The Lord is here; his kingdom has come. (Part 7)

The Lord is here; his kingdom has come

Part 7: Starting to examine precisely what we mean by “The Lord is here”

I have gone quite a long way round in explaining how much I don’t know about God, and in trying to lay out a broad framework for how I experience God’s presence. I will try once more to focus in on what I mean by, “The Lord is here”. What I will try and describe has been experienced by countless people, but there are many different ways to experience God, so, while what I will describe is common, I am outlining my own experience.

In this wonderful world, in this vale of tears, in the material universe created by the Big Bang, and human society shaped by evolution and the history of civilisation, we can meet with God and experience his presence. Sitting in the room now, with table and chairs, and a window looking out into the garden, and other people as they come in and out, the Lord is also here. Of course, I cannot see him or hear him, and so it is quite a puzzle to clarify what do I mean by saying the Lord is here? In some ways, I put it as though God is an additional item in the room. There is a table and chairs and a window and sometimes other people – oh, and also God. I don’t think there is any escaping this way of thinking – or, at least, this way of talking. An atheist sees the table and chairs but denies that God is also present.

I am completely convinced of the independent, objective reality of God as a person. The alternative to this is to understand God as a dimension of my mind. He is a part of what I do. We might say that God, or my sense of the presence of God, is an aspect of my way of looking at the world. In this sense, God did not create me; I created God. God is an idea or a set of values which I have adopted and I impose these criteria onto what actually exists – that is, onto material reality – and in doing so “I see God”, because God is the lens through which I look at the world. This would be a pretty satisfying way of understanding God, and it would certainly make more sense, or, at least, be easier to believe in, than believing in an independent, spiritual agent who is the person of God. There would be no difficult questions to answer in such an understanding of God, and anyone and everyone could immediately opt into it (if it suited their preferences) because “faith in God” could be understood in an entirely secular way. “God” is the way some people choose to look at the world. If you do, you see God everywhere; if you don’t he is invisible – or, rather, he is non-existent.