How do you practice entering the presence of God?
A friend texted me yesterday,
I’m asking 10 men I respect and admire to tell me how they practice
entering into the presence of God and how they maintain a healthy fear (reverence and awe) of God. You’re one of the ten. So if you have a minute, let me know. I’m gonna compile the answers anonymously and make them available to all the guys I ask.
I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian tradition but spent the last three decades pursuing the mystical path of direct experience with God. I say this because my answer combines Christian language with the lessons gained from putting my childhood theories of encountering God to the test. We called such testing the Refiner’s Fire back in the day.
As a kid, I believed that the most spiritual adults were the ones who maintained a regular spiritual practice. In our house, that meant prayer and devotions. Each day, at a prescribed time, mom and dad sat with their bibles open and underlined verses in red or blue ink before closing in prayer.
Throughout the year, they punctuated these practices with periods of fasting and regular attendance at church. It was our way of following the admonition in the Book of Romans not to conform to the patterns of this world but instead to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.
In that same chapter, the Apostle Paul discusses renewing your mind. He lists the work required for righteousness, describing how love is a practice including acts of charity, non-violence, humility and peace. However, not everyone in our community who practiced spiritual disciplines yielded spiritual fruits, so full transformation must require more than thoughts and prayers.
The account of creation in Genesis holds no record of God including a building—like a temple—as a necessity for worship. Communication with God was initially direct, requiring no structures, priests or intermediaries. Only much later, after the fall from grace, did God provide the exact dimensions and proportions for a physical building to King David.
Blueprints used in the construction of Solomon’s temple were of the highest geometrical precision. Only the best quality materials and most skilled workers could participate in the construction. From the pillars to the veil leading into the Holy of Holies, each piece worked together to create a space worthy of God.
It appeared that while God doesn’t require a physical space to connect with humans (after all, Moses did meet God on a mountaintop and in a bush), we humans needed physical reminders of God’s ideals. The manner in which he suggested the construction and maintenance of the temple indicates how important caring for our material world is as the key to our ability to encounter God.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus takes this a step further, equating his body to a temple. It’s an analogy with an immense practical application when considering the path to spiritual growth and transformation. Any body/temple, built or expanded with shoddy materials or improperly maintained, will fall into ruin and struggle to experience God.
Who hasn’t gone through periods of indulgence, whether through food, alcohol or sex? How close did you feel to God in those moments? Or did you feel like an old transistor radio with bent antennas? The signal’s was still there, but it was not tuning in.
To paraphrase Paul, “Everything is allowed, but not everything is useful.” If Paul were alive today, he might say, “Sure, you can doom scroll while shotgunning a Monster Energy, but it won’t help your meditation practice.” So what preparations help us to enter the presence of God? To answer that, let’s look at what Jesus did before starting his own ministry.
The desert (or wilderness) holds symbolic significance in Christian mystical tradition as a place of purification and spiritual return. It is where Jesus spent 40 days fasting before beginning his spiritual ministry. It is where he was tempted by hasatan (the adversary) with the treasures of this world.
There are physical and symbolic ways to see the role of the desert in our lives. Master Eckhart, a 14th-century German theologian, used “the desert” metaphorically to describe the site of a soul’s return to God (who Eckhart saw as the basic “ground” of being). For Eckhart, our souls are connected to the same Ground as God. By letting go of things we own, ceasing to think about ourselves all the time, and halting self-serving actions, our soul returns to the proverbial desert, the ground inside of ourselves, which never ends.
Then, there is the Way of the Wilderness. Devout Israelites combined a lifestyle of holiness and separation out in the actual desert while following Adam and Eve’s Genesis diet of eating “seed-bearing” fruits and plants. While a literal slavery in Babylon (also a spiritual term used to represent material things in opposition to the desert), Daniel fasted, eating only vegetables and water rather than the king’s diet. He thrived as a result. Likewise, the desert-dwelling Essenes lived as strict, orthodox, kosher Jews who rose with the sun and practiced sexual abstinence and vegetarianism.
Jesus himself called for mercy rather than the killing of animals in his temple/body. His own brother, James the Just, who led the Jerusalem church following Jesus’s death, practiced vegetarianism and abstinence from alcohol. John the Baptist, Peter and Tatian (a pupil of Justin Martyr) all practiced strict diets and may have been vegetarians.
Taken together, this indicates that within Jesus’s family and his earliest followers existed a tradition of purifying your bodily temple by abstaining (or drastically reducing) intoxicants and meat and increasing your vegetable intake. By analogy, the foods of Babylon today would be associated with fast and other junk foods which pollute the body and our environment.
From a scientific perspective, researchers like Dr. Terry Wahls (The Wahls Protocol) and Dr. Stephen Grundy (The Longevity Paradox) have shown modern support for such ancient practices. “Eating the rainbow” of colorful vegetables packed full of micronutrients alongside healthy nuts and seeds, when combined with a reduction in meat intake (especially of dubious quality), increases longevity, promotes a healthy nervous system and can halt chronic autoimmune conditions.
Given that over 90 percent of meat and eggs in our country come from concentrated animal feeding operations where animals get little light, exercise and leafy green vegetables, I feel comfortable saying that Jesus and his followers would consider these types of meat defiled as those sacrificed in Herod’s temple. All things are on the table, but not all things are good.
