Who are you?

Known By God

“O Lord, you have searched me and known me. 

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

You discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

…Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.”

                                                            Psalm 139

          What does it mean to be known by God?  Do you have the sense that the creator of the universe knows you by name?  What would it mean if we knew the same force that powers the cosmos knows every individual being; not only knows us as we are now, but knew us even before we were a twinkle in our mother’s eye?

          Would it mean that God is no more ‘out there’ than ‘in here?’  Whatever God is, we are too.  We are part of that which we call God.  We exist within God and from beginning to end, are never separate from God.  All existence, both human and non-human, is intricately woven into the fabric of the divine and it into us.  There is no separation.

          If we believed that we and God are inextricable, would we behave differently; would we think differently?  If we were to realize that every other human being, whether Arab or Israeli, Christian, Muslim, or Hindu, whether black, white, brown or yellow are, were, and always will be inseparable strands in the web of life that is God, would we view them differently? 

          Theologian Paul Tillich called God, “the ground of being.”  His belief was that God is “being itself” not “a being.”  How would the world be different if we all believed this?

                                                            Keeping the faith,

                                                            Jane