I have often concluded an email note or letter with words such as the following: “May you sense the Presence of the Lord, today.” I remember that Shackleton in writing of his explorations in Antarctica included a similar sentiment – that somehow on the journey, in the cold, winds, ice and barren waste of that great continent, he had an enormous sense of the Presence of Another. My desire is that i and others, too, will know God’s Presence.

But ‘sense’ is perhaps the wrong word to use, unless used metaphorically, if at all and with understanding- for followers of Jesus Christ, those who believe in God, ‘walk by faith and not by sight. In other words, sense is not to be the way, ultimately, in which we are to trust and obey and to live our lives.

There is an another ‘organ’ of experience and knowing granted to those who believe in God and follow Christ. It is the organ of faith and it is perhaps more real than the other ‘organs’ we know and taken for granted in the human experience. We have eyes to see, ears to hear and hands with which to grasp the things of life – but (and the Scriptures use the same ‘organs’, but metaphorically) we have in the capacity of faith, also to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ – and handle things unseen.

How to understand this wonderful, strong and effective spiritual ‘organ’ – and to speak of it, other than metaphorically – who can say? But that it’s abilities and effects are real, powerful and immensely capable so as to enable the touches of reality, not only in this life but also of the eternal, who can deny?

One exercises this organ and it becomes stronger, just as do those body organs of the physical realm. And the spiritual realm is just as real and perhaps more so – the greater Real. At any rate, the spiritual and the physical, heaven and earth, may resonate as ‘one.’ For this we pray, in the Great Prayer of our Lord with all that is summed up in life as we know it, that in every aspect of life, in all that is necessary and pertinent to creaturely life, God’s will may be (done); i.e. here ‘on earth as it is in Heaven.’

I hate it when the media talks about ‘the faithful’ – not with admiration but as a way, wink/wink, of describing this strange, archaic group who still believe that stuff (the Bible, God, angels, Heaven, morality and that the Church should speak into everyday life). They are seen as credulous and superstitious relicts and hold-outs from a former, superstitious time (like stubborn and continuing members of a flat-earth society). We live in the present day of greater understanding and actuality produced by the real of science and technology. But, these few – the ‘faithful’ still go to church and continue to believe things that one can’t prove, claim to experience and know another dimensions of knowing and being, claim to know a Greater Power behind the universe. But one cannot prove this. The media prophets speak for the greater, wiser majority who know perfectly well such things are unfounded, unscientific, intangible, not part of the real – and hence to be ignored, as having been discarded, and in attitude to those who hold still such values – they are to be pitied, tolerated and even suspected.

When followers of Jesus talk of walking by faith not by sight, we do not mean that we discard science and other aspects of physical knowing (such as touch, sight, etc.), but we mean that there is something more, things that are other, deeper and fuller, as ways of apprehending and knowing.

The organ of faith in a human being may be present but as good (or bad) as dead – something unused and so flabby, shrivelled, moribund. But when the organ is enlivened by God and begins to be strengthened by use, at first early and fledgling, and then with bold, regular exercise, this capacity becomes almost as ‘normal’ and may even be as taken for granted as any other of the body’s organic, physical abilities Somethings profound begin and may continue to happen. New abilities arise, with new insights, hopes and goals.

The ‘believer’ who does not ‘believe’ (exercise faith) is not a believer, whatever may be the contrary protestations. For a believer believes and there are results – some tangible (sensed) and some intangible but nonetheless known, nevertheless real.

Believers believe. By faith lives are lived, things not yet in existence are imagined and built. God is known – and obeyed. By faith believers suffer all kinds of humiliations and even torture; they sacrifice and even lay down their lives. By faith couples who can’t have children procreate. By faith cities and a whole new Earth are seen. By faith eternal verities are pulled into this world, again, sometimes with tangible results and sometimes with only hope that their fruition will one day come into being.

Believing is seeing.