Genesis 12 (NRSVE) When they had come to the land of Canaan, 6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak[b] of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east, and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. 9 And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.
When I started to make a Jesuit prayer exercise recently, I went immediately to Google, a resource that St. Ignatius didn’t have. In imaginative prayer, we “accompany Jesus through his life by imagining scenes from the Gospel stories” and listen for God to “speak to us […] through our imagination.” Part of Ignatian contemplation, or imaginative prayer, is picturing the scene. “Visualize the event,” suggests Kevin O’Brien SJ, “as if you were making a movie.”
Which is why I got on Google.
For various complicated reasons ranging from my concept of the Holy Trinity to Judy Blume’s young-adult novel Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret that I’m still thinking through (I’ve blogged about it HERE), I find it more natural to imagine praying to God the Father than to Jesus. Like Judy Blume’s Margaret, a secular Jewish 11-year-old, it’s God the Father to whom I first learned to pray. Maybe an image from the Hebrew Bible would help me compose the scene or visualize the event.
Chaim Potok, another Jewish novelist, makes a useful distinction between the “utterly infinite, utterly unapproachable, utterly spiritual” God of so much modern theology and the personal God of the Hebrew Bible. (I blogged about him HERE.) “I can’t make the step beyond creation to the infinite God,” Potok once told an interviewer. “But I can certainly relate to the God of the Bible. I talk to him all the time and complain all the time.”
That, I can definitely relate to.
In the Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, God has animated conversations with Abraham, Moses, Job and Jonah, among others, as well as the prophets of Israel. So I did several Google image searches. I didn’t find much, since God specifically warned the people of Israel against divine images and most notably appeared to Elijah (in 1 Kings 19:11-12) as a “still small voice.” But I did find a painting by Paulus Potter titled “God appears to Abram [Abraham] at the sacred tree of Moreh at Shechem.”
It’s a very nice landscape, typical of the Flemish school of the 17th century. It shows Abraham sheltering under the oak (or terebinth) tree of Moreh with his family and his livestock (Potter loved to paint animals). Overhead, a scattering of clouds crosses the blue sky; most of them are fluffy white cumulus, but over at the upper edge of the picture frame is a darker cloud. Abraham, seated under the tree, is looking up at it.
And that’s the only sign of God in the picture. Well, that’s good enough.
That’s how God appears to me.
A day or two later, I thought about the Ignatian prayer exercise while I was waiting for a CT scan at the Southern Illinois University med school. Trying to conjure up the scene when God spoke to to Abraham under the sacred oak of Moreh. (God promised, “to your offspring I will give this land,” but I’m more concerned at the moment with how God and Abraham communicated.) What would I do if I were there? What would I say if I were chatting with God under the sacred oak of Moreh? It’s thought to have been near the modern Palestinian city of Nablus. Do I need to go to the West Bank to pray? Can I pray here?
I wandered over to the windows in the waiting room. Rows of beige and gray chairs filled the room, one of those home improvement shows was airing on a TV attached to the wall near the ceiling. Registration desk, cubicles. It’s functional, sterile-looking (not a bad thing in a hospital, I thought). The windows are floor-to-ceiling, and they look out on a Memorial Medical Center parking garage and several trees breaking the red-brick monotony.
And there, in the sky above the parking garage, blue sky and fluffy white cumulus clouds.
Well, is this as close as we’re going to get, I thought, to a sacred oak tree in the Occupied Territories? Same clouds and sky here. A nurse came to the door and called my name, and it was time to go back to the lab for my CT scan.
But the question lingered. My attempt at a semi-Ignatian conversation with God follows.
***
SETTING: We are in the waiting room outside the radiology clinic at the SIU Medical School. Rows of beige and gray padded chairs line the walls, and two rows occupy the center space. At left is a registration desk, and at right at TV set is mounted high on the wall next to a floor-to-ceiling tinted window that looks out on a parking lot. Behind the parking lot are two ornamental trees, and the circle drive in front of a red brick building bearing the sign SIU MEDICINE OUTPATIENT CLINIC. In the distance we can see a large parking garage, and above it the blue sky and white clouds of a sunny early fall day. PETE, standing at the window, looks up into the sky above the parking garage.
ME: Hey, God, it’s me, Pete.
GOD: Well. (Pauses for a beat.) Good to hear from you! It’s been a long time.
ME: Welp, I’ve had a lot on my mind …
GOD: Yes, I’ve noticed that.
ME: … and I didn’t want to bother you.
GOD: You’re not bothering me. One of the nice things about being the utterly infinite, utterly spiritual Master of the Universe, you get really, really good at multitasking. So what’s on your mind?
ME: Well, I’m going in for my second CT scan now in less than a month. I got a bad biopsy report, and it looks like my cancer is back. I don’t want to ask you to make the cancer go away, and …
GOD: So what do you want to ask me for?
ME: That’s the problem. I don’t know.
GOD: So?
ME: I don’t know. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I don’t really know how to talk to you.
GOD: Don’t worry. It’s like I told Jonah. I’m slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. So take your time, you’ll figure it out. A thousand years are like a single day in my sight — I can afford to be patient.
ME: But … but …
GOD: In the meantime, why don’t you just talk? We’re talking now, aren’t we?
ME: You mean it’s that easy?
GOD: Why, yes. That difficult, too.
Links and Citations
Kevin O’Brien SJ, “Ignatian Contemplation: Imaginative Prayer,” IgnatianSpirituality.com, Loyola Press, Chicago https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-spiritual-exercises/ignatian-contemplation-imaginative-prayer/
God Appearing to Abraham at Sichem. Paulus Potter.jpg Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:God_Appearing_to_Abraham_at_Sichem._Paulus_Potter.jpg
Paulus Potter, 1625-54 Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulus_Potter
[Published Oct. 19, 2023]
Ordinary Time 
You were there…
And there, in the sky above the parking garage, blue sky and fluffy white cumulus clouds.
What’s the outcome of the scan, Pete?
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It showed the same malignancy … what another FB friend calls some “bad boy cells” in a lymph node adjacent to where my bladder was before the cystectomy. I’ve begun immunotherapy at SIU Med, and my oncologist seems to have several tricks up his sleeve to deal with it.
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Love this! ❤
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Thanks, Debi. I’m a terrible judge of my own writing, and I thought it was a stinking mess when I finished it and uploaded it.
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It was perfect!
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