How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere: An Anthology of Spiritual Memoirs

by Andrew M. Davis

Theologians say that your image of God defines your spirituality. Nothing could be more true. (Given all the theologies of a vengeful, distant, and disembodied God, this correlation is probably bad news for the planet.) The spirituality of an oak tree is grounded, stable, and nurturing; it radiates strength. An oak is not in a space; it defines a space, owns it. If I had any idea of eternity, it was that oak tree at the Tappans’ house.

a stranger wandered into a village. The farmers, coming in from their fields, gathered around him on the village green. The stranger told them that he could make soup out of stones alone. Wanting to see the magic, the townspeople built a huge fire and placed on it a kettle large enough to feed the entire village. Each child was sent off to collect a stone and throw it into the boiling water. The stranger tasted the Stone Soup and noted that it would be perfect if it had just a little more spice. Four housewives ran off and brought back armfuls of spices to drop in. The stones are working, he proclaimed; just a touch of barley would balance out the taste. Potatoes, leeks, tomatoes followed, until the smell of the soup wafted out across the green. Bowls were brought, and the stranger distributed Stone Soup to each villager. The magic had worked, the soup was glorious, and the villagers feasted and sang and danced well into the night.”

“These are the questions!” In that instant, as quickly as a snap of the fingers, I got it: in the end, it really is more about the questions than it is about the answers.

I am learning to sit in the questions rather than have some truth to distill to others.

Only the freedom to challenge orthodoxies can bring transcendence down to earth.

Appealing to the New Testament, early Quakers refused to serve in the army, to swear to tell the truth when in court, or to use any titles for the British nobility, calling each one “Friend” instead.

Imagine what would happen if we learned to see and hear That of God in every part of the natural world around us?

God is that presence that is always already alongside and within.

Heart: What if we think of “ways” not as highways to God, but as wandering paths? The German philosopher Martin Heidegger calls these Holzwege, trails that meander through the forest with no particular destination.

“The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one million year old light… It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.”

It is my belief—and because it is a belief, you can discuss it but not disprove it—that there is a great Spiritual Power and that there is a spark of that spiritual power within each of us. And I believe that there is a spark of the same spiritual power in all life… We have rationalized our feelings about the great spiritual power—God, the Divine, the Creator—whatever we want to call it…Some of us call this spark a soul… Many people are prepared to admit that there is this spark of spirit in everything, but only in us [they say] is it the soul.

“But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force.”7

One can live infinitely into a single moment; the Now knows no boundaries.

Somewhere between Basho’s frog and Eliot’s “hints and guesses” is where I seek to dwell.

a Mystery that frightens and fascinates at the same time.

But if God is in nature and nature is in God, we are surrounded by new possibilities.

If Christians think that Christ is “the true light that enlightens everyone” (John 1:9), then God must somehow be present to everyone, and must be seeking their enlightenment and salvation, whether they believe in God or not.

We did not roundly transform either cultures or individuals with our distant, largely judgmental, and very “substantial” God who was more a noun than an active verb.

In the world of religion, you either go deep or you slowly go dead.

I am no longer afraid of an all-powerful, all-knowing bully in the sky. I no longer construe the world through the lens of a morality play in which there were winners and losers although there are beloved and outcast. Instead, divinity reveals itself as permeating all worlds.

There is nothing, nothing in the world, no moment of time, no place, no created event, that is not marinating in God.

I love this line - all of the world marinating in God.

All life is a mixture of delight and suffering, and consciousness itself brings about the capacity to delight and the capacity to mourn.

TRUTH!

panentheism articulates the insight that the very universe sings with the breath of God, that God is, as the ancient Hebrew author understood, chei ha-olamim, the very life of the cosmos.