Where is God?

In Diana Butler Bass' book, Grounded, a central questions is "where is God" today?  As she elaborates, our cultural landscape has changed.  We are connected in global community, we turn to the Internet for easy and instant answers.  The ground upon which we once easily identified God's presence has shifted.  Thus: to relocate God is to reground our lives.

In so many ways this is not a new impulse.  Lent calls us to this "re-grounding" by reminding us that we are dust and to dust we will return.  As Bass gives witness, though she has struggled with faith and theology often in her life, she says "God showed up" at several junctures in her life.  That is something that resonates with me on this day, the anniversary of losing our first three children to pre-term labor.

Before that deep loss, grief, and re-grounding of our lives, the God I knew came from my study of theology and what the Church taught me. However, when I was lying on an operating table, completely bereft of emotion, energy, almost all life, God showed up.  That really is the only way to put it.  It was a life-changing experience.  It gave me a completely certain assurance of all those things we proclaim in worship: God is good, God is powerful, God draws near to the broken-hearted.  It is the only real blessed assurance we can have in this life.

As we wander through life we are tempted to forget this promise and reality.  We become distracted and in so many ways we seemingly lose God.  Bass argues that with our changing concepts of God, a rebirthing of faith is happening from the ground up (not the top down).  Whereas the Church has lost its credibility to many in our society, God is still showing up and there are faithful persons willing to proclaim and live in to that reality.

While some may read into Bass' call for a spiritual revolution an effort to throw away all that has gone before, I don't see that.  As she admits: "the once thick ecclesiastical walls have proved a surprisingly porous boundary between the church and the world..." This awareness has always been present in mystics and prophets, in the Gospel proclamation itself.  

Thus, I find it a helpful injunction as we begin our Lenten journey. May we all experience a new grounding in God through our love and openness to our neighbor and to the earth upon which God has placed us.  May it be porous and its boundaries open to those we do not regularly see or hear.

God is the ground, the grounding, that which grounds us.

We experience this when we understand that soil is holy,

water gives life, the sky opens the imagination, 

our roots matter,

home is a divine place, 

and our lives are linked with our neighbors'

and with those around the globe.  

This world, not heaven,

is the sacred stage of our times.