Good morning…
“I have been drawn to spend less structured time with God during this pandemic,” she admits, “but somehow I am sensing God’s presence more and more. Quotes from yesterday’s post put words to my experience: ‘There is no place that Jesus is not.’ Jesus is in our hearts, our homes, our world. ‘Bidden or not bidden, God is present.’ We do not have to beg, to invite, to coerce. God already is and God always will be here, now, with us.”
Now a quote from Franciscan theologian Bonaventure, who lived from 1221-1274, joins our conversation: “God is One whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Think about that. If God’s center is everywhere, God is centered with you and God is centered with me at the very same time. Though we may be physically far apart, with God as our center, we are intimately connected. If God’s circumference is nowhere, then God’s presence extends beyond every limit.
“In Sunday school, I learned to think of God as a very old white-bearded man on a throne, who stood above creation and occasionally stirred it with a stick,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor in her 2000 collection entitled The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion. “When I am dreaming quantum dreams, what I see is an infinite web of relationship, flung across the vastness of space like a luminous net. It is made of energy, not thread. As I look, I can see light moving through it as a pulse moves through veins. What I see ‘out there’ is no different from what I feel inside. There is a living hum that might be coming from my neurons but might just as well be coming from the furnace of the stars. When I look up at them there is a small commotion in my bones, as the ashes of dead stars that house my marrow rise up like metal filings toward the magnet of their living kin.”
Barbara asks: “Where am I in this picture? I am all over the place. I am up there, down here, inside my skin and out. I am large compared to a virus and small compared to the sun, with a life that is permeable to them both. Am I alone? How could I ever be alone? I am part of a web that is pure relationship, with energy available to me that has been around since the universe was born.”
Barbara ponders: “Where is God in this picture? 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.”
Barbara concludes: “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.”
Not somewhere but everywhere, God is prayed to in all directions. Prayers for healing. Prayers for transformation. Prayers for the disintegration of all dividing lines. I like thinking of God’s luminous web, bright and brilliant, glowing and gregarious, connecting each one of us, all of the time. Even when we are physically held apart, we are held together in God’s vast net of relationship animating everything.
This is a luminous web …the way of Christ. Everything of God gets expressed in him, so you can see and hear him clearly. You don’t need a telescope, a microscope, or a horoscope to realize the fullness of Christ, and the emptiness of the universe without him. When you come to him, that fullness comes together for you, too. His power extends over everything (Colossians 2:9-10, MSG).
…Sue…
P.S. This fun photo is from Unsplash.com.
