“you are trying to kill me because my word has no room among you” John 8:37

In conversations with Jews who believed in him, they struggled to connect with Jesus’ divinity. In all that was occurring, all that the Jewish authorities were trying to do to discredit and kill the messenger from God, they, like many today, are unable to see God. Karl Rahner once said that one of the secrets to faith is to always see your life against an infinite horizon. Seeing your life against an infinite horizon meant having a sense of divine providence within every dimension and event of ordinary life. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this meant that you always searched for the finger of God, some faith meaning, in every incident within your life. Thus, for example, if something tragic happened to you (sickness, the death of a loved one, an accident, the loss of your job, or an economic disaster), you would always ask yourself: “What is God saying to me in this?” Conversely, if something good happened to you (you met a marvelous person, you fell in love, you had a huge success, or you made a lot of money), you would ask yourself the same question: “What is God saying to me in this?” The idea was that, in every event of life, God spoke, said something to you, and meant this event to have spiritual significance for your life. Divine providence might be defined as a conspiracy of ordinary accidents within which God’s voice can be heard. John of the Cross said as much when he wrote: The language of God is the experience that God writes into our lives. Karl Rahner, as we saw, suggests that it is a question of seeing against an infinite horizon. When Scripture tells us to “pray always,” it doesn’t mean that we should always be saying prayers. Among other things, though, it does mean that we, like generations of old, should be looking at every event in our lives and asking ourselves: “What is God saying to me in all of this? What is providential for me in this event?”

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