God is so above and beyond us and human relationships! God is our Creator and our Redeemer. God is our Beginning and our End. God is the Under-Girding of Everyone and Everything. God loves us with a love which never pauses, never ceases, never quits, no matter how unloving we are acting, towards others or towards God.
Frustrated and exasperated with ourselves and our human limitations, we may ask "God, why would You even WANT me to personally know You?"
God replies "I have loved you with an everlasting love. With unfailing love, i have drawn you to Myself." (Jeremiah 31: 3.)
The truth is, it's not our idea to want to know God more deeply. It's God's idea, it's God drawing us gradually, unfailingly, to God's Self, with the unbreakable bond of God's love for us. God wants a relationship with us, a relationship like and unlike human relationships, a relationship of mutual, concrete, faithful love. Not a calling God "Thee" and "Thou" from a fearful distance, but a daily calm, trusting togetherness.
God teaches us that with our frail human minds, the best and surest way to know Him is through the heart, through love.
If we think of those we love deeply and intimately, we realize that they are never far from our conscious thoughts, that we want and need to contact them regularly, that we use gestures to show our affection, that the closer we are to someone, the fewer words we need to express our love and intimacy, that sometimes silent togetherness is our greatest peace together.
All of these ways of knowing and loving are true of our relationship with God - a relationship that we call "Prayer." Our prayer is words, actions, and silent togetherness.
God will never be far from our conscious thoughts if at the beginning of our day, we offer God in advance all that will happen and invite God into our day by saying "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening." Then God, our loved One, remains close to us. We know and trust that every thought and action is a way of "living ourselves" into God's Will for us, that God is gently "nudging" us in the right direction. He sits beside us in the passenger seat of our car. He is our Guest as we eat our lunch. He touches our shoulder as we rage, laugh, or weep. Every word and thought and action of ours becomes a living prayer.
God speaks to us, not only in the depths of our hearts, but in Scripture, especially in His eternal Word, Jesus. Daily, find some quiet time, a quiet place. Picture yourself in a particular Gospel scene; even pretend you are Mary, mother of Jesus, or one of the apostles or disciples (disciples were women too.) Hear Jesus speak his message directly to you. Does a light go on in your mind? Does a burning enter your heart? Speak to Jesus about how his words have enlightened you, set you on fire, revealed ways you may need to change your life, through and in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Our gestures speak our love for someone. God asks us to show our love for Him by loving others, to recognize His Son in our neighbor, a stranger, even those most unlike ourselves. Our gesture of choosing to spend time with God at Church services is a way of telling God that we want to draw nearer to Him, we want to use our precious time to be with Him. To sing. To speak. To kneel. To listen to His Words with other members of His family, His people, His Body. For Catholics, God asks us to recognize Jesus in the Breaking of the Bread, the gift of the Eucharist. First, we offer ourselves to Him along with our gifts of Bread and Wine. Our gesture of receiving Jesus in the Eucharist is our acceptance of His gift of Himself to us. We acknowledge that we are receiving the matchless gift of the One Who sacrificed Himself for us to give us life. As we receive Jesus, we attend the Heavenly Banquet, receive an early taste of union with God in Heaven.
The closer we are to someone, the more deeply we know that we need few words to express our love for each other. Sometimes we need to be with each other in silence. The closer we come to God, the more we realize that God is the Center of our lives. We are nothing and God is everything! God is everything we want. God is all that we need. God is the One we fall in love with, more and more deeply. We can't possibly understand God with our frail, limited intellects. We need to go to God through a different route - the path of wordless love. Times of silent, wordless prayer, of surging love. God bestows these times on us.
Often purified through suffering, our souls can find God through reaching out blindly to God, calling His Name, then experiencing His Presence. Resting with Him alone is our peace. Sometimes He suddenly overwhelms us with surges of love and we rest silently in His love. In our beds, on a couch or in a chair, at a moment in Church we can experience a freely given touch of God. Or even a longer time of union. This is a time when our soul "communes inwardly with God, alone and in solitude...and with delightful tranquility, for the knowledge of God is received in divine silence." (from "The Cloud of Unknowing."
Yes, God wants a loving relationship with us, a relationship marked by conversation, gestures of love, day to day living together, times of solitude, silence, and surges of love and knowledge. God is our Everything. When we reach out to Him in wordless moments of love, our love is the dart of longing that pierces His heart with joy and blesses us and the world.