God
Is…
“God
is the most passionate presence in the universe…there is not a stitch of
utilitarianism or functionalism in God…God surges and flows and is wild…
God
is not a dead answer. God is the greatest question in the universe, a question
that has kept itself free of banal answers. This is where all fundamentalists
and sects get lost. They convert the passion, wildness and danger of God as a
question into a cliched answer.”
John
O’Donohue (‘Fire: At Home at the Hearth of Spirit,’ in The Four Elements:
Reflections on Nature)
I’ve
always been surprised when people attempt to describe God as being represented only
by a certain religion or belief—their own, of course. The creative force of the
universe, the source of everything that has ever been or will be, the agent of
diversity in all of creation, is not a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Jew, or a
Hindu, or a Buddhist, or any other category of human description. That would be
us—we are that, not God.
The
Divine is the culmination of all the opposites—darkness and light, hot and
cold, creative and destructive, masculine and feminine, personal and impersonal,
unpredictable without explanation, ungovernable, the force of nature and the peacemaker.
Beyond description in human language, God must be experienced in the storms of
life, and in the quiet moments, and in the incredible beauty of nature. We must
understand that no matter how we think of God or experience God, that is only a
tiny dot in the totality of the Divine.
One thing we can do is learn to ask the questions.
Rather than thinking we have the answers, we can, as Rainer Maria Rilke advised,
“Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the
questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very
foreign tongue.” We can look around us and ask, is this God? Is this God’s
work? Is God’s hand in this? Regardless of what is going on in our lives—whether
we define it as good or bad—we can ask these questions. And then we can listen
for answers, trusting that they will come. Perhaps not in the way we thought, and
maybe not the answers we hoped for, but because that which we call God is also in
us, our answers will come from within.
Think about this today:
the passionate, surging, flowing wildness of God is right there inside of you. How
awesome is that?
In the Spirit,
Jane
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