Where Is God?

Where is God?

Well,  “of course,” we know that God is "everywhere."  God is in, among, through, and beyond all creation.  God is the power that holds atoms together and galaxies in their courses. God is before all things, in all things, through all things, and all things have their being in God.

But that’s not really the question we are asking, so that answer sounds theology-textbook dry.  When we ask, “Where is God?” what we mean is "How and when and where do we experience God’s presence?"  This lies at the roots of pilgrimage, the sense that God can be found in places and experiences beyond our everyday life. 

(This is also a dangerous instinct, for most people most of the time cannot go on distant pilgrimages and can and do find God in the everyday and mundane.  So everything I say here needs to be balanced by Brother Lawrence, the monastery cook “Lord of the pots and pans,” who writes in the Practice of the Presence of God (1693) "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.")

Yet many of us follow this instinct and search out “thin places” where the divide between the mundane and the Divine seems closer.  As Coloradoans, we all have as streak of nature mysticism in us, finding God in the mountains and meadows and sunsets.  (I hear Lillian Daniel muttering, "Any fool can find God in the sunset!" and maybe I should repost my sermon from May for my development of that point!) For others, it’s different.  A few years ago at Ring Lake Ranch, I listened to Marcus Borg wax rhapsodic over “foggy English moors, little moss covered villages, mist and clouds and the green of earth.”  That sounded claustrophobic and lame to me, as I looked longingly out the window towards the vast alpine reaches of the Wind River Range!

The other easy answer to this is that God is “in heaven.”  Somewhere up past the sky, behind the stars, far, far away in resplendent grandeur.   “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and our church steeples and cathedral towers point us up, up, up.  Even the A-frame construction of Plymouth and many sanctuaries of its era draw the eye and heart aloft.  Many of our beloved hymns point to the skies.  This was THE favorite hymn of a former congregation I served:

O Lord my God,

When I in awesome wonder

Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,

I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,

Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul! My Savior God to Thee:

How Great Thou Art,

How Great Thou Art….

In the Holy Land there is a different architecture.  Of course, there were plenty of basilica constructions and towers which form the prototype for our long rectangular sanctuaries and steeples.  But there were also a lot of round and octagonal structures, usually over a central rock or cave.  Domes bespeake a different language than steeples, feminine to masculine.  And the focus was downward.  God might indeed be enthroned in the heavens, but God is found by going down, deep, into the depths of the earth. The bedrock throughout the country is limestone, so it is riddled with caves, crevices, hollows and springs. Every church, every chapel, every shrine was built over a cave or rock or spring. The list of places built this way was profound:  the Church of the Nativity is built over the cave Jesus was born in, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is over Jesus’ tomb and the rock of Golgotha.  The Dome of the Rock is over the exposed bedrock Abraham sacrificed Isaac (or Ishmael, if the Muslims are telling the story) and you can descend into a small crypt in the rock, where Muslims pray.  The Church of the Multiplication (loaves and fishes) near Capernaum is over a rock (the table for the meal), now much chipped away by centuries of pilgrims.

Nazareth had at least two caves for the Annunciation, (different ones for Latin and Greek churches), the cave Joseph had his workshop, and a well where (alternatively) Mary met the angel Gabriel and also everyone drew their daily water, with a church atop each, and stairs down to each sacred place.  We saw the well Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman below another church, and at least three different caves of Elijah. Even the Shepherd Fields near Bethlehem had caves – while we envision the shepherds watching their flocks in open pasture, in reality they were likely penned for the night into these rock overhangs along the field’s edge.  So the chapels are in the caves, complete with altars. 

Kemal, our Palestinian guide, speaking in the Shepherds Field chapel

where I had just finished celebrating and serving our group communion.

It got to where, when I got to the Church of St. John the Baptist in Madaba, Jordan, and I heard there was a well in the crypt, I said, “Of course there is a well.”  You could draw up the water and drink of the same town spring Iron Age Moabites had drunk. (Sense prevailed over piety, and I’d splash water from these wells and springs rather than drink.)

The most striking example of this descent was the church of St. Peter Gallicantu, outside Jerusalem's modern walls but squarely in the ancient city and believed to be upon the site of the High Priest Caiaphas’s house where Jesus was first tried. You can easily look across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives and trace the route Jesus must have taken to get there.  You start in a lovely French church built in 1932, with striking frescoes of the Jesus’ trail, Peter’s denial and heartbreak, Jesus’ crucifixion, and Peter’s post-resurrection restoration.  Then you descend to a lower chapel made from Crusader and Byzantine elements. Large areas of bedrock are exposed, with ancient Byzantine crosses carved into the stone as graffiti.  Then you go on down, down, down into the bedrock, to a series of rooms, some maybe storerooms and some prisons with places for bolts in the walls, dating to the first century.  Was this where Jesus was imprisoned?  Was this where Peter and the Apostles were imprisoned (Acts 5)?  Nearby archaeology suggests it is entirely plausible.  And being in the dank bedrock, the bowels of the earth, it feels like it could be truly here. And as I descended from level to level, I felt my spirit going deeper and deeper into the story and deeper into me.  Peter’s story.  My story!

What does a reordering of our search for God from "up" to "down" mean?  We long ago gave up Dante’s “3 story universe” of hades-earth-heaven.  But what does shifting our spiritual aspirations from the skies to the depths mean?  I think part is looking inward towards that place where the Image of God who I am communes with the Spirit of Christ who I trust.  Yes, that means threading through the maze of thoughts and feelings and emotions and reactions and instincts and complexes that form parts of our inner selves, though not our innermost Selves.  Part is trusting our own earthy, embodied, fleshly selves to be real us and to be vessels of the divine.  You know, that crazy “incarnation” thing that I keep coming back to. “The Word became flesh and encamped with us” John 1:14. (More on the downside of being an incarnate being in a subsequent blog post when I’ll talk about my pilgrimages’ shocking dénouement.)   It means to look to the earth, care for her times and seasons, her resources and ecology, and find our place embedded firmly within life on this planet rather than awaiting evacuation to the skies. 

Where is God?  I will keep asking this question as I ponder the caves, the wells, cracks, crevices and springs I visited.  I think there’s something important there for us steeple-raised Westerners.  And I invite you to consider where you find God.  In the heavens? In the depths?  Or someplace else entirely?