and your personal encounters will bear much fruit for the discernment of wise solutions for a more inclusive and sustainable future.  [This is] a future where finance is at the service of the common good, where the vulnerable and the marginalized are placed at the centre, and where the earth, our common home, is well cared for.

In future posts, attention will be given to what other religious leaders are considering as crucial as countries undertake the challenge of reshaping their societies so that what was harmful though “normal” – such as gross inequality – no longer takes pride of place, instead the starting point being allocated to the common good. 

Did we "unlearn" how to create enchantment in life?

Has something profound been lost in the society we have let develop? Watch and listen to this animated short film created by award-winning filmmaker Emily Downe.

 

Social media link to girls' transgender rate needs study

           From the video What do DETRANSITIONED WOMEN think of SOCIAL MEDIA? on the              YouTube channel Pique Resilience Project

The impact of social media on all our lives is just beginning to be realised – as with the scrutiny the tech giants are facing from lawmakers in the United States and Europe. But of concern, too, is whether girls  in particular are being harmed by social media through bearing additional forms of social pressure, forms that are much stronger than that which young people have typically had to deal with.

A new first-person account of how a troubled British teenager was handled by the National Health Service highlights some startling UK statistics. Kiera Bell, who went through a transitioning programme from girl to boy, writes:

Notably, a growing wave of girls has been seeking treatment for gender dysphoria. In 2009-10, 77 children were referred to the [National Health Service’s] Gender Identity Development Service, 52% of whom were boys. That ratio started to reverse a few years later as the overall number of referrals soared. In England in 2018-19, 624 boys were referred and 1,740 girls, or 74% of the total. Over half of referrals were for those aged 14 or under; some were as young as 3 years old. The court noted the practitioners at the Tavistock did not put forward “any clinical explanation” for the dramatic rise in girls…

Kiera Bell after her court victory

The reference to the Tavistock centre needs explanation. Bell, who is from a broken family, came to believe she would be happier as a boy. She was referred to the Tavistock clinic. The clinic’s practitioners acceded to her demands with little counselling, a matter that led her to take it to court for a judicial review of her treatment while a teenager, especially relating to her ability to give informed consent over the serious actions taken that would affect her later life. All the way through she had wanted to transition, even having a double mastectomy as a 20-year-old.

However, there came a point where she knew that she had made a big mistake: “As I matured, I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause.”

Bell, who has subsequently detransitioned, won her case against the clinic, with the judges ruling that youths under treatment at the centre could not meaningfully consent to the medical interventions recommended.

Last year, another set of figures were published in the United States by Abigail Shrier, who is concerned about the impact of social pressure on girls with regards their self-esteem. She writes:

In America and across the Western world, adolescents were reporting a sudden spike in gender dysphoria—the medical condition associated with the social designation “transgender.” Between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the United States quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for—as we have seen—70 percent of all gender surgeries. In 2018, the UK reported a 4,400 percent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments. In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria—from predominately preschool-aged boys to predominately adolescent girls.

Clusters of cases among friends, and the existence of trendy sites on Tumblr and Reddit, point to the need of all platforms to send a message about social media literacy to young people as Tumblr did in 2012 when there was a flareup of self-harm linked to material in posts it was hosting. That message is at “A New Policy Against Self-Harm Blogs”,  here and here .

Researchers are exploring the role of “social contagion” among young people. Findings will be of great value to parents who suffer when surprised by statements about sexuality arising from a child “out of the blue”. 

This is how Dr Lisa Littman, the Brown University researcher who introduced to this field of study the term “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”, describes how her work encapsulating social media is helping understand the unique and rapid phenomenon that we see in the transgender "explosion", in which greater social acceptance can only be just part of the underlying set of causes. Dr Littman said in an interview:

This research explores, through the reports of parents, a phenomenon whereby teens and young adults who did not exhibit childhood signs of gender issues appeared to suddenly identify as transgender. This new identification seemed to occur in the context of either belonging to a group of friends [in which] multiple—or even all—members became transgender-identified around the same time, or through immersion in social media, or both. The findings of the research support the hypotheses that what I have described could represent a new type of gender dysphoria (referred to as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria; that, for some teens and young adults, their gender dysphoria might represent a maladaptive coping mechanism; and that peer and social influences might contribute to the development of gender dysphoria. More research will need to be done to confirm or refute these hypotheses.

