There is nowhere you can go that God isn’t.
There is no place where God is absent.
In one of my favorite Psalms the writer marvels at this simple, life-altering truth:
“If I climb up to heaven, you are there;
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there your hand will lead me
and your right hand hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will cover me,
and the light around me turn to night,”
Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day;
darkness and light to you are both alike.
We are not always aware of God’s presence. In fact it is very often that we are not.
Certainly God seems to make their presence known in different ways at different times. Sometimes God is ridiculously obvious and loud. These are the times when things come together so seamlessly, flow so smoothly, that the believer finds themselves not only saying, “How could I not believe in God?” but even goes so far as to wonder, “How could anyone not believe in God?” It is times like this that even the atheist shakes their head and wonders. As C.S. Lewis once observed, sometimes it takes a lot of faith to be an atheist.
Yet other times God seems achingly embarrassingly absent: Unknowable, unseeable, inaudible. Utterly mute, if not entirely elsewhere. Mother Theresa herself – who during her life was the very picture of faithfulness to many of us regardless of religious affiliation – wrote repeatedly in her journal towards the end of her life that she had not heard from God in years – that God had not spoken to her as they had long ago. Whereas before God’s voice had been so loud and clear it had guided her into a life of radical devotion, now it was silence.
For just about anyone I’ve ever met, known, or heard of, God’s silence – God’s apparent absence – is a recurring event in this life. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.
If, as I believe, there is a God, then that God cannot be conjured or controlled. There is no guaranteed way of experiencing God day in and day out. That alone is enough for some not to buy the existence of God. I have no clever argument to counter those who say they don’t believe in God because God does not conform to the demands of scientific method. They may be right.
We’ve had some deaths in our church community that have absolutely rocked us in the last few weeks. When a group of people care about each other, no death comes easy, but even by that measure, the deaths we’ve experienced recently have stopped us in our tracks, made us weep, made us call one another in disbelief, made us reach out to a loved one just to remind them we love them because we didn’t know what else to do in the face of such grief.
I don’t think people should be shamed for asking, “Where is God?” in times like this.
The same Psalmist who wrote the words of God’s intimate presence above also wrote the words, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”
And if any one of the people closest to one of these devastating losses were to look me in the eye and say, “Where is God?” or “Why would Got let this happen?” literally any answer I gave them would be insufficient.
I believe in God because I have experienced God, I have heard God. And I have decided that, however unlikely and unprovable and unreasonable that sounds, I’m going to stop pretending otherwise. But I think (at least I think I think) my belief in God is non-transferable. That is to say, I cannot make my experience yours any more than you can make yours mine. And we may as well stop pretending otherwise about that too.
The two people who died right in front of me were my father and my grandmother. One of them was too young and too sudden. The other was not young at all, but still felt all too sudden. I was very close to both of them. There is no right time for someone you love to die. In both cases, I felt God’s presence. I did not hear God’s voice. I did not like that these two people died. When I am saying I felt God’s presence, I am not saying that I got what I wanted. I remember falling to my knees in the bedroom and praying that the paramedics working on my dad would save him when in fact he had already been dead before they got there. I remember wishing my grandma would just open her eyes in that hospital bed one last time so I could see that twinkle of recognition once more, or that she would just squeeze my hand as I held hers – but the stroke she had had made sure that was not going to happen.
And yet I felt very much that God was there and was with us all in those moments. That God was with my dad in his death, and with me as I held him – with my grandmother as she drew her last breaths on this earth.
And I could have been mad at God for being there and not bringing them back to me. I don’t know why I wasn’t. This isn’t a spiritual brag about how my faith was so strong I knew something others didn’t know. And I know my words are insufficient even here, that I am failing at what I’m trying to tell you, but I am trying to say it was not something I thought or knew – it was something I felt and experienced.
I have had years to reflect on this and still speak feebly about it – but I have come to realize I believe God is literally always with us. Yes, that belief brings with it more questions, more challenges – chief among them, if God is here, why do the bad things happen? Is God weak, or forgetful, or does God just not care? Unanswerable questions. If believing in God solves some problems, it produces myriad more.
At least for me, faith is not about solving unsolvable problems or answering unanswerable questions. It is about remembering that I have felt and experienced God’s presence during the times when God feels absent. And – again, at least for me – faith is about practicing looking for God in the places where God seems absent – looking for signs of blessing amidst the devastation, signs of grace within the sorrow.
I smile thinking that Grandma Bonnie got to walk her dog and smoke one more cigarette right before the stroke. When I held her hand in that hospital room and she didn’t have her dentures in she didn’t look as much like her as I wanted her to, and when I squeezed her hand she didn’t squeeze back. Why did I feel God in that moment?
I remember thinking that if my dad had died at home in Maine while I was in California I would not have even seen his body. But he died while visiting us in California and I held that body and maybe that is devastating and sorrowful but it is also a blessing that I will never fully grasp.
My bishop likes to remind me that God is not elsewhere, and I take her very seriously when she says that.
If I make the grave my bed, God is there also.
There is nowhere you can go that God isn’t.
There is no place where God is absent.
This is for Elizabeth and Michael and Laura and Ron. And for those of us who love them.
