seeing God, everywhere, in everyone

God is all over the place

6/25/2020

 

God is all over the place. God is up there, down here, inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light—not captured in them, as if any of those concepts were more real than what unites them—but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that animates everything that is.

 

At this point in my thinking, it is not enough for me to proclaim that God is responsible for all this unity. Instead, I want to proclaim that God is the unity—the very energy, the very intelligence, the very elegance and passion that make it all go. This is the God who is not somewhere but everywhere, the God who may be prayed to in all directions at once.

                                         Barbara Brown Taylor

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we have a God problem

 

God is not the problem

The problem is how we think about,

Even more how we talk about

God

 

Our problem is we don’t know how to talk about God

I mean God is

Transcendent

Big

Really big

 

And there is no way we can wrap our head around this spiritual reality

this mystery

which is why it is a mystery

 

but we try

and we do so by anthropomorphizing God

God becomes, as Barbara Brown Taylor suggests

a very old white-bearded man on a throne,

who stands above creation and occasionally stirs it with a stick

 

what we do

unintentionally I am sure

is two very devastating things

we contain God, defining God (in our heads) physically, spatially

we place this God outside creation

 

up there, out there, somewhere

 

when the fact is God is everywhere

woven into the fabric of this earth

contained, immanent in the skies, the earth

the mountains, the trees

the deer, the birds

in you, in me

 

and here is the thing

if God is in the earth, the how we treat the earth

is how we treat God

(more than a little abusively if truth were told)

 

and if God is in each creature

and more, in each person

then how we treat people, is how we treat God

 

when we dehumanize another

because of race, or creed

we are not just denying their humanity

we are denying God

 

If I look at the earth and see God

If I look at the creatures of forest and field

 

If I look in the face of a black brother

If I look in the face of a frightened senior, terrified by Covid 19

If I look at that person who refuses to wear a mask

 

and see God

that (should) change everthing