Rop tú mo dítiu, rop tú mo daingen; rop tú nom-thocba i n-áentaid n-aingel.

Be thou ever with me and I with thee Lord.

I have often experienced frustration with this idea of “God ever with me and me with him” because I reckon I am deploying the wrong sensory apparatus to experience the with-ness. I can’t escape the idea that I may be focusing on sensation (literally sensuality) too much…my gut…my soul. It would be like evaluating marital intimacy exclusively on sex. I know because I have been guilty of precisely this.

I need to develop (discover?) some other means of knowing that I am with him, and he with me. To be with God in the course of a regular day cannot solely depend on the standard methods of sensing his presence: conscious thought, physical posture, emotional connectedness, etc. It’s not that these go away, just that something else is added to the moment by moment experience. This is the center of something. A graduation from the school of sensuality.

I can see how aesthetics of all kinds develop down this path. How the denial of the senses becomes a focus, an obsession, a method of developing (discovering?) that new sense. It’s been shown that blind people can hear better than sighted people and that deaf people see better than hearing folks. It appears that in the absence of one or more of the senses, other senses become enhanced to compensate.

What if practices like fasting, solitude and sacrificial giving create a kind of deficit in our senses, forcing our spiritual senses to become more sensitive?

Be sure to visit the Applications web page at AC3.org to find out more about practices that help us