Scott’s Column: God’s Presence

Sunday I preached about God’s presence.  Though it didn’t make it into the sermon, that week I read a beautiful description of the presence of the Spirit in our lives in the book She Who Is by Elizabeth A. Johnson.  She writes that we humans experience the Spirit in a variety of ways.  It is her description of the Spirit’s presence in personal and interpersonal relationships that I rather enjoyed and want to share with you now:

Personal and interpersonal experience likewise mediates the presence and absence of Spirit to human life.  As the Bible’s love songs show, the love of God for the world is revealed through the depths of love human beings can feel for one another.  We seek and are found by Spirit in the person-creating give and take of loving relationships, in each fresh, particular discovery of the other’s beauty, in the strength of ongoing fidelity.  The anguish of broken relationships, by contrast, mediates traces of divine absence, and perhaps, divine compassion.  Moreover, the dynamism of questioning, or arriving at insight in clarity or darkness, of imagining new possibilities, of artistic and scientific creation conveys the fire of the intelligent Spirit, source of all creativity.  Finding one’s own voice, however haltingly, imparts the power of Spirit crying out.  The boldness to hear the claim of conscience and follow its deep impulses even in the face of loss; the courage to taste righteous anger and allow it to motivate critical resistance to evil; the willingness to utter the prophetic word–these occurrences inscribe the movement of the Spirit’s compassion into the ambiguity of the world.  In the sheer joy and pain of bearing, birthing, and rearing; in everyday, commonplace work; in living out freedom with its considered choices; in taking responsibility for our own life and its impact on others; in the depths of sin, despair, and emptiness; in accepting forgiveness and bestowing it; in the outbreak of joy and celebration; in befriending the stranger and caring for the truly helpless; in meeting limits and making peace with our finitude; in hoping against hope in the face of overwhelming oppression, suffering, or death or, in the absence of felt hope, in the sheer grit still to go on–the mystery of God’s Spirit, present and absent, is cogiven in every instance.