A Place Called Bethel
[“Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.’ He was terrified and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven’” (Gen 28:16-17).]
[“The gate of heaven is everywhere” (Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1965, 158).]
O Lover,
In my morning prayer in recent months I have responded to Thomas Keating’s nudge in offering my consent to Your presence irrespective of the contents of that day. Indeed this prayer may well be part of my daily practice for the duration. The major tension arising out of this discipline is that while I am persuaded that You, Immanual (“God with us”), are ever present whatever the day might contain, I often live largely unaware of this. In the words of Jacob in our text, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it” (EA). To assent to Your ubiquity is not necessarily to abide restfully in the awareness thereof.
For me the above discrepancy is repeatedly linked with a particular place I experienced while living in Palestine in the 1970s. As director of Mennonite Central Committee projects and personnel in the occupied territories I would meet intermittently with the NGO liaison officer of the Israeli military government. The setting for these chess-like exchanges was one of the Tegart fortresses harking back to the British Mandate for Palestine (1920-48); the location was ancient Bethel (Beit El [“house of God”]) a dozen miles north of Jerusalem in the West Bank.
In Genesis 28 we learn of Your nocturnal encounter with Jacob. Fleeing Canaan for ancestral Haran in Mesopotamia because of his own deceitfulness, he was severely shaken—shades of Otto’s mystérium treméndum—upon awakening from a dream in which You delivered a promise and blessing to him. Terrified and awestruck, Jacob poured a libation over the stone which had been his pillow and called the place the “house of God,” the very “portal of heaven” (17). And he marveled that, unbeknownst to him, You had never not been in that “place”—a word employed six times in vss 10-19.
O Lover, of late I have been increasingly identifying with that “place,” one in which You in various ways are aiding me in perceiving my own situation more truthfully. First of all, Jacob’s ignorance of Your presence in that setting, one replete with Canaanite cultic antecedents, mirrors my own bent toward prejudging where You will, and will not, surface. Thus I offer consent to Your presence in every nook and cranny of my day whether it be filled with euphoria or despair, light or darkness, religiosity or no. Furthermore, Your oxymoronic visitation of Jacob and Your lavish promise to him (12-15), all amid a night sleeping alone on the ground, mirrors my own experience of the penchant for the improbable and surprise in Your Self-disclosure. The tale of Your traffickings, Your Oneing, with us humans and all creation repeatedly blindsides a routinized trekker like myself. The experience of finding myself discombobulated in the wake of glimpses of Your splendor is not alien to me. Finally, there is this kaleidoscopic implication viewed through the keyhole of the Genesis 28 text: beyond ubiquitous and pervasive, Your lavish Love, trustworthiness, and compassion infuse all having being. Thus all “places” are Your habitation; all times Your kaíros; all situations the narthex to Your divine life.
In short, my most needful prayer, rather than a petition for Your presence, is for an enlarged consciousness of the givenness, the self-evidency, the axiomaticality—both ontological and experiential—of Your Self-infusion in all You have wrought. O Lover, I long to rest in that awareness.