Is God merely a person’s subjective projection?

Good and evil angels struggling for possession of a child - William Blake 

How do you respond to the skeptic who says that God is merely a subjective projection? was a question asked of professor Tanya Luhrmann of Stanford University, where she teaches anthropology and psychology, when she took part in a video discussion on the publication last year of her book How God Becomes Real.

She started her answer by affirming that her research did not aim to prove the existence of God, but it “reveals how people learn to experience [their] God more vividly”. In this she seemed at pains to espouse an impartial or objective viewpoint:

“Whatever social science can say about [God] is perfectly compatible with the view that God is nothing more than the way that humans imagine this invisible being.

“But it is not incompatible with the question whether an external presence can be made more vividly present in an ordinary human’s life.”

Her research goal was to “get to the core of this human experience of interacting with invisible others”.

 As my previous post illustrates, Luhrmann found that people used their imagination extensively to “interact with invisible others”.  She states that this might be frowned upon in the rationalistic, materialistic West, but that that experience is more natural  where our "inner and outer senses" have not been corrupted (my word) by the governing mentality of “seeing is believing”.

In preparation for your look at Luhrmann’s ideas in the following post I provide here two samples relating how Christians have traditionally used their imaginations to pray.  The texts refer to the insights of Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Jesuit order of priests and brothers in 1534.

The first description of the Ignatian style of prayer comes from Grace Institute of Luther College, Iowa:  

Ignatian Contemplation is prayer with Scripture. It is meeting God through story. The prayer develops as you “live into” a Scripture story with all your senses and imagination. You become a participant in the story, and you continue in the story in your heart, mind, imagination, spirit and body after the reading ends. You let the Spirit guide the prayer - you don’t force anything to happen - you let it happen to you, within you, around you. You may pray with the same story for many days in a row before you feel the prayer is complete, that God has spoken to you, that you have heard God, and worked through what it means for you. It is a wonderful, rich experience.

Ignatian Contemplation is a prayer form developed by Ignatius of Loyola in the 1500s to help people come to know Jesus through imaginative interaction with Scripture. Through the story God meets and interacts with each listener personally and differently. That interaction of our spirit with God is prayer. The difficult part of the process is relaxing into it and letting God be in control, rather than trying to force your response or reaction.

Second, the Ignatian Spirituality website has this description of how to pray using the imagination:

Put yourself in a Gospel story.

Just choose which character you’re going to be, and walk right into the scene where Jesus heals someone, delivers a teaching, or feeds thousands. You can be a main character in the story, or you can be a bystander or friend that you simply invent for this prayer. Don’t get distracted by trying to be historically accurate—this is not about you interpreting Scripture in a scholarly way. The point is to encounter Jesus. Ask the Holy Spirit to guide this very spiritual function, the human imagination, to where you need to go.

Pray as though you are having a conversation across the dinner table or in your living room.

In the Spiritual Exercises, this is called a colloquy, but it’s just conversational prayer. You speak to Jesus as you would a close friend. You speak to Mary, his mother, or to God the Father/Creator, or to the Holy Spirit who is comforter, or to one of the saints, who can be part of this conversation with the Divine. Sometimes, when we pray the way we talk, it can enable us to be more honest. Probably the only danger is that we become flippant or casual, but this isn’t much of a temptation when we remember who it is we’re talking to.

Finally, as a general matter of interest, here is a snippet of information about Ignatius of Loyola from History.com:

The Jesuit movement was founded by Ignatius de Loyola, a Spanish soldier turned priest, in August 1534, with 6 companions. The Jesuits have 16,000 priests and brothers and in training.

Under Ignatius’ charismatic leadership, the Society of Jesus grew quickly. Jesuit missionaries played a leading role in the Counter-Reformation and won back many of the European faithful who had been lost to Protestantism. In Ignatius’ lifetime, Jesuits were also dispatched to India, Brazil, the Congo region, and Ethiopia.

