Where is God?

God is not located somewhere up there, or out there; not beyond us, nor beside us. We may say that God is omnipresent, everywhere; and God is transcendent, entirely other; and God is immanent, acting in Creation. Or, maybe not.

The most salient truth is that God is to be found within us, at our hearts’ level. If we feel God’s presence, we feel it within. We may imagine God as a being present with us, but the divine presence is truly to be found within, where felt reality resides. If we feel God with us in corporate worship or prayer, it is truly God’s presence in other persons who are here beside us.

This is what early Christians meant when they referred to the church as the body of Christ. When the ancient people of the Jerusalem temple gathered around the Holy of Holies to be in God’s presence, it was God’s presence within them, and within each other, that they really felt. The ark was actually empty, just as the communion cup is really empty until we fill it with meaning, and the host is only a morsel of complex carbohydrates until we take it into our being where God truly is.

I think the prophets and priests of ancient Judah and Israel understood this, as they elaborated the uses of religious symbols and signs to represent the ineffable reality of God’s presence in the very being of the human person. Jesus certainly knew it, as his words pointed toward God within, although his disciples and some of their followers may have missed the point.

I believe the early proto-orthodox theologians of the Christian church understood that their Trinitarian formulations were symbolic representations of the inward reality of God. Thus, the prismatic diffraction of God into distinctive “persons” (which were originally conceived of as “substances”) were not to be taken by cognoscenti as objective descriptions of reality. They were systematic analogs of subjective religious experience, based in the received mythology of the resurrected Christ. I think the construction of the Christian mythology was conscious and intentional on the part of the apostles, the epistolary authors, and the evangelists of the synoptic gospels.

Each of us is a particular concrete manifestation of ultimate reality, and by the mysterious providence of God, we have been given the miraculous gift of apprehension of the divine presence of which we are images; and more than images, we are avatars. We are the creaturely lenses through which God recognizes Godself in Creation, and the mirrors in which God’s image is reflected.