Yet another aspect of The Way of the Wilderness is silence and meditation. “Be still, and know that I am God,” the psalmist exhorts us, but how do we learn to be still?
Our nervous system, including our brain, spinal cord and all the little nerves running off that main trunk, is the primary tool of consciousness that we use to experience our world. If our nervous system lacks polish, we will “see through a glass darkly.” But what if we could polish our awareness — tune our nervous system, so to speak? Would our experience of the presence of God change? Outside of the Genesis diet, what other polishing wheels exist to still our minds?
Humans are the only mammals in the animal kingdom capable of regulating their nervous system through breath. In his bestselling book Breath, James Nestor explains that our right & left nasal cavities work like an HVAC system to control temperature and blood pressure and feed the brain chemicals that alter mood, emotion & sleep states.
By willing ourselves to breathe slowly and deeply, we open communication along the vagal network, which relaxes us into a parasympathetic state. So, regulated breathing calms our nervous system and helps us be still (the path to knowledge of God according to Psalms).
One of the benefits of starting with a protocol like Dr. Wahls’ or Grundy’s is that they lay the groundwork for tools like breathing to work. You can tell your body as much as you want to relax, but if the necessary micronutrients don’t exist, the signals you send to your body can get muted. Anyone in a chronic state of stress and physical exhaustion will struggle to be still and know God.
Once the Way of the Wilderness diet begins to heal our nervous system and proper breathing regulates our consciousness, we are no longer a drunk rider on a blind horse. We’ve grasped the proverbial reigns and are in command of our nervous system. We can now use this newfound freedom to fine-tune our awareness of God, find our spiritual path and return our soul to its proper state—the heart.
Many people feel like who they are is a small person living inside their heads, controlling their bodies from just behind their eyes. They struggle with the mind’s unwanted thoughts and have trouble sleeping. They question the meaning of life and believe in God but silently question because they’ve never felt a personal connection.
The ancient Egyptians cared little for the brain and its machinations. So much so that they discarded it altogether during mummification. But the heart? That was prized. They believed our choices weigh heavy on our hearts until it was judged on a scale against the weight of a feather in the afterlife.
No preacher ever said that we need to accept Jesus into our brains. Our brains (minds) are supposed to be renewed as a byproduct of the presence of Jesus in our hearts which makes sense. Rarely do people change through logical arguments, but how often has love or deep forgiveness charted a new path?
Brain change is something we are supposed to let happen (“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”). And how do we let that happen? Take up the cross daily and do selfless acts. Paul says Jesus emptied himself and became like a slave. Master Eckhart said it this way,
“To be full of things is to be empty of God; to be empty of things is to be full of God.”
Another way of saying “to be empty of things” is to let go. Let go of thoughts that enter your brain. Witness them without hitching your wagon to them. Just let them rise and fall like waves on the ocean. By witnessing without attachment, we shift our identity from our thoughts, possessions and body to our awareness.
Exercise: Place your finger on your heart. Notice how your awareness moves from the mind to the body (specifically your heart). Shifting awareness from our heads to our hearts moves us from thinking to feeling. It spurs empathy and action—charity, non-violence, humility and peace.
Before our brains can evaluate someone’s beliefs, appearances or ethnic group, our heart has already yelled, “Let’s goooo!” and has run headlong into loving our fellow traveler. Our brain is a tool of separation, while our heart brings us together.
Our hearts connect out of empathy to the souls inside all people. That soul stuff is the “divine spark” Quakers speak of. By changing our seat of awareness from our heads to our hearts, we see the world as God sees it. This is why scriptures tell us that [most] men [stuck living in their heads] look on outward appearances, but God sees [and connects through] the heart. Scriptures say, “God so loved,” not “God sat down and had a nice long think about it and then decided.”
The path of living from the heart requires healing. We have to learn to feel again. For many of us, (myself included) feeling deeply hurt too much. Abuse, neglect, abandonment or witnessing atrocities were too much for our hearts to handle. We escaped to our heads where we could deal with life as ideas. Ideas we could control. Ideas didn’t hurt as much. We learned to detach and dissociate.
Changes we make to our diet and breathing are WD-40 to loosen the rust in our hearts. Therapy (read about my experience with EMDR) and training our awareness to pay attention to where we store emotion in our body when certain thoughts arise and then letting it go are all part of shifting into heart consciousness.
Only when we gain control and perspective on our thoughts, shift to heart consciousness and identify as our soul can we fulfill the greatest commandment of Jesus, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.”
But what of my friend’s final question, “How do you maintain a healthy awe and fear?”
Let’s start with the fear. Someone once told me that the opposite of fear is knowledge and understanding. As I’ve encountered God through the practices listed above, my fear diminished, yet my awe increased. What’s replaced the fear is a deep sense that underlying everything in the universe is a profound sense of love.
For me, awe and wonder are connected. I am filled with wonder whenever my awareness grows. This includes watching Stephen Hawking describe black holes, learning the facets of a human eyeball or witnessing the ever-increasing rate of the novelty of our modern times.
When I fail to keep up with the practices outlined above, my curiosity and wonder diminish. My tools rust and dull, and my connection to God and the divine spark in others dims. The lights of Babylon block out the stars.
But, whenever I sharpen my tools, I feel connected to the Source and all that emanates from it. My days are filled with awe and wonder. In those moments, I can see the invisible path laid out before me, and I know my soul’s purpose. I can even feel the current that carries me along The Way. I call that current God.
