How would our lives be different if we believed that God is not elsewhere (the theme for our We Together gathering)?
Scratch that question. “Believe” is a broken word. We take for granted that the word means something like, “accept the truth of a proposition.” Suppose I’m inside a drab, windowless hotel conference room. You come in from outside and tell me that it is raining. I “believe” you if I accept the truth of your claim. Such believing is done with the mind and seems a limited, low-stakes affair.
But suppose you are a treasured friend of many years — someone who would never lie to me about matters small or large. Now the word “believe” means something heftier — more like the meaning of the New Testament Greek word pistis, which we translate as “faith.” Here, “faith” or “believe” means wholehearted trust grounded in relationship. I don’t just believe a proposition; I believe you.
Now, a third possibility: water from your umbrella drips onto and into my socks, despite your caution. Now, I know by experience. Does the word “believe” even apply? Now my soaked socks attest to the truth of your claim.
Is such knowledge by experience possible concerning the truth “God is not elsewhere?” Many strands of the Christian tradition (and other traditions too) insist that such experiential knowledge of God is possible and necessary for abundant life.
The word “mysticism” is sometimes used to talk about this kind of direct experiential knowledge. I have a love-hate relationship with the word; I’m unsure how useful it is. The word often makes people feel like they need a huge lights-blaring, Saul-knocked-off-his-donkey kind of experience for something to count as mystical. There is the further notion that you need to be a special kind of person — a mystic — to have such experiences. They’re not available to ordinary folks like you and me. Paradoxically, such expectations foil experience rather than deepen it.
What if our knowledge of God is as ordinary as rainwater soaking through socks? As profound and as ordinary. The contemporary contemplative prayer movement holds that divine presence is readily available as we become accustomed to abiding in silence — the site of divine dwelling. Variations abound, but the basic practice is simple. Sit quietly and open your heart to the divine. Find a word that holds your intention to be open to divine presence. For me, that word is “surrender.” When the chatter begins, when thoughts intrude and consume, refuse to do battle with them. Say the word and fall back into silence, the stillness where God dwells.
Will something magical happen? Perhaps. We don’t get to choose how God makes Godself available. But the focus of contemplative prayer across traditions is not the exceptional or extraordinary. Instead, the goal is intimacy, as simple and profound as sitting companionably with a dear friend and becoming familiar with each other, until an experiential knowledge begins to take root that God is not elsewhere.
And how might this transform your life, the 95% in which you are not sitting in silence? Another quotidian example. Recall how, when you first fell in love with your partner, you might suddenly, when you were out and about town, spot someone in the distance who has the same shock of red hair and is roughly the same height. Your heart quickens because you think, “That’s her!” until the stranger turns her head and you realize that it’s not your partner.
The red hair fooled you… or perhaps it did not! You are now alert to signs and traces of your beloved everywhere. You are attuned to this particular form of beauty as never before. Who knew there were so many redheads!?
Keeping company with Love works very much like that. Your time in silence attunes you to Love’s omnipresence — in the kindness of the stranger who holds the door open for you as you rush to work; the joyous excitement of your dog as you return after a day’s work or even a 20-minute errand; a friend’s consoling hug in the midst of difficulty; or your own act of love for an unhoused person who asks you for food. You now see Love, which is to say, God, everywhere.
Perhaps you are tempted to say that these little acts of ordinary love are all love with a lower case “l,” not Love itself, and surely not God.
Are you sure? Is that how these encounters with love feel in your body? Are you not encountering the same Love you keep company with in silence?
Perhaps your inclination to suggest that these little loves, given and received, cannot count as divine is the product of a misguided theology that has long taught you to believe that God is elsewhere “watching us from a distance.” What if there is only One Love refracted through an infinite multiplicity of prisms, One Love in a multitude of colors and varieties — erotic, brotherly/sisterly, the love of friendship — all manifestations of a boundless Love that suffuses all things? What if we really do live in a Love-soaked universe, a universe in which God is not elsewhere?
Let us continue this conversation when we gather at We Together.
