Feral

“Spirituality is the active pursuit of the God you didn’t make up.”
~ Barbara Brown Taylor’s Sufi friend, Judy, Holy Envy

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Where is your God? Where does he live?

If your first answer is ‘in heaven,’ then I think you might be following the wrong blog. Stick around. Who knows… you might like it here.

If you are indeed at the correct address of the interwebs, then I can probably guess your initial answers, but I won’t presume. Here are just a couple of mine (you might recognize a few):

• Everywhere, everywhen, everyevery, soaking the cosmos to the very core
• Sitting quietly at the center of my soul, also yours, also your most loathed politician’s
• In the eyes of the next person I see
• Under that rock, that leaf, that puddle
• Holding the universe together with the very web of his being
• Inside outside me

They’re all good answers. Mine and yours. I don’t know that there is a wrong answer, so long as your answer doesn’t include an ‘only.’ No onlys allowed.

But actually, that’s not the question I was really asking. What I really want to know is, where does your life, your beliefs, your actions, your being show God to be? Where do you keep your God?

And if we’re honest, the answer is likely to be:

In this here box that I’ve built.

If we’re honest, we keep God all boxed up. We keep him in the boxes that we’ve inherited from those who have shaped us, because that’s where he was when we found him, so that will forevermore be where he is found. Sometimes those boxes of God that we were given proved to not actually be quite ours, they didn’t fit quite right, so we set about to rectifying the situation, but rather than peering out over the edge of the imperfect box into the vastness of the outside world, we constructed another box inside, one shaped more like us, but in truth even more restrictive.

We are box builders of the highest order, we who pursue religion of pretty much any stripe.

If we’re honest, the God that we claim, that we love, that we follow, that we worship, that God is one confined to more boxes than we can count, a nesting doll of wonky mirrors, every one taking the unfathomable truth of the Source of All Being and shrinking it down into something like us. Something palatable, digestible, containable. Something tame.

Damn, we’re good at it.

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I’m not saying that it wasn’t inevitable, all these boxes. We’re finite creatures, and not so great at wrapping the old noggins around things so far beyond our ken. At many levels, we were destined to shrink God into something we could fathom.

But that habit of shoving God into boxes is one that takes off like a rocket and before we know it we’re moguls of boxing business, professional boxers, the students of the box, the world’s foremost experts on the history and intricacies of boxes everywhere, and we have lost all concept of what we think we’ve captured in those boxes to begin with.

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What if we peered–ever so carefully–over the edge of just one of our boxes, and considered that what we saw out there in the wilds was just as much God as the tiny bits we’ve captured and domesticated inside–or, as the case just may be, even more? What if we let God out of our one little box, if we let him expand to fill the spaces we’ve cordoned off, if we allowed him to stretch his limbs a bit?

What if we stretched our limbs a bit, if we expanded to fill those bigger spaces?

More life. More love. More God. One box at a time.

It’s time to love louder. Burn the damned boxes.