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I am not the only person relating to my friend, of course, for every relationship between people differs from every other. My wife perceives my friend differently from the way I do; his wife perceives me differently. Over time though, a bond develops between us as strong as any bond a human being can know—the word covenant comes to mind.
All these stages of relationship apply to God. If I could interview Jeremiah, Jacob, Job, James, and Jude, each would give me very different answers to the question, "Tell me about your relationship with God—what is it like?" If I asked that question of David, I would get starkly different answers from the same person! The relationship varies from one psalm to the next, and even varies within the same psalm. Psalm 143, for example, reflects on "the days of long ago," when God seemed close and intimate, then cries out, "Do not hide your face from me." David understood, perhaps better than anyone who has ever lived, the dynamic, living rela tionship that takes place between a person and God.
"Ah yes," someone objects, "you make these parallels sound so smooth. I have many successful relationships with other people. I can see them, touch them, hear them. I have tried to relate to an invisible God. Nothing happened. I never have the sense that God is even there!"
I do not discount such an objection, because at times in my life I have won dered the same thing. Even now, my relationship with God rests or falls on faith (though, as I have pointed out, all my relationships do). You can see the problem by watching scenes of religious experience in movies. They are, in a word, boring. A saint kneels and prays. Something is happening, we presume, but not such that the camera can record. The action is invisible—which, for us humans, holds far less interest than something involving our bodies, like sex.
In response to this objection, I defer to Thomas Green, a priest who has spent his life exploring spirituality. Although he serves as spiritual director of a seminary in the Philippines and has written seven books on prayer, he admits that some people never develop a successful prayer life. He estimates that about the same proportion of peo ple have a very successful prayer life as have a very successful marriage. Tan gibility is not the issue, he says, for tangibility does not ensure the success of human relationships either.
Of course my relationship with God will not exactly parallel my relationship with human beings; in some ways it will radically differ. God is infinite, intangible, and invisible. If I may use such language, we humans have little sympathy for the "problems" confronting such a Being who desires to relate to us. Baron von Hugel drew the analogy of a man's relations with a dog:
Our dogs know us, and love us thus most really, yet they doubtless know us only vividly, not clearly; we evidently strain their minds after a while—they then like to get away amongst servants and children; and, indeed, they love altogether to escape from human company. … And yet, how wonderful! Dogs thus require their fellow-dogs, the shallow and clear, but they also require us, the deep and dim; they require indeed what they can grasp; but they as really require what they can but reach out to, more or less—what exceeds, protects, envelopes, directs them. … The source and object of religion, if religion be true and its object be real, cannot, indeed by any possibility, be as clear to me even as I am to my dog.
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