Father Dominic Emmanuel

Those of us who have the task of teaching pupils in schools find ourselves dinning into them to improve their handwriting or their pronunciation, saying, “practice and keep practicing, for practice will make you perfect”. Similarly every athlete is told by his/her coach that if s/he wants to excel in one’s field s/he needs to simply work hard. There we see how practice leads to perfection. This is also true of music. A famous study of music students in Berlin’s elite Academy of Music has shown that those who emerged as elite musicians practised almost 10,000 hours.
While different individuals practise special art and acquire perfection in the specified field including a few who achieve great degree of perfection in prayer and meditation by constant practise, one rarely hears people being reminded by anyone to keep working so as to be able to “live in the presence of God”. One sometimes learns the art of “living in the presence of God” either at the feet of some guru in an ashram or during a spiritual retreat. And those who do it are often told to do so by detaching themselves from the world or the normal activities of family life. But ordinary mortals rarely hear someone telling them to practise living in the presence of God as they go about doing their daily business and household chores.
When, as part of my priestly training, I was going through a year of “novitiate”, our novice master constantly reminded us to learn to be conscious of God’s presence all the time around us, in all the activities that we were involved with and to be aware that even during our sleeping moments God’s presence was real.
One should be clear that practising the presence of God is not to somehow make God become present. Understanding that one is practicing the “awareness of the presence of God” puts responsibility in the right place. That is, God is always present. Our responsibility is to be aware of God’s presence. The ball is in our court. But one needs to have a bit of a practice to create this awareness and the following ways could help us reach that goal even in the midst of our daily chores.
We could start by spending a little more time in learning about God, ourselves, and the world by personal study; we could learn to see work as part of our worship, which could also help us keep away from those types of occupation which dishonours God; we could choose companions and friends who can be our spiritual buddies; we could learn to use our income in a way that glorifies God and helps the needy; we need to learn to have adequate sleep, exercise, and practise healthy eating habits; to learn to use our sexual energy in healthy ways that is in keeping with God’s design for us; to learn to avoid being a workaholic but do things that relax us; to learn to participate in God’s mission to redeem the earth spiritually, socially, and environmentally and so on.
At times, the biggest obstacle to our “practising the presence of God” is a subtle, subconscious fear about what God might think of us. In the back of our mind, we are concerned about making the right impression in God’s eyes. We watch carefully over every word instead of speaking simply and from the heart; we try to live up to standards that we imagine God is expecting of us; we are afraid that if we don’t meet those extra expectations, God will be displeased with us. This mindset discourages us from living in God’s presence, because we can’t relax, we can’t be ourselves if we are trying to live up to artificial expectations.
But God is not like that. He is not watching us like a hawk. He truly is the only friend who is perfect and perfectly committed to us. He wants to share every moment of our life, because he is simply that interested in our lives, like the oldest friend, the one we can always count on. That is how God is. The more deeply and fully we believe that, the easier and more natural it will be to live always in his presence.
Practising the presence of God helps us maintain and deepen our communion with God even in the midst of trials and tribulations of life in a world with a fallen human nature. We are created to live in communion with God and that we could achieve by being constantly aware of God’s presence. 
This would really make our lives on earth as if we were already living in heaven, for what else would be the meaning of living in God’s presence.

— Father Dominic Emmanuel, a founder-member of Parliament of Religions, is currently the director of communication of the Delhi Catholic Church. He was awarded the National Communal Harmony Award 2008 by the Government of India. He can be contacted at frdominic@gmail.com