My wife and I enjoy reading the meditations of the late Rev. Oswald Chambers in his book My Utmost for His Highest each morning. (At least on the mornings when no alarm is set and we don't oversleep.) The reading for January 9th turned out to be one of those thought provoking entries, in that it deals with the ubiquitous Holy Spirit and how it preserves us through the trials of life. The key for us this morning was Rev. Oswald's instruction to read Psalm 139 in connection with his commentary. We did.
Psalm 139 is labeled in the The Harper Collins Study Bible, NRSV, as"The Inescapable God". The first 18 verses describe God as the all knowing, all seeing and all encompassing spirit. "Where can I go from your spirit?", he asks, "..where can I flee from your presence?" The psalmist makes the famous assertion that it was God who formed him and knit him together in his mother's womb, that it is God who laid out the plan of his days as written "In your book". And finally comes the plea to "Search me, O God and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts."
There must have been something in the coffee this morning, because after this we picked up Day by Day from the Forward Movement, and read in the meditation on Acts 19:2, "I much prefer the word Spirit to God. The latter has been anthropomorhphized from an unseen but undeniable force into male qualities: the white-haired old man and the blue-eyed suffereing son. God is boxed into a certain form we think we can know and understand."
I believe that the Psalmist and the authors of today's meditations are all saying the same thing, and it is a thing I have felt to be true in my soul since the occurrence of the transforming moment of enlightenment I had as a youth- We can never know or understand God on our terms, we can not put God in a box and claim to know who or what he really is. God has made life as God is, and has made our understanding as it is- infinite and mysterious. One knows there is God, but there is no way to define God with anything other than descriptions that are limitied by the number of nouns and adjectives we have in a our vocabulary. A mystical experience, a sacremental moment, communion with the Holy Spirit, are things felt and experienced, but always inadeqately described.
The psalmist makes clear that God transcends anything we can know or think. That God is part of everything, living and dead, animate, inanimate. God is the air, the rocks and the sea; God is our thoughts, our happiness and our sadness. God is the dark space between the stars and the planets. We are all a part of the fabric of God and God is a part of all that is, both seen and unseen. God knows us so well because we are all fundamentally the same, we are driven by the same inteligence, the same madness.
Can anyone ever prove God? Why is there a need to when God simply is? Trying to make a literal being out of such an ephemeral concept is foolishness, and the results of such foolishness are always in our face, every day. Look no further than the newspaper or the evening news.
God is. I pray that we can allow him to be that. Only then can we be like him.