Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?
Part 3: We turn to God because we feel there is “something more”.
Let us turn to the core dimension of religious experience, often expressed in symbols.
Two people view a stunning sunset. One says, “What a wonderful sunset! It fills me with awe and joy at the beauty of creation and how wonderful it is for me to be here, seeing it”. The other says, “What a wonderful sunset! It fills me with awe and joy at the beauty of creation and how wonderful it is for me to be here, seeing it – and it connects me to a sense of God’s presence and love”. The second person “sees through” the sunset to a sense of God. In an unformed faith, we have just dropped that bombshell of a word “God” into the sentence, with all its host of connotations. However, for the person newly becoming aware of the wonder of life / the grace of God, the word “God” is a label for a concept that initially has little content. So, if a new believer is looking at the sunset, what do they mean when they say that “through, or behind, or above, or beyond” the beauty of the sunset they sense the beauty of God? I think it’s much more than simply a failure to find adequate words to describe the experience. The atheist may also be lost for words to describe the beauty and joy that the sunset evokes. What the believer is grasping after to express is that, no matter how awesomely, joyfully wonderful their experience of the sunset is, they are experiencing more than the totality of what a beautiful sunset could possibly impart to us. The beauty of the sunset has connected them to a sense that the beauty of the sunset depends on, stems from, flows from a presence – as yet barely known, but for shorthand we are calling “God” – which presents “himself” (to use standard terminology) as immeasurably more beautiful than the beauty of the sunset. And then God excels in all other good qualities that the experience of a sunset might evoke.
Why should we go beyond the beauty of the sunset to posit that there might be, indeed we feel sure is, “something more”? What can be more beautiful than the beauty of the sunset? Yet to the believer, it appears to be the most natural thing in the world to not be “limited” by the sunset (extravagantly, over-flowingly unlimited to our senses as it is) but to recognise that “obviously” there is a power “behind” the sunset, which is responsible for it. And we naturally identify this power as a person. (Note: in my idea of something “behind” the sunset, I am not simply bringing God into the picture in order to explain the existence of creation – even though I feel sure this was an important factor in the early development of religion. What I am exploring is the sense that there is an additional experience in the view of the sunset that is not explained simply by pointing to the beauty of it. The experience of God is a reality – an extra dimension of the experience)
Spiritual Devotion 