God
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 at 9:40AM | by Otter In Facebook, somebody asked me what my religion is like, what I think God is like...
For me, God is that part of you that feels when a lover turns her heart away, or that feels the deaths and births of people you love when you are far away.
He's the part of you that aches and will not be consoled. She's the consolation that comes with time.
God is the connection we make when we know we are living a beautiful story. She's the part of you that screams in agony when the story comes to a close, that keeps you up restless, that makes us wander from room to room as though we were searching for something that has gone and will not return.
God vibrates between people when they have faith in one another, when they trust one another with their secrets and their fears. God hums in the lovemaking of those who fall in love without meaning to, and in the yearning of the hopeless lover.
God's voice is in the space between the dying woman and the relatives gathered around, quiet as people in church.
She moves steadily between all things that have mass, drawing them together, making them one.
She abhors the vacuum and fills it with the restless energy to be something, to be more, to have more presence, more truthfulness, more life.
God rattles in the throat of the prophets who cannot take the long pragmatic view but who feel the catastrophe in every moment. She punctures the hearts of the priests who hold together by laws and rules the restless hearts of the people.
He is the agony between our freedom and our love, our desire to be ourselves and to give others more of themselves. He is the passionate patience of parenting, the angry beautiful heart of love.
"God is love," wrote the apostle John. "Whoever loves is born of God and knows God."
And all who love stand on the precipice of destruction, feeling nothing but love coil around them, holding them back, for a little while, from the edge.
Epistle of John, God, Love in Personal Reflection 
Reader Comments (6)
This post just left me speechless. Thank you.
I agree, God is love. God encompasses all the feelings we experience when we love. I remember attempting to close my heart off to love, a losing battle of course. I avoided eye contact, rarely smiled, made no new friends, and definitely didn't date. What a lonely existence it was, but more importantly I knew I had lost something so essential to who I was. I didn't call it God, but I knew it was my reason for being here and enduring this time on earth. Love, (good, bad and ugly) what a way to live.
What you say hear makes me think more of the soul, especially the way some mystics like to think of her--our passions, mind and will. I can see the presence of God in these things, that he is with us in these things, but it seems to me that God is still someone other than this. Thanks for even attempting to describe who God is to you. It made me think.
Brian, how would one know? Apart from the "phenomenology" of God, you're kind of stuck, huh?
Welcome back to the land of the living where you belong, Eavesdropper.
I've been here Otter, just eavesdropping ;)