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I realize, in reading your posts Mike, that a lot of the premises that you base your arguments on are not my premises, and therefore I don't know how to answer your questions. I also can't figure out if you are playing a devil's advocate, trying to draw responses from us, or if you are seeking answers.
For example, I don't see/know God as someone/thing that I am supposed to "please" by things that I do or don't do. I don't question or doubt or need to prove my "pleasingness". I do need to somehow know my relatedness to God, though, and the best way that I know to get in touch with that is to turn off all the chattiness and just be. Listening and expectancy is part of that silence, but I wouldn't say it is like staring at the phone.
Here is a Merton quote that gets at this a little better than I can:
"The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but
is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his
darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of
darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and when he is "answered", it is not so much by a word that bursts into
his silence. It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full
of the voice of God." (THE CLIMATE OF MONASTIC PRAYER - one of the last books Merton prepared for publication before
he died.)
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