God Beyond, God Among and God Within

Readings:
June 3, 2007
Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31
Romans 5: 1-5
John 16: 12-15

Pastor Mohn spoke to us of that nebulous concept of three beings in one: the Trinity. I don’t know about you, but this is something I struggled with from early in my faith development. And my struggling was based in my wanting a plausible explanation for all this, one I could bring to terms with my understanding. None has really been forthcoming, except in fits and starts. One of the fits occurred when it was pointed out in a Bible study that the concept of the Trinity is not discussed in any great detail in the Bible. Perhaps it is inferred from the many stories there. One of my starts was received recently when I read an NPR “This I Believe” essay quoted elsewhere in this blog entitled “Humbled by Mystery” offered by Richard Rohr:

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity. "Hints and guesses," as T.S. Eliot would say. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God. Paradoxes don't scare me anymore. When I was young, I couldn't tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations. Now, at age 63, it's all quite different. Whenever I think there's a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say "only" or "always," someone or something proves me wrong.

People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It's the people who don't know who usually pretend that they do. People who've had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don't know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. It is a litmus test for authentic God experience.

As I get older, I also seem not to need the completely plausible explanation any longer, at least as much as I insisted I used to. I am more comfortable being simultaneously in awe and content in not having explanations for what I have encountered and am more sure is true, but indefinable, in words and other ways. Perhaps Pastor Mohn had the best advice of all. Albeit, it was reassuring to me. That advice: don’t spend a huge amount of time on it – the explanation, that is. Perhaps an explanation, per se, is not what we should seek, but, rather, a notion, a way to experience and encounter our God.

Yes, perhaps a faithful journey to a notion of The Trinity is to admit it is a human mnemonic. If, in some broader sense we are not capable of fully understanding God, the Trinity is a way human beings can come to encounter God, a way to come closer to experiencing something we are not capable of fully, as humans.

Recently on the men’s ministry retreat, I heard Ralph McCarthy make an excellent analogy. He said God gave him his family, in one sense, as a way for him to understand and be closer to whom God was, that the roles of family members helped him to see what God was meant to be in his life. I have come recently to see many pertinent analogies of God to a parent figure. It has helped my notions of forgiveness, mercy, and hope become more than concepts and has helped me move further in a struggle to make these natural parts of a life in progress. Can a parent wear many hats? Is a single parent ever all mother, all father, all things to all who need and depend upon them? Of course not. And God is immensely more multi-dimensional than we can have words for.

God defies categorization, defies definition, in some sense; defies placeholders, compartmentalization, framing, boundaries, and the humble means of expression by virtue of our limited experiences. Perhaps that is why Pastor Mohn said that to say “more” than what she did would venture into “heresy”. Perhaps I have played the role of heretic here (and said too much), but it does help a human soul to struggle with the concept of a notion of God. And in this struggling to come to know something of the element of what the deity is, Pastor Mohn offers us the notion that we can all encounter God in these three unique and different ways:


God is three persons in one, three hats in one, three things that while different, all define either elements of what God is, what God means to us or how God can be sensed and internalized by us.

God can be experienced and encountered as beyond, among and within.

God Beyond is our notion of God the Father, the Creator, external to us and larger than we have the ability to imagine, unfathomable. We, as humans, are intrigued with size. We love to extol large and small, ad nauseum, and ALWAYS in reference to ourselves as the debatable reference point. And we can experience this God in size scale enigma, from the enormity of the universe, the power an awe of nature on Planet Earth, dust from here to light years distant to the probability and chance that govern the state of sub-atomic particles in your fingernails. Albert Einstein said “God does not play dice”, but perhaps God does. God Beyond has never been tied to our humble, feeble, and all-too-human ability to grasp what we can. Stephen Hawking once said the “universe is not only more complex than we are able to say, it is more complex than we are able to even imagine”. Substitute God for Universe herein.

God Among us is God the Son, in the person of Jesus Christ come to Earth to live among us. Here God is “one of us”, human. God is connected to us. God is a teacher, a friend, a confidant. One of Christ’s best examples was how we can “be God for and to one another”. We have both that ability and that awesome responsibility.

God Within is the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, Counselor. The analogies re many here: wind, breath, the bird on your shoulder, the “still, small voice within”, a swirl, energy, a notion, a flashlight of light or inspiration, a glimpse, a moment of comfort, a moment of recognition of significance. We encounter God Within whenever we find ourselves feeling the hairs on the back of our neck stand up and bristle, whenever we encounter seemingly unexplainable circumstances we find ourselves in serendipitously, when we hear the music from The Twilight Zone, a mountain top experience, a brush with an angel.

I sometimes lose what little Biblical background God has allowed me to muster and fall, as I often do, into story. A story told by the Reverend Robert Fulghum about one grandfather and his granddaughter on an outing to the zoo has always stuck with me. It is a story, once again, of family and the relationship between the generations. We may not be meant to fully understand the gravity of our relationship to one another, but we are meant to attempt to come to terms with it. If we can not possess it, we are perhaps meant to struggle with obtaining some notion of it. We ARE meant to encounter it, for sure. While we will never comes to terms with what God fully is with in this life on Earth, we are made ever richer for the trial to understand, to be curious and to make attempts at encountering our Creator, Our Mother, Our Father, beyond, among and within ourselves.

Perhaps as we seek these encounters, we will become wiser and more patient, as the grandfather in this story admits he has. To know that possessing the knowledge is not the plan, but pursuing and reaching are. That care, quiet, caution and perseverance will serve us well in those encounters with the mysterious. Even, as the Advocate implores us to believe, at the zoo ….

Grandfather and grandchild go to the zoo. For all my “Oh, Sarah, look at the whatevers,” Sarah was most impressed with the pigeons. What she liked about the pigeons was she could almost touch them, but not quite. No matter how cautiously, carefully, quietly, she approached, the pigeons always managed to move just one small step further out of reach. The space between her and the pigeons moved in concert with her. She could come so near and yet never completely close the distance. She spent most of the time at the zoo trying to bridge this moving space between her and the pigeons.They would be made even more real if she could just get her hands on one.

‘What would you do with one if you caught it, Sarah?’

She didn’t know. Possessing was not in the plan. Reaching was what was important. Not catching, but pursuing, mattered. Riding home in a thunderstorm, Sarah fell asleep. I sat and looked for a long time at her face.Now that I am older, wiser, and have the time and patience I did not have as a father, I will approach her as she approaches the pigeons, with care, caution, quiet and perseverance. She is not “mine” and never will be. Sarah only belongs to herself. There will always be a moving space between us – an untraversable distance to be treated with respect.

Sarah doesn’t know what she would do if she actually caught a pigeon. And I don’t know what I would do if I ever caught Sarah.

Perhaps the Trinity remains a mystery, but one we become the fuller and richer for having encountered, with care, quiet, perseverance; not in an attempt to capture God, but in a humble, yet faithful respect for the untraversable distance that is that moving space between us and our encounters with the Almighty.