“…in Him we live, move and have our being…”Acts17:28
Embracing a reality that God is present everywhere all the time — God’s presence, constant communion with Him—must define the journey.
How to believe in a God who is “everywhere present and filling all things” is a very different way of life than to believe in a God who is “out there.”
Rejecting the reassuring lie of a two storey existence and embracing the reality of a one-story universe has profound implications. Leaving the two-story world to enter a one-story world; we move from the realm of abstraction to the realm of living.
I have not “arrived”. I am currently residing “between”— a liminal space. Mark Geil says, in this space, “…we step outside what we know and see and realize there is something else, something beautiful and mysterious.”
Liminal space is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation where we can begin to think and act in new ways. It is where we are betwixt and between, in transition, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next. We usually enter liminal space when our former way of being is challenged or changed—perhaps when we lose a job or a loved one, during illness, at the birth of a child, or a major relocation. It is a graced time, but often does not feel “graced” in any way. In such space, we are not certain or in control.
The very vulnerability and openness of liminal space allows room for something genuinely new to happen. We are empty and receptive—blank tablets waiting for new words. Liminal space is where we are most teachable, often because we are most humbled. Liminality keeps us in an ongoing state of shadowboxing instead of ego-confirmation, struggling with the hidden side of things, and calling so-called normalcy into creative question.
It’s no surprise then that we generally avoid liminal space. Much of the work of authentic spirituality and human development is to get people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough that they can learn something essential and new.
Richard Rohr
Encountering the one-storey life has been like an Easter egg hunt— discovering and gathering. Each encounter reveals something beautiful and mysterious. It is like trying to solve a jig-saw puzzle without a picture of the completed puzzle. Unclear how the pieces fit together, I eagerly anticipate God’s presence and working in the “here and now” of the first-story will lead me in the right way.
Following are some “pieces”I am grappling with in the here and now of a one-story world .
If you are interested in delving deeper into the one-storey life, “Christianity in a One-Storey Universe” by Fr Stephen Freeman has been a helpful resource for me.
Realm of the Living – ultimate reality1 “pieces” from Christianity in a One-Storey Universe
The Christian faith is that God is with us. The christian life is lived moment by moment in union with God and in harmony with nature which God has rendered the bearer of the holy and the place of communion. Living a one storey life can be described as simply living here and now. It is being present to God Who is present to us.
In “a one story universe the “really real” presence of God, is experienced”—”here and now”. Living n a two-story universe God was an illusion of something real… true but unreal.. superficial and ineffectual — a mirage.
Speaking:
Speaking in a one-storey manner, words from the two-storey world are transmuted by the reality of God everywhere present.
Providence, God’s involvement with everything that is, cannot be avoided.
Incarnation
Eat, drink, abide. Words that are very here and now, though they change the nature of here and now.
Sovereignty
Trinity
Communion— Eucharist
Doing Life
As we move our Christian life Out of the realm of abstraction and into the realm of living:
- We pray rather think about prayer.
- We trust God rather than discussing the concept of rusting God.
- We act on the basis of faith rather than spending time talking bout the importance of faith.
- We make every effort to embrace God as good and at work in all things.
- we bring our faith into this blessed first storey doing here what we were commanded to do : pray, give, forgive, love, clothe the naked, feed the hungry …
- It is in such straightforward activities rather than in the abstract that we will find Christ, God is with us and has come to abide in us. That truly makes this storey the first.
- Suddenly in dwelt by Someone Whom even the universe cannot contain, that reality changes us.
The more truly sacramental becomes the Christian life, the more thorough grounded It is in the God-Who-is-among-Us. Such a God is indeed. “everywhere present and filling all things.” Our options are between such a Testament, or a God who is no God at all for He is removed from us anyway.
Challenges of the one-storey world
In the one-storey life Christ reveals both hell and paradise.
One of the great difficulties of our one-storey world — It’s not that we on the first floor and that’s all there is-it’s that we live on the first floor and we don’t know the half of it. We do not realize the true nature of where are or when we are. the battlefield of our spiritual life remains within our own heart. We labor in the land where heavenly wickedness does its battle: the human heart.
The only thing first- storey Christianity can do: Keep his commandments and fall down and worship- for God is with us.
STILL ON THE JOURNEY
- 1“pieces” from Christianity in a One-Storey Universe