I had a very interesting conversation this week about the way in which we relate to God. A friend of mine spoke about 'pressing into God' a phrase that I had heard before from a number of different quarters. It is a phrase that appears to be gaining wide currency amongst Charismatics. I asked what it was he meant by the phrase and he replied "I view God as a giant marshmallow. As you press into it, it surrounds and envelops you." In many ways its a powerful image of union with God, a real immersion or participation in the divine life, a popular metaphor for the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis or deification. But I have to be honest with you, the conversation left me feeling a little uneasy.

I have been immersed in my thesis over the last few weeks in a desperate attempt to break the back of the work before my ordination at the end of June. For some reason the final deadline for the course in the end of September! What amazed me is that the thesis is about exactly this issue. Is it right to view our relationship with God as union or indwelling or is it better to see it as covenant or partnership? Karl Barth is critical of the Eastern Orthodox and their view of theosis. Instead, he argues that the God of Israel is a dynamic personal God who enters into covenant relationship with us.

Barth's concern is that the notion of union leaves us with an inert substance or essence. It has to be said the marshmallow metaphor is pretty inert and the language of soaking into the divine also seems too static. It seems to me that it is tempting for us as Charismatics to view the Holy Spirit in this way. I do recognise that Scripture uses the language of filling and the language of water when speaking of the Holy Spirit, but during the giddy heights of the Toronto Blessing the Spirit was seen almost as a kind of ecto-plasm, a gooey malleable substance that we could immerse ourselves in and pass on to others. Barth, rightly it seems to me, worries that this reduces God to the divine 'it'.

So, what does this mean for prayer? Well, I haven't got to that bit in my thesis yet, but I think I have the beginnings of an answer. It certainly leans away from mysticism, whether the silent mysticism of the contemplative or the ecstatic mysticism of the Toronto Blessing, and towards the conversational and spoken forms of prayer.

That doesn't mean to say for one moment that I am ruling out an experience of the Holy Spirit, far from it. I am simply making a plea to remember that the Holy Spirit is one of the three persons of the Trinity, a 'he' not an 'it'. Therefore, when we encounter the Spirit, it is not simply a power encounter, it is a personal encounter. Having said that, it is not simply an personal encounter that engages our minds and our mouths in conversation, it is an intimate loving encounter that captures our hearts, our desire and our wills. But it is not a passive encounter in which we ease back and relax into the divine bubble bath, it is a dynamic encounter in which we are summoned by the Spirit and called to respond in faith.