Like anyone who uses the internet as a tool, I am sometimes asked to identify myself on websites I visit. When it’s a matter of ordering a book from Amazon.com, I obviously have to give my real name and address. I don’t even mind signing in with the New York Times or the Washington Post.
On others sites I can find my privacy antennae quivering. Occasionally, therefore, I use only my initials and last name (as I did when I inadvertently ended up on an ex-christian site last year [see the entry, Being Scorned]). Or I type in my middle name without a last name; or, if I am feeling particularly paranoid, a name I made up in high school when I had aspirations of being a poet and thought a pen name would lift me to the ranks of the literary immortals. (I won’t reveal that one to you.)
Human beings sometimes request personal identification from God as well (that is, when we are not just assuming we already know all there is to know about the divine). For example, when Moses encounters God at the burning bush, he asks for God’s name.
Moses says, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you’, and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” (Exodus 3:13).
Now God, being God, is not required to give out personal information–or as far as that goes, to answer any questions at all. Nevertheless, God, being God, treats Moses with respect and does give Moses a response of sorts, although it is probably not the response he hopes for.
“Ehyeh asher ehyeh,” replies God.
What in the world does that mean? No one really knows. “I am who I am” is probably the most frequent translation, but some contend that it is not the most accurate. The phrase can also read, “I will be who I will be,” or “I will be what I will be,” or, as Johannes Metz writes in Suffering unto God, “I will be for you who I will be.”
According to Martin Buber, the answer God gives is the answer we need to hear:
Not “I am that I am” as alleged by the metaphysicians—God does not make theological statements—but the answer which his creatures need, and which benefits them: “I shall be there as I there shall be” [Exod. 3:14]. That is: you need not conjure me, for I am here, I am with you; but you cannot conjure me, for I am with you time and again in the form in which I choose to be with you time and again. . .
“The Faith of Judaism,” The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, edited by Asher D. Biemann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 103.
You cannot conjure me, God says. No matter how often you go to church; no matter how many prayers you say or the assiduousness of your scripture study; no matter how long you sit in silence with your legs crossed or with your feet flat on the floor; no matter how many charitable deeds you perform; no matter how shining your virtues or upright your life: none of this suffices to conjure me up or make me present.
The good news is that you have no need to conjure me anyhow, for I am there.
Our own actions can be either welcoming or contemptuous of the blessing of divine presence; but God’s presence is a gift and a given, not the reward for prayer well prayed or a life well lived. Indeed, it is God’s loving presence that motivates us to prayer, to worship, to silence, to virtue, to good deeds—not the other way around.
But notice this: God says to Moses, “I will be for you as I will be,” or “I shall be there as I there shall be,” not necessarily as you would have me to be. I am there whether you want me to be there or not. And I am there the way I desire to be there. “Ehyeh asher ehyeh.”
You are not in control of my presence. I promise to be there whether you ask me to be or not, but “I shall be there as I there shall be.” Not always as you want me to be or expect me to be or think you need me to be. Perhaps not in the way I seemed present to you yesterday or will seem to you tomorrow. But I will be there.
And what is more: what I will be for you is what I Am in truth, not an illusion, not an imitation of godhood or a figment of your imagination—though you may at times mistake one of these for me, and though, with your limited human awareness, you will never be able to grasp the fullness of divinity.
I will be for you who I Am and always Have Been—and who I always Will Be, world without end. I will be there for you, I your heart’s desire, what you have always desired, whether you knew it or not.
So we pray,
You who are there for me as you will be, may I also be there for you as you graciously will me to be.
O God,
that at all times you may find me
as you desire me
and where you would have me to be;
that you may lay hold of me fully
both by the Within and the Without of myself.
Grant that I may never break this double thread of my life.
Amen.(Prayer by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)