We can know of God, but we can never fully know God. The only way we have to know and make meaning of God are through finite, analogously bound constructs and contexts. And as such they will always be a finger pointing at the moon but never the moon itself. The task, then, is not to get caught staring at the finger but to always turn our gaze to that which it points. I don’t want language about God; I want God. Though our language is the only means we have to apprehend this incomprehensible God.

There will always be a difference between our understanding of God and God as God really is. Peter Rollins, in his book How (Not) to Speak of God, writes, “Hence revelation ought not to be thought of either as that which makes God known or as that which leaves God unknown, but rather as the overpowering light that renders God known as unknown” (17).  The term ‘God’ will always fall short of that towards which the word is supposed to point. When we fail to realize this we sustain and perpetuate idols, bowing down before our own creation rather than before the one who stands over and above all creation. We must join Meister Eckhart in his famous prayer, “God rid me of God.”

I believe that spiritual forces embody themselves in our reality, most often manifest through systemic structures, powers, and ideologies.

We live in an integrated world, with heaven and earth as one reality and the spiritual held within the physical held within the spiritual held within the physical and so on and so forth. In such a world, there is no dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual, for it all simply is. The cosmos are an integrated reality.

In this integrated reality, the meaning we make with language of “devils” and “evil spirits” are the interior reality of systemic structures, powers, and ideologies. It is the crowd overcome by the energy of the riot following their teams’ victory, the cult following of certain products, individuals, or ideologies, and the myth of redemptive violence and religion of free market capitalism that rules (and orders) our world. Our life is marked by spiritual warfare, but not a war of violence nor against pitchfork toting demons. The people of God are called to follow Jesus in a life of loving our enemies and nonviolently resisting the domination system that so easily corrupts the powers and principalities of our world and reality.

Spiritual forces embody themselves in our reality for both good and evil, manifest in Wall Street and those occupying it, Black Friday and Buy Nothing Day, the myth of redemptive violence and non-violent resistance, Mein Kampf and Mother Theresa, Jim Crow Laws and the Belhar Confession. We live in a world where everything is spiritual, the physical manifestation of an integrated reality. And it is to this life that God calls us to live into a New Reality, the Kingdom of God where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, where wolves and lambs dwell together and weapons are traded for tools of trade and harvest; we are called to be and help this world become God’s New Creation.

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I believe that the Ruach Elohim continues to breath life into all of creation.

My first experience upon entering this world was a gasping breath with my newborn lungs. My last experience in this world will be one final exhale from my aged body. And between these two points the spectrum of my life is filled the constant rhythm of in-breath and out-breath, a perpetual process that my primary participation in is to simply witness it as it happens. Without even trying, I am sustained by every breath. My awareness, or lack thereof, does not control it, but simply recognizes this life-giving act that is always with me. I breathe in, I breathe out, and I exist.

In the same way, this world is sustained by the breath of God. In the opening chapter of Genesis, the Ruach Elohim is poetically remembered breathing life into all creation with a divine “Let there be.” This “word of God” is vibration of God’s spirit hovering over the water. And this cosmic wind continues to breathe life into all of creation today, sustaining all things. For it is in God that all things live, move, and have their being. Every rock and tree and sky and sea is caught up in this divine wind and cosmic breath.

God is the transcendent wind that blows through the cosmos, an unidentifiable form and uncontrollable substance. God is the immanent breath that fills my lungs, each inhale and exhale a life-giving gift of God and the very life-sustaining presence of God. God is as close as my very breath. Or perhaps even more simply, God is my very breath. For just as the Ruach Elohim hovered over the chaotic waters of creation, God’s Spirit continues to hover over our chaotic cosmos, breathing life into and sustaining all things, the omnipresent “Let there be” in whom all things live, move, and have their being.

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I believe that God constantly creates out of something, often the formless and void tahom.

Even before the first “it is good” of the opening poetry of Genesis is a lyric referencing the formless and void, the face of the tahom, the Spirit hovering over this chaotic water. And it is from this place, a uniquely potent “something,” that creation emerges. From the face of the deep, the spirit hovering over the formless and void waters come the words, “Let there be.” Creation grows out of a chaotic-but-beautiful something.

Often we assume all chaos is bad and all order is good. However, just as the chaos of a rainforest is far better than the order of the same ground tilled into a tree farm, the face of the tahom is the beautiful chaos from which creation continues to emerge in our lives and our world. It is the cosmic compost pile, a filthy and decaying pile of “formless and void,” filled with the potential for life and new creation.

