Spacious Intimacy: Making Room For God
By Christine Pohl
Seeking and claiming intimacy with God would involve extraordinary presumption if it weren’t a possibility that runs through the Scriptures. The idea that we, God’s broken, obstinate creation, could be drawn into the privileges of intimacy with the creator and redeemer of the universe should strike us as outrageous. Rather than taking this privilege for granted, we ought to be continually amazed that God both welcomes us into the deepest fellowship of the Trinity and wants to live in us.
Love is the hallmark of the Christian life and of the God we worship. But in the context of love, intimacy suggests the distinctively powerful experiences of knowing and being known, of vulnerability through exposure of the deepest parts of the self. Dependent on trustworthiness, it is a risky form of love.
An emphasis on intimacy highlights love’s intensely personal character, its mutuality and oneness. Such closeness does not dissolve or swallow up the distinctness of the parties, but it does involve deepest self-disclosure. It is cultivated by a mutually sustained attentiveness to the other person. In an intimate relationship, there is such an identity and identification with the other that we begin to see with the other person’s eyes, hear with their ears. We encounter the wonder of shared purpose, of shared love and loves.
Most of us understand intimacy with Jesus in a very individualistic way-a close, loving relationship between Jesus and me. Such a relationship is an amazing gift, a priceless treasure of the Christian life. But intimacy with Jesus is also bigger and more spacious.
Jesus, in the Gospel of John, promises believers that He and the Father will make their home with those who love Him and keep His word. He prays, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” The possibility of mutual indwelling is overwhelming: “so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and loved them even as you have loved me.” In these verses we catch a glimpse of an intimate community of love that turns outward for the sake of the world (Jn. 14:23, 17:21-23).
Images of the church as the bride of Christ and as the body of Christ can help us with this more expansive understanding of intimacy. Much more than a one-to-one relation, it is a beloved and loving community that experiences such closeness and identification with Jesus. The Scriptures reserve the most intimate imagery to describe the relationship between the body of believers and God.
Intimacy with God involves three different dimensions-first is our individual attentiveness to God in prayer, Scripture reading, and reflection. Second, intimacy involves our participation in a loving community in covenantal relationship with God. And third, intimacy with God comes through the loving attention we give to others-neighbors, enemies, and especially the most vulnerable.
When we nurture closeness with Jesus and seek to be attentive to Him, our closeness turns outward. We cannot love Him without loving others. Henri Nouwen writes,
The intimacy of the house of love always leads to solidarity with the weak. The closer we come to the heart of the One who loves us with an unconditional love, the freer we are to let the small people come close to us and celebrate their redeemed humanity with us (Sojourners, June 14, 1985).
Intimacy-that tight, personal quality that has eyes only for the beloved (“my beloved is mine and I am his”)-somehow blossoms into welcome to the least, the lonely and the lost. These are the very ones with whom Jesus identified and to whom Jesus opened His life.
Intimacy with God does not become diluted as more people are included in God’s heart of love. There is always enough love, enough room in God’s house. But we might want to ask: “What kind of hospitality would enable us to invite God to make a home in us? What personal environment is suitable for God?” In Romans 8:9-10, Paul writes to believers that the Spirit of God dwells in us, Christ in us. How can we make a large enough space in ourselves and in our communities to be able to invite God to live with us, to make a home in us?
While our intimacy with God ultimately comes to us as a gift, an expanded understanding of intimacy is crucial. When we recognize the significance of Jesus’ words in Matthew 25 that inasmuch as we have welcomed “the least of these” we have welcomed Him, we begin to understand the extraordinary kind of identification and oneness available to us. As we love and live among those most likely to be overlooked-the poor and hungry, the despised ones, the prisoners and the sick-we find ourselves in intimate relationship with Jesus.
It is impossible to imagine true intimacy without long-term commitment. We do not gain intimacy with poor and vulnerable people through little forays into areas of need, but through faithful relationships of shared joys and sorrows, shared lives and hearts.
Such intimacy does not come through carefully crafted programs dependent on measurable results, but through relationships of mutual valuing and presence. Each of us yearns to be known by another, to be cherished for who we are. But, so often people want relationships with others for what they can be or can do for them. As Henri Nouwen notes, there are few who offer “love without conditions,” and rare is “the place where we can be vulnerable without being used” (Reaching Out). Being known and cherished by another brings us to life.
Our challenge, as we increasingly know God’s heart, is not to presume on the relationship or to take it for granted, but rather to cherish it. As we grow in intimacy with Jesus, He will continue to transform our love to make it more spacious and more fertile. As we share ourselves in deepest expressions of love with others, we will find that we have more love to give. Love is not a scarce commodity that we need to ration in case we run out. An intimate relationship with the Source of Love guarantees sufficient supply.
Christine Pohl is Professor of Social Ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY. Her book, “Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition,” is a WMF staple. She has also contributed to a collection of essays called “Practicing Theology,” edited by Miroslav Volf and Dorothy Bass and co-wrote “Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism And the Theological Academy” with Nicola Hoggard Creegan.