Be My Guest

The psalms provide a litany of praising God, thanking God, and acknowledging God’s great works. Yet all too often, when we close our prayer books, our awareness of God fades into the background of our day-to-day lives. As a result, we are missing out on a great source of comfort, guidance, and joy. What, then, can we do to increase our awareness of God’s presence in our lives?

The following sentence from 74 Tools for Good Living by Michael Casey caught my attention: “The monastic life is a training in living in the presence of God.” How is that so? It is certainly true that monastics turn their attention to God through communal and private prayer several times a day, which is helpful, but that still leaves a lot of time when we are engaged in other activities. I suspect that the monastic key to living in the presence of God is actually the insistence on offering hospitality at all times, as St. Benedict says in Chapter 53 of the Rule: “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.”

                                   

It might be that we operate under too narrow a definition of “guest.” If, as the Merriam-Webster dictionary indicates, one definition of guest is “an organism sharing the dwelling of another”—and if we all share a dwelling in the body of Christ—then everyone we meet should be treated as a guest who reveals Christ to us. A simple way to remember that God is present in everyone is to make a conscious effort to smile at them, just as we would smile at Jesus if he were to appear to us with his radiance and the wounds marking his love.

Perhaps we who are training to live in the presence of God need a new motto: Smile, and God who is in your presence will smile back! :)