Swimming in God

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

(John 14:15-21) – "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. "I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

 

I have a friend named Scott who loves to scuba dive. His favorite experience is to go to a point where the shelf of the ocean drops off very severely, a mile or so straight down. From there he swims out and down until he gets to where he can look in any direction and it all looks the same -- like infinity. Out and deep enough that he can perceive no bottom and no top, no direction this way or that, suspended in a silent womb of sensory depravation. He says that is where he feels closest to God. Wrapped in the life of the ocean, he is one with it. The ocean pervades all, surrounds his total being. The water that cradles him is simultaneously touching every shore at once all around the world, supporting ships and tankers, breathing and cleaning and feeding the entire planet's life.

In more than one way, water is like God. Think of how water fills all spaces, flowing into all of the inbetweens, every nook and cranny. By its presence water changes everything, interacting in subtle yet persistent ways. A persistent drip can melt rocks and carve canyons. And every thing the water touches affects the water as well in some relationship, changing the water's color or taste or texture. Yet the water remains water; the fish remains fish; the shore ebbs and flows.

Like water, God is pervasively present, flowing in, around and thru all life, filling spaces and changing everything with a subtle touch. Pervading us without displacing us. As Paul quotes the Greek poet, it is God "in whom we live and move and have our being." Touching the deepest depths of us, the invisible soul of our true selves, our deepest consciousness below thought and feeling -- God is. Touching our edges also, our interactions with the world in an ebb and flow like the boundary between ocean and shoreline.

God is omnipresent. God's power is exercised in presence. The God "in whom we live and move and have our being" is equidistant from everything that is in the universe. Everything is present to God, therefore all things are at the center because God centers all.

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Another metaphor. David Steindl-Rast says, "We may think of spirituality as the highest frequency of life power, set along the larger bandwidth of life that oscillates as one. If we stay with this image, we may envisage our relationship ...to God ...as the grounding of the life-current. ...Religion ties us again to our own depth, which is one with the fathomless depth from which the whole universe wells." (Solving the God Problem, "Spirituality and Health," June, 2005) The Spirit of God pervading us without displacing us.

Right now I know that radio frequencies from KUAF are moving right through our bodies invisibly and silently -- omnipresent. If we were wired like a radio receiver we could hear KUAF inside of us. Maybe God is so close to us that we have become habituated to God's presence, and thus deaf and blind to the presence of the divine. Experiencing God may be as simply difficult as it must be for a fish to experience water. But if God is pervasively present, the only place to experience God is in the present.

In every present moment, God touches the world, drawing us toward our highest good in this particular time and in this particular place. Within the limits of our particular selves and the circumstances of the moment, God's energy is always present, offering to us whatever good is possible, moving us ever so subtly toward wholeness.

Sometimes circumstances are so broken and tragic that the best that God can offer to us is simply bad. But if we have courage enough to move even with that, the next option may be a little better. Each moment is a dance with God. We receive energy from God; we return energy to God. Whatever we choose to do with each moment, it is our response to God, actualizing the possibilities God has set before us. Each choice sets the context for the next moment with its possibilities. Whenever we cooperate with God, we become co-creators of the future with God, setting the boundaries for the possibilities of the next moment. And, of course, we can always resist God, distorting the guidance of God, refusing the possibility of the moment. Habitually resisting God tends to narrow the range of possibility for goodness and to limit our good options for the future. However much we resist God, we cannot defeat God, any more than we can drain the ocean.

How do we hear God? How do we know and understand God in the present moment?

I want to borrow a clue from psychology. The psychologist Abraham Maslow noticed that most of the energy of study in his field was centered around treating mental and emotional illness. "What makes us psychologically ill?" He decided to ask the question the other way -- "What is it that makes us psychologically healthy?" What he discovered was that people with outstanding creativity, inner strength and resilience have one characteristic in common: mystical experiences. He described a mystical experience as "a sense of the sacred glimpsed in and through the particular instance" of the present moment.

Maslow found that for wider acceptance he had to change his language to sound less religious, and so we have the now familiar concept of the "peak experience." A peak experience is one in which you are wide awake, fully alert, fully alive, living without fear. It is the experience that the universe is of one piece and you are part of it. In a peak experience, conflicts and polarities seem to be transcended by a deep sense of belonging. It is described as having the qualities of truth, goodness, beauty, integrity, peace, simplicity.

I have a friend who swims during his lunch hour. Sometimes the rhythm of his breathing, the motion of his arm moving past his ear, the union of water and body puts him into a place where time disappears, where he is fully present in the water, with the breathing, through the alternating push and pull of the swim. He is one with all that is present. It is invigorating, he tells me.

I remember a tennis game when I could see the ball with such clarity that I knew where it was going before it left my partner's racket, and my whole body moved instinctively toward it with such fluid harmony that it seemed as though the racquet hit the ball without my conscious intervention.

Such aliveness can happen any where, any time. God is everywhere. Peak experiences, mystical experiences happen. Focused on a book, singing a hymn, rocking a child, driving a car, adding a column of numbers, greeting a customer, eating a meal, organizing a committee, looking at a bug. Suddenly we are alive, alert.

It's like a fish suddenly seeing and knowing water.