FINGERS POINTING TO THE GOD WITHIN

“Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord.”

PSALM 130:1

“What you're looking for is what is looking.” ST. FRANCIS

Paul Tillich, the preeminent Protestant theologian of the last century, has a telling paragraph on knowing about God in his book The Shaking of the Foundations. I quote from the chapter entitled “The Depth of Existence”:

“The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about Him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever.”

Note that Tillich suggests that perhaps one has to leave behind all previous notions about God one has acquired in order to grasp the meaning of God as depth. I submit that Tillich's “infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of being” is what the Hindus call the Atman, what the Buddha calls the Unborn, what Zen masters call “your original face before your parents were born,” what St. Francis alludes to when he says “What you're looking for is what is looking.” It is the “I AM.” The “I AM” is primary, all else is secondary. Descartes found that he could doubt everything except his own existence, the “I AM”, for if he did not exist he could not doubt. Meister Eckhart says that, subjectively speaking, if he did not exist God would not exist for him, which is obvious if you think about it.

“I AM” is the ground from where one can say “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30). Seen from the outside as Barth sees Him, God is “Wholly Other”. Seen from the inside as mystics see Him, God is “Wholly Same”. “The eye with which I see God,” says Meister Eckhart, “is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge and one love.”

The God Within

In one of his poems the Moslem poet Rumi says he searched outwardly high and low, far and near, for God. He visited churches, temples, and even the cave where the Archangel Gabriel was supposed to have appeared to Mohammed – but all in vain. Then he turned to philosophical theology, but found it out of range of the Most High. “Finally,” says Rumi, “I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him. He was nowhere else.”

Augustine, too, in the end found God within himself. In his Confessions he says: “Late have I loved you ... you [God] were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you.” (Book X, xxviii, 38. Henry Chadwick trans.)

“If you now want and desire to draw near by faith to the life of God,” counsels Jacob Boehme, “you must enter inward to the depths within yourselves wherein Christ dwells — not without.” He who tries to find the kingdom of God outside of himself is like a poor man trying to enrich himself by counting the wealth of others, not knowing that “the kingdom of God is within” (Luke 17:21).

T. S. MONGFebruary 2015