How Does God Do It?
2 August 2007 by Gil
For most of my life I have been perplexed by the question of what it actually looks like when God does something. Growing up within the Christian church I inherited a vocabulary that was full of assertions that were (in hindsight) strikingly casual in describing things that God ‘did’ or ’said’ as if they were obvious or at least similar to things that human beings did or said.
There seemed to me to be a giant elephant in the room whenever conversations like this took place, namely the enormous assumption that whatever else we meant by talking about the activity of God, we knew that it wasn’t as obvious as the things we saw one another doing from day to day. It’s as if we all had this unspoken agreement that the words we used meant something a little different when we were talking about God than they did in normal conversation.
For a while I thought that maybe I was missing something. Maybe God did things for and said things to other people in more direct ways. Maybe there was some defect in my practice of the Christian faith that accounted for this gap, some lack of faith or fundamental misunderstanding of how the whole thing was supposed to work. But gradually it became obvious that we were all in the same boat, interpreting (for the most part) ambiguous events and circumstances in light of our faith that God was, in fact, active and present within them.
Yet expectations are difficult things to alter. It has been difficult for my gut-level reactions to catch up with my brain. I know that whatever else the love of God looks and feels like, it isn’t as obvious or tangible as a conversation with my wife or a hug from my daughter. It’s not as if God’s activity in the world is some kind of alien invasion from outside world, some kind of paranormal suspension of what normally happens (leaving aside, for the moment, the question of miracles). I know this yet I still feel myself, in unguarded moments, expecting it to feel this way.
It’s as if I’ve taken the whole, vast realm of ‘experience’ and divided into two camps: the one full of things that have natural or human causes, and the other, a shadowy, mysterious (and decidedly smaller) realm of things that are caused by God. The key failure, I’m starting to realize, is the giant assumption that these two camps don’t meet; either an experience can have ‘natural causes’ or it is the hand of God.
I was reading Mere Christianity again recently and was struck by C.S. Lewis’ response to a hypothetical objection that a person had never ‘felt’ the help of Christ, they had only experienced help from other people. Lewis compared this to a woman in the first world war who said that a bread shortage would not affect her because at her house they ate toast. Lewis makes the obvious point that if there is no bread, there is no toast.
Likewise, our description of ‘merely’ human or natural causes is a fundamental mistake. We endlessly search for the ‘toast’ - an undeniable miracle, a spectacular occurrence, an audible voice - when we’re surrounded by bread. We long for something that can’t be explained by natural causes while ignoring the presence of God within the things we stubbornly insist on referring to as if there were not a God in whom we lived and moved and had our being.
This was a sweet post, Gil.
Hey Gil. I can clearly identify with the tension or maybe divide you point out in this post. It’s refreshing to read how you verbalize it and are honest enough to say what likely many others, including myself, have experienced as part of our journey. Hope things are well in Hepburn!
Jayson
thank you - well said!
“We long for something that can’t be explained by natural causes while ignoring the presence of God within the things we stubbornly insist on referring to as if there were not a God in whom we lived and moved and had our being.”
Thanks, Gil, for the reminder.
Another perspective, perhaps slightly different angle from what you presented originally:
What do these (biblical “David”
stories tell us about living this human life well, living it totally? Primarily and mostly they tell us that it means dealing with God. It means dealing with a lot of other things as well: danger and parents and enemies and friends and lovers and children and wives and pride and humiliation and rejection and siblings and sickness and death and sexuality and justice and fear and peace - to say nothing of diapers and faxes and breakfast and traffic jams and clogged drainpipes and bounced checks. But always, at the forefront and in the background of circumstances, events, and people, it’s God. It’s always God with whom we have to do. And the God with whom we have to do can never he dealt with in an antiseptic theological laboratory as a specialty of heaven, but only on this earth - “…on earth as it is in heaven.” Earth and the conditions of earth-weather, digestion, family, job, government-define the content in which we deal with God.
- Eugene H. Peterson
Hi Gil. I guess I’ve said this here before, long ago, but this idea of God being the One in whom we live and move and have our being is becoming the only way I know how to conceive of God. I’m not sure how to add to that phrase “and the One who is also ‘other’ from us”. This second part seems like something Christian orthodoxy asks that people add. I’m not sure how to make sense of the two together.
Hi Kristin,
Yes I remember our earlier conversations on this topic so I hope I’m not too repetitive. I’m still a bit confused as to why you would view what you call Christian orthodoxy as something ‘added’ to this view of us having our being in God. It’s not obvious to me that a God who is somehow embedded within the world is more basic than a God who is not. What do you find most difficult about belief in a God who is distinct from the world?
I tend to think a lot in pictures. When I picture living and moving and having my being in God, I see myself (and everyone/thing else) inside of God somehow…and God in me. It makes a distinct-from-me divinity hard for me to imagine. Your important thoughts in this post about how God works are also tied into my difficulties with a separate-from-us God. Distinctions between the God part of who’s at work and the people part of who’s at work and the “natural causes” part of who’s at work in any situation are blurry for me, every way I look at them. I am also a bit of a mystic I think, and the times when I’ve experienced my greatest sense of connection with God have been times when I feel the distinction between God and everything there is get really wobbly. That’s a subjective thing, I know, but still part of what has gone into this difficulty for me.
Thanks Kristin. I resonate a lot with the ‘blurryness’ in trying to figure out what’s actually going on in everyday experience and how that relates (or doesn’t) to God. It’s been good for me to slowly realize that the distinctions between what’s God and what’s ‘natural’ are not as strong as I had thought (though I’m not prepared to say they don’t exist). I think it’s one of the tragedies of the modern world that we have gradually lost our intuitive sense that the world and its processes are charged with the presence of God.
For me the main problem is still what to do with/think about evil if everything that is, is somehow inside of God. Forgive the caricature but this view seems to point toward a God who is having a massive identity crisis. In my opinion, there is room for a more nuanced understanding of how God is at work within a larger belief in a personal, transcendent God.
All fair enough. Maybe the nuancedness of God I seem to be finding myself/soul in the midst of is a part of the same “elephant” veiwed from another side. But maybe its another animal entirely.
Without seeing God as a person, the tension of having everything be part of the One doesn’t feel like a crisis to me. It feels reflective of what Is. Somehow, while not diminishing the reality of horrendous evil, this doesn’t diminish the great Good there is in the world for me, or the powerful Love or Wisdom or Self-giving or Compassion that we can seek to allign ourselves with. It makes me feel simultaneously more responsible to seek this allignment/communion, and more at ease about these things surrounding me, being in me, through me, sustaining me somehow. A kind of a paradox. Yes, the bad is there as well (the other side of the coin). But this, too, only goads me on to a rich life of pursuing the other. For my sake, our sakes, and…yeah…for the sake of God.
But alas, this is probably spilling back into the last conversation. Thanks for the chance to think about these things again.
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