Education was of utmost importance to the Jesuits, and this has been especially true in the United States with several universities established. When Ignatius de Loyola died in July 1556, there were more than 1,000 Jesuit priests.

Another view of the man, who might be regarded as an unlikely promoter of imaginative prayer: 

St. Ignatius of Loyola’s passion to become a dashing courtier, a courageous and celebrated soldier, and an advisor to royalty became, under the influence of grace, a passion to serve Christ—all the way, holding nothing back.

He effected this influence first through the establishment of the Jesuit order, which even in Ignatius’ lifetime had become a powerful force in Europe and beyond and which today spans the globe; and second, through his masterpiece the Spiritual Exercises, which for the past five centuries has taught people how to commune with God and to find true freedom. (Word on Fire.org)

Of course, the use of art and the outpouring of creativity have been notable features of religion throughout history, as part of the "human experience of interacting with invisible others". This continues with the practice of sharing uplifting photo and quote cards on Facebook and the like. 

William Blake used the image of a tiger to explore the power of God:

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
To see the world in a grain of sand,
And to see heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hands,
And eternity in an hour.
If the doors of perception were cleansed
Everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

LitCharts has this to say about the poem and introduces the artist Blake:

The Tyger is a poem by visionary English poet William Blake, and is often said to be the most widely anthologized poem in the English language. ... At the same time, however, the poem is an expression of marvel and wonder at the tiger and its fearsome power, and by extension the power of both nature and God.

Why don’t you talk to God in your daily life?

“What I want to talk about this morning is a remarkable phenomenon: that people not only talk to God but they learn to experience God is talking back.”

With those words Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann* opened a TEDx account of her research on people’s relationship with God, "which led to astonishing discoveries about those who say they hear God speak to them, literally". Her talk followed the 2012 publication of When God Speaks Back, in which she explored “how rational, sensible people of faith experience the presence of an invisible being and sustain that belief in an environment of skepticism”.

Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others was published by Princeton University Press last year.

This blog has been tracking the divergence of stances with regards belief in God, or at least, the acceptance of the transcendental element of human life, between those who are open to the spiritual and those who are closed to that experience. Therefore, Luhrmann’s research is of importance because it illustrates how each person can train themselves, in the way that anyone does to develop a skill, to move beyond the physical aspect of our human nature to experience "objects without material presence", such as the non-physical reality of prayer and a relationship with God.

Luhrmann’s findings are very pertinent to our understanding of our nature so, in order to give the full view of her conclusions, what follows is the transcription of her talk.  Notice her emphasis on the use of the imagination. This capacity, often mocked by those who reduce the human person to solely the physical, is shown to be central to a spiritual life. Luhrmann states that “… many Americans are involved in […]  a renewalist spirituality, a kind of spirituality in which they want to experience God intimately, personally and interactively; they want to reach out and touch the Divine here on earth”. She continues:

I am an anthropologist. My job is to immerse myself in the world that I've come to study and to keep observing so that to some degree, I get a sense of what it would take to become a native in that world.

Unlike Margret Mead and Gregory Bateson, I did this work in America. I spent two years in the "renewalist" church in Chicago and another two years in one in the Bay Area. I went to Sunday morning services. I was a member of house groups. I was in a prayer circle. I hung out with people. I prayed with people. I really wanted to know how their God became real to them.

So let me begin by asking, Who is God in a church like this? Well, God is God, God is big, God is mighty and holy and beyond, but God is also a person among people. The pastors in this kind of church want you to experience God the way the early disciples experienced Jesus. They walked with Jesus. They ate with Jesus. They talked with Jesus. He was their friend. And these pastors will tell you that you should put out a cup of coffee for God, you should have a beer with God, go for a walk with God, hang out, do the kind of thing with God that you'd get to not do with anyone who you wanted to know as a person.

And he cares about all the stuff in your life, the little stuff: where you want to go in your summer vacation, what shirt you want to wear tomorrow morning. You can talk to him about that.

