Abbot Columba McCann: Ask and it will be given to you. I asked God for a winning lottery ticket, but I didn’t win. What went wrong? What went wrong is that God was offering me something far greater, something far more valuable, something beyond what I can actually imagine: the Holy Spirit.
If we ask God for the Spirit we will receive. We will begin to think with the mind of Christ himself. We will have godlike instincts. We will live a divine life in human form, just as Jesus did when he walked the earth. But since all this is, at first, too big for us to handle, God feeds us this new life, this new relationship, piece by piece.
And so we ask God for our daily bread. We are asking God to keep feeding us this new life, this new way of being with him, this new way of being in the world. Like any food, you don’t just get this once and then forget to eat again. We have to get it continually, and that’s why Jesus says ‘ask, and keep on asking’ – because that’s what the original Greek meaning is. Ask and keep on asking, knock and keep on knocking, seek and keep on seeking.
As a young child I was quite fussy about food, and sometimes my mother would have to coax me to open my mouth and take just one more mouthful, again and again and again until my dinner was finished. She must have had the patience of Job! When we repeatedly ask God for heavenly food, for the Holy Spirit, it’s not because God is mean and has to be pestered; it’s more like continually opening our mouth for more. God can’t force feed us his nourishment. We have to open our mouth by asking for it.
Once we stop asking for a live relationship with God, it stops. Because it takes two to tango. A dance designed for two comes to an end if one partner stops, even though the other wants to continue. If we stop looking towards God for life, then he can’t bring our relationship with him any further. It we keep looking to God in every situation, then we are protected, and furthermore, we have a huge influence on the people around us. It’s like a phone conversation. We have to stay on the line with God. If we hang up on God then the line goes dead, and we go dead. If we stay on the line, then we really live.
When I was a teenager I was mad about trains, and used to watch them for hours. Once I was on a train where the driver’s compartment wasn’t in a separate locomotive but was at the end of a carriage. The curtain that would normally hang behind the glass partition was drawn back. It meant that by sitting right at the top of the carriage, I could watch the track ahead as if I were the driver, and I could watch what the driver was doing. It was train-spotter heaven!
I noticed that every minute or so a bell would ring in the driver’s compartment, and a light would flash on his dashboard. He would then pull some kind of lever. I noticed that under the light was a label marked ‘vigilance’. Later I guessed that this was probably some kind of safety mechanism to ensure that the driver hadn’t fallen asleep. A few days ago I researched this online. I discovered that in Ireland in the 1970’s they installed on trains a thing called a ‘Vigilance Control System’. I read:
The system would typically monitor the driver’s actions, such as applying brakes, changing throttle settings, or operating other controls. If the driver failed to perform any of these actions within a set time (e.g., 60 seconds), the system would activate a warning (e.g., flashing light, buzzer). If the driver did not respond to the warning within a further period (e.g., 17 seconds), the system would automatically apply the brakes to bring the train to a stop.
So I think that, when Jesus tells us to keep on asking, keeping on searching, keep on knocking, it’s a spiritual Vigilance Control System. It’s a way of ensuring that our connection with God remains live at all times, that we don’t fall asleep on the job. Otherwise our thoughts, our drives, our talk, our actions get corrupted. Without this system in place we are like a runaway train, dangerous to ourselves and others. Our conversations will get derailed. Our emails will miss the mark. Our decisions will be poorly judged. What we communicate to others may be true, but if it’s not coming from God, it will be wrong piece of the truth, or for the wrong person, or at the wrong time, or said the wrong way. If we do look continually to God in each situation, we will arrive at whatever the next station is, safely, on time, not too early not too late. Ask, and keep on asking; seek and keep on seeking; knock and keep on knocking, for your whole life.