Finally, I believe I experience God, in the words of my greatest theological mentor, Reformed German theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965), as the Ground of Being. That is a difficult phrase to embrace. It was borrowed and refined by Tillich from the philosopher Plotinus, an early-third-century-CE Greek philosopher, who was himself not a Christian. If God is the Ground of Being, then the only way I can worship God is by having the courage to be all that I can be; and the more deeply I can be all that I can be, the more I can and do make God visible. So the reality of God to me is discovered in
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