So I wanted to know how people learned to interact with God, how they felt that God was speaking back. And I knew that they learned because newcomers would come to these churches, and they would say things like "God doesn't talk to me," and then six to nine months later, they would say, "I recognize God's voice the way I recognize my mom's voice on the phone."

What I saw the church teach was that you should think about your mind not as a fortress full of your own self-generated thoughts and feelings and images, but you should think of your mind as a place where you were going to meet God, and that some of those thoughts that you might have thought of as yours, they were really God's thoughts being given to you, and your job was to figure out who was God.

And in fact, people did talk in ways that suggested that they would have - as if they had experiences that weren't their own.

A woman said to me, "As I've started to pray in this church, it feels like my mind is a screen that images are projected on. Somebody else is controlling that clicker."

And of course, not all thoughts were thought to be good candidates for the kinds of things God would say. People would look for thoughts that stood out, that were more spontaneous than other thoughts, thoughts that were louder, that captured your attention.

One woman explaining to me how she learned to discern God speaking said that people were praying over her one day, and the phrase "Go to Kansas" flashed into her mind. So her parents live in Kansas. She was kind of idly thinking about visiting them, but when this thought just captured her attention, it made her say, "You know, makes me want to say, 'Where did that come from?'"

So you could imagine there would be risks from this style of discerning God's voice. I did think people were reasonably thoughtful about the process. I also thought that the church took care to minimize those risks.

One morning, the pastor said in church, "You know, if you think God is telling you to relax and calm down - totally fine, take it as God. If you think that God is telling you to quit your job, pack your bags and move to Los Angeles, I want you to be praying with every member of your house group, I want you to be praying with your prayer circle, I want you to be praying with me, so that together, this community can help you to discern whether that's actually God or just some of your own stuff that's getting in the way of your relationship."

So what are people doing when they're praying like this? They're using their imagination to do something that they do not regard as imaginary. If you're going to represent God, if you're going to think about God, you've got to use imagination because God is invisible.

It's a very 21st-century thing to draw the inference that if you're using your imagination, you are doing something false. It turns out that using the inner senses, using the imagination has been part of the tradition of Christian spirituality […] The medieval monastics cultivated their inner senses to make God more alive and present to them. That's what these Christians are doing. They are not only talking to God in their mind - using their mind's ear to talk and then to listen to something that God might say - they are imagining that they are sitting on God's lap while they're doing that, or they're on a park bench and they're trying to feel God's arm around their shoulders, or they're in the throne room and their cheek feels warm because of the heat of the blazing light from the throne, or they're lighting a candle to God in their mind and they're trying to smell the scent of the smoke as it wafts up to heaven.

My work demonstrates that this cultivation of the inner senses, it's a skill. You get better at it over time, and it changes you. The people who do this, they say that their mental imagery gets sharper, they say that things they have to imagine become more real to them, and they are more likely to report that God's voice would sort of pop out into the world and they'll hear it with their ears.

So just to give you a sense of the way people talk about their own change: This is a woman who said to me that as she began to pray, her images would get so vivid, "Sometimes," she said, "it's almost like a PowerPoint presentation." And then she spontaneously gave this example of God's voice popping out into the world so she could hear it with her ears.

So one morning, she had wonderful devotions, she felt great about her prayer time with God, she came out on to the street - it was Chicago, it was freezing - she was very grateful that God brought the bus along really quickly, she gets onto the bus, she's reading a book, she's getting all caught up in the book, and she is missing her stop to get off the bus.

And God says to her in a way she can hear with her ears, "Get off the bus!" So she stops the bus driver, she gets off, and she feels wonderful all day that God has been so intimately involved with her as to enable her to make her stop.

What do we make of those kinds of experiences? It turns out that these funny voices and visions, they are less unusual than you'd imagine.

Depending on the way that you ask the questions, somewhere between 10% of the general population and 70% of the general population will say they've had one of these odd experiences, like maybe even drifting off to sleep and you hear your mom calling your name, or maybe you walk into the living room and you look at the cat, the cat's on the couch, you look again, you realize the cat was never there.

