Experiencing God

For me a significant understanding in my life was the slow recognition of the “ME” within my consciousness as God.   That is my direct experience of God as an intrinsic part of my being.  As I live and move as a human being,  I can only respond with awe and thanksgiving and praise – at the glory of a sunset sky, or watching ocean waves breaking on a beach, or the holding of a newborn baby, or listening to the sounds of a Bach fugue, or feeling the touch of a loved one, singing a Brian Wren hymn in church, biking along the Moldau River, or attending the graduation exercises of my grandchildren.

I no longer think of God as a distant being somewhere beyond the sky who created the universe some billions of years ago and now watches and intervenes periodically. To me, God is that continuous creativity that we now know as happening throughout the universe. God is in the life that is all around me on this planet Earth. I am an individual participant in this evolving universe at this moment and place in space-time! I am an integral part of something grand! Within me, within each of us, there is this spark of consciousness that is ME.  Meister Eckert, a tenth century mystic, described it as, “My me is God.” The writer of the Gospel of John has Jesus say, “I am in my Father, and you in me and I in you.” [John 14:20]

This means that God lives and moves in each of us, but also means that God lives and moves through, and beyond us. This directs our attention beyond ourselves, to the relationships to all those around us, even to all life around us, to our environment, and to our relationship to the Earth itself. We are not alone. We are a community with God. This makes all the difference in how I am to live my life.

My religion is not about my earning a place is some future heaven. It is not so much about what I believe, but about how I behave. Freeman Dyson, noted physicist and devoted Christian, said, “Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus according to the Gospels thought so too.”

Loren Bullock
November 15, 2017