God With Us

The Hassidim tell the story of the preacher who preached over and over, "Put God in your life; put God in your life." But the holy rabbi of the village said, "Our task is not to pur God into our lives. God is already there. Our task is simply to realize that.
-from The Rule of Benedict: Insight for the Ages, by Joan Chittister, OSB

God is in my life. Even when I'm not aware of it, even when I'm not seeking God, God is in my life. Imagine what this says about God.

The typical religious model involves pious people praying to God and God responding to their prayers. But consider that God is active in my life even when I haven't prayed. My life, all of it -- the good, the bad, the ugly -- is a manifestation of a life lived with God. The world around me -- again, all of it -- is a manifestation of a world filled with God.

What could I learn about God from this simple fact? Imagine if instead of relying on theology to tell me what God is like, I tried to learn what I could about God from examining my life and my world in light of the fact that God is there. I know as theology this is a shaky proposition at best, and disastrous at worst, but isn't this how we form our ideas about people? Granted, we're often wrong about people, but when we're trying to form a relationship rather than an analysis, this way of knowing someone works quite well.

There's a danger that theological assumptions will taint the conclusion. If I place high importance on the idea of God's omnipotence, I'm likely to conclude that God has caused everything I've seen happen. That's a distortion of what I have in mind. It's an analysis. If there's a conclusion there to be had, I'm on the wrong track already.

What I want to do is to start with my personal experience of God, primarily in prayer, and from this I want to learn to recognize God in the world around me. I want to learn about God in this way. What does God do? What does God leave undone? What does God want?

Is this circular reasoning? Yeah, I think it may be. Most of what I write in this blog I write just for myself. I feel like there's something here, but I can't quite get at what it is.

God in History and in Creation

I was on vacation last week and did a lot of reading, so I've had more ideas rushing through my head than I've had time to blog. This post is a bit of compressed backlog.

Two books I read last week were Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath and J. Philip Newell's The Book of Creation. I paired them intentionally, as I thought they'd have a similar mood.

It's a bit odd reading a Jewish book on the Sabbath as a Christian, like an outsider looking in, but Heschel always has such brilliant insights that I'm willing to accept such a position to listen to what he has to say. Right from the prologue he blew me away with the idea that God exists in time moreso than in space. Listen:

Even religions are frequently dominated by the notion that the deity resides in space, with particular localities like mountains, forests, trees or stones, which are, therefore, singled out as holy places; the deity is bound to a particular land; holiness a quality associated with things of space, and the primary question is: Where is the god? There is much enthusiasm from the idea that God is present in the universe, but that idea is taken to mean His presence in space rather than in time, in nature rather than in history; as if He were a thing, not a spirit.

Then I read Newell's The Book of Creation, which happens to be precisely about finding God in nature. Newell's book is an introduction to Celtic spirituality by way of a meditation on the seven days of creation in Genesis 1:1-2:4. It's very good overall, but in the shadow of Heschel's book, it left me with a certain disatisfaction -- namely, the God that Newell finds in nature tends to be "God-in-general" and not particularly the God of Christianity. He mentions Christ occaissionally, and even points to the Incarnation, but it's not really central to his thought.

On the seventh day he says:

The seven days of Genesis, as we have noted, are not a chronological account of the emergence of the universe in the past but a meditation on the ever-present mytsery of creation. The life of creation is a theophany of God. It is a visible expression of the One who is essentially invisible, an intelligible sign of the One who is beyond knowledge. Just as the first day points to the light that is always at the heart of life, so the seventh reflects the stillness that is part of God's ongoing creativity.

I don't want to knock this too much. It's a very solid theology of nature, and in the end I do agree that nature points us to God. But Heschel convinced me that you can't really have the blessing of the seventh day without the God who blessed the seventh day. The blessing, the very God we are experiencing, is necessarily tied to the historical event. I don't mean to hereby embrace seven-day creationism (nor do I think Heschel does), but ultimately the creation story doesn't tell us anything about God-in-particular if it isn't telling us about God's historical act of creation.

At least that's what I think tonight.

Evidence and Existence

Yesterday on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" one of the topics was "evidence for and against the existence of Bigfoot." "Bigfoot" wasn't at all what I was expecting to follow that introductory phrase. Forgetting that it was "Science Friday" I expected to hear "evidence for and against the existence of God" though I would have probably been annoyed. It got me thinking about that.

Generally, I think that there can be NO evidence for or against the existence of God. As a matter of principle, there can be no "evidence against" the existence of anything, including Bigfoot. But what about evidence for existence? The idea of "evidence" for the existence of God seems to me to involve either a misunderstand of who God is or a misunderstanding of what evidence is, at least as applied to existence.

Evidence as applied to existence is an inherently scientific construct. It is based on the physical -- examining the physical to see what has effected it physically. God on the other hand is other than physical. I don't mean to say that God is "supernatural" and thereby divorce God from the physical world, but rather to say that God acts in the physical world in non-physical ways (though perhaps sometimes through the physical and with the Incarnation as an obvious exception).

An analogy.... This summer as I was driving around the country, I came across a sign that said "high winds may exist". I remarked to my wife what a delightfully philosophic statement this was. I mean, in what way can you say that winds exist? Can you look closely and find wind? Can you hold it? If you examine the air in the presence of wind all you'll find is the particles of air that were there before the wind came, and they're not even all moving in the direction of the wind. So does wind exist?

This analogy breaks down quickly, of course, because while wind is a secondary effect of the physical, I would say that the physical is a secondary effect of God, but it kind of captures what I was thinking. People are far too ready to see physical explanations of what God does as evidence against God's existence.