These are not crazy; they have a different structure and pattern than the kinds of experiences people have when, for example, they meet the criteria for schizophrenia. They tend to be rare, and many people have them. When you ask people whether they've ever had such an experience, they'll remember one, maybe two, maybe a handful of these experiences.

They're really brief. You see the wingtip of an angel and then it's gone. You hear a voice, four to six words, and then it stops.

And they are positive. I remember a woman who was in distress, and she was driving down the street, and she really heard God speak out of the seat behind her in the car and say, "I will always be with you."

It was a little freaky. She pulled over to the side of the road. But then she wept with joy because, I mean, why would you not?

My work demonstrates that people respond to training. The more people practice inner sense cultivation, the more likely it is that they'll say that they've had one or more of these experiences, and the more likely they are to say that the experience was powerful.

While doing this work, I ran an experiment. I got a hundred people into my office. We randomize them into lectures on the Gospels or this inner-sense-rich prayer. And the rule was 30 minutes a day, six days a week, for four weeks.

We brought them back; we gave them a bunch of computers experiments and standardized questionnaires.

And turned out it was the folks in the prayer condition who, on average, reported sharper mental images - they reported more sense of God's presence, and they said that God was more present as a person to them, and they were more likely to say that they had unusual spiritual experiences - among them these voices and visions.

We were also able to demonstrate that some people are better at this kind of stuff, independent of the amount of time they spend praying.

We give people a standardized questionnaire that asks them, in effect, whether they feel comfortable being absorbed in their imagination. Turns out that the more items you say true to on that scale, the more likely you are to say that you experience God as a person, the more likely you are to say that you have a back-and-forth relationship to God, the more likely you are to say that you've had one or more of these odd voices and visions.

So what do we learn from this? Well, the skeptic could say that we learned that, you know, Christians are just making it up out of their imagination, and that's what I have always thought - end of story.

I actually don't think that we learned anything about the real nature of God from these observations. I don't think that social science can answer that question.

There's also a Christian way to ask this question, which is, If God is always speaking, how come not everybody hears? I think what we learn is that change is real, that as people enter churches like these and they begin to pay attention to their mind in new ways, they begin to pay attention to their inner senses, they really do have different experiences that they associate with the presence of God.

I came to think of churches as offering a social invitation to pay attention in particular ways, and I thought of individuals as having a psychological response to the way that they trained that attention.

I also think that we learned that belief is not a thing. Sometimes if you are a secular person and you kind of look at somebody who is a believer, it is tempting to think that they have this extra thing in their life -it's like they've got a piece of furniture in their house that you don't have.

I think these observations suggest that in many ways, the experience of God is made slowly, through the way that you pay attention to your world, to the way that you pay attention to your mind, to your history of hearing God and talking with God and feeling more confident that God is there.

I think these practices make God more real to people, and that has a palpable effect on their life. I also think this helps to explain why these kinds of practices are so much more appealing in this kind of society.

Since the 1960s, there is Christian mainstream liberal churches -,their membership has been plummeting. Churches like these, they've exploded; the congregations are huge. I think it's because of these kinds of practices. I think that they make God more relevant.

You know, you're trying to hear God speak - God shifts from a 45-minute engagement on Sunday morning to something you're doing throughout the week.

These practices make God more real to people, they make God more alive. And I think these churches, by putting the emphasis on these practices, emphasize the experience of God and emphasize God's mystery.

That helps somebody to hang on to a sense of God in what they perceive to be a skeptical, secular society.

Finally, I think we learned something about our minds. I think that we learned that the way we pay attention to our minds changes our mental experience. It's so tempting to think that the inner landscape of your experience is somehow set as the way that it is. I think that we learned from this that whether or not you are a religious person, whether or not you believe in God, you are making choices in the way that you use your imagination and your inner senses, and the choices you make will change you.

*Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department.  She also teaches psychology, with her work focusing on the way that objects without material presence come to seem real to people, and the way that ideas about the mind affect mental experience. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. When God Talks Back (2012, Knopf) was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. She has written for the New York Times and her work has been featured in the New Yorker and other magazines.

See a discussion of How God Becomes Real here

See also this philosophical discussion of what is termed "religious epistemology"