This is how the creation poem in Genesis opens. And this is what we continue to see in our life and world. We only know of a “something.” We see it all around us, in dirt and trees and flesh and phlegm. Any hypothetical nihilo will always be imagined, assumed, and hoped for, concluding that a God who creates from nothing is the only all powerful God. However, this “something” and tahomic view of the world does not diminish the power or presence of God. It does not make the “chaos” greater than God, somehow “pre-dating” and usurping God’s authority. Instead, this “chaos,” this formless and void water, this face of the tahom might be the most helpful lens through which to view God. Rather than insisting upon some “before the dawn of dawn” date in which God pulled everything out of a mystic nothing, God is the chaos of creation. God is the “something” from which creation emerges (and inversely, creation is the “something” from which God emerges). God is embedded in the created world and the created world is embedded in God. God is the breath of existence, holding all things together, the good and the bad, the chaos and the order, the formless and void, the face of the deep. This world is the word of God.

Instead of a creation-from-nothing, we live in the midst of an ever creating world that always has and always will come from something.

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I believe that our human actions continue to break and build the world around us, a seemingly perpetual domino and infinite butterfly effect.

The only world we know is a world riddled with suffering. We can dream of a utopian “once upon a time” when all was well or hope for a utopian “someday” when all will be well again. But we only ever live between these two points, knowing the world as it is and reaching for a world as it could be, striving to create “what could be” or “what should be” out of “what is.” And the “what is” finds itself saturated with suffering.

The origin of this suffering is unknowable. From our limited perspective, it simply is. Rather than tracing it to some temporal “fall,” it is the ongoing consequence of human existence, from famine to farmer’s market, total genocide to Toyota Prius. Rather than a scapegoat human disobedience, it is our ongoing actions, both good and bad, that contribute to the perpetual and infinite butterfly effect that creates the world as we know it.

I don’t believe in a fall. I believe in a falling down and a getting back up and a falling down and a getting back up and a falling down and a getting back up and so on and so forth. God is the cosmic Alfred Pennyworth, reaching a hand to an ever-stumbling world, lovingly saying, “Why do we fall down? So we might learn to pick ourselves up.” And God is always there, helping us to our feet, present with every fall and rise, ever moment of breaking and building, curse and blessing, suffering and celebrating wrought with our lives.

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I believe that all things are good, all things are fractured, and all things are being redeemed.

The narrative of scripture opens with the repetitive refrain that “it is good.” With this as our starting point we delve into a fractured world, perpetually falling apart and in constant process of redemption. The Spirit of God hovers over the chaotic waters of creation, an image that we continue to see in our world and lives today. The epistles to the first century church reminds us that in Jesus all things hold together. And the gospel of John provides the much needed nudge in the ribs, telling us that the light of Jesus is the light of all people and all creation.

Because God made it all. And God continues to make it all today. We hope for a day when God will make all things new, knowing that we are called to be both made new and join God in making all things new. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes, “This world and everything in it is a manifestation of God’s presence. Our goal and challenge is to find it and then act in such a way as to help others find it too.”

But our world is riddled with suffering and violence and other forms of dis-ease. Even still, God is present and active and never giving up. The most fractured pieces of this good creation are held and taken up by God. In the cosmos of our creator, everything belongs, even if we cannot readily see its place in the present. Every system and power, no matter how fractured or distorted, is being redeemed by God and the people of God.

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I believe that all things rest in God and God rests in all things, not always as the cause but as an incarnational presence.

One of two extremes is common: God creates good in the world but is helpless to the evil that emerges. Or God is the cause of all things, both good and evil, raining blessing and curses alike. However, I prefer a third way in which God is neither the cause nor observer the good and bad alike, but rather God is the incarnational presence of the cosmos.

Rather than a distant deity, observing the good and bad that befalls creation, God is the enmeshed spirit found in all things as all things find themselves in God. Rather than being the anthropomorphic hand from which everything comes or is sustained, God is the incarnational presence in which all things rest, for God rests in all things.

God does not cause the pain and the hurt, but God is present with it. This is incarnation: God joining us in our flesh, often messy and unkempt, celebrating and suffering alongside us. God does not cause evil, nor does God “allow” it in the way we understand control (i.e. meticulous sovereignty). God does, however, co-opt evil and non-good, turning dust, ash, and decay into something beautiful.

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