Sports fans everywhere appreciate the home-court advantage, that is, when the hometown team plays in its own arena, stadium or field. For one thing, the local team has a lot of fans rooting for it. For another, the facility is familiar. Besides, there’s no travel and no jet lag.
Come to think of it, each of us enjoys the home-court advantage. In the contest between good and evil, the Lord himself comes to our “court,” our “field,” our home “turf,” namely, our heart. And by heart, I don’t mean the bodily organ, but rather our soul, our inmost self, the core of our being. It is there that God chooses to dwell.
Scripture attests to the presence of God in our hearts. We read in the Book of Revelation, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will enter his house and dine with him and he with me” (3:20). In the Gospel reading for Ash Wednesday, Jesus instructs us to go to our “inner room, close the door and pray to our Father in secret” (Mt 6:6). That “inner room” is our soul, the “storeroom” of our life, where we keep our inmost thoughts, our motives and the record of our deeds. There we keep track of what we cherish, whom we like and dislike, what we are planning and why. It is our core. Our home court. Our field. Our turf.
The Holy Spirit dwells in our depths so long as we are in a state of sanctifying grace, that is, so long as we do not block or cancel God’s friendship by what we’ve done or failed to do. Yet even in the state of grace, it is easy to forfeit the home-court advantage. We do this by choosing to live noisy, distracted, superficial lives. Amid the din, we avoid God’s glance and presence by avoiding or neglecting our own inmost heart and by not facing up to what is going on in our depths. In his Confessions, St. Augustine describes how God was within his soul, yet he (Augustine) was outside of himself, seeking God in his pursuits while failing to pay attention to the voice of God within, the Voice calling him to conversion and friendship. “You were within me and I was outside of myself,” he wrote (Confessions, X, 27).
How do we regain the home-court advantage? By coming home to ourselves. And prayer is the way home. Not noisy, verbose prayer. Not prayer laying out detailed plans for what we want God to do. Not prayer informing God of how good we are. Not prayer that theologizes God into an abstraction. The prayer the Lord asks of us is to invite him in and allow him to reveal us to ourselves. That we encounter him in the deepest truth of our existence. That we recognize that he knows us better than we know ourselves: “O Lord, you formed me, and you know me … before a word is on my lips, behold, you know the whole of it” (Ps 139:1, 4).
To come home to ourselves, we need silence. We need to pray in secret. We need to be open, welcoming to God who wants to dwell in us. We need to trust that he knows us best, loves us most and gives us what we need.
Meeting God this way enables us to love others authentically. To forgive and be forgiven. To serve without counting the cost. For when we meet God on the ground of our being, we realize at long last, “He loves me and he gave his life for me!” (Gal 2:20).
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