How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere captures for a general audience the spiritual shift away from a God “up there” and “out there” and towards an immanent divine right here. It’s built around the personal journeys of a close-knit group of prominent contributors. Their spiritual visions of immanence, sometimes called “panentheism,” are serving as a path of spiritual return for a growing number of seekers today. Contributors include Deepak Chopra, Richard Rohr, Rupert Sheldrake, Matthew Fox, and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Telling ourselves that “everything happens for a reason” may be comforting but there is a minority voice in the Bible that screams out that it “just ain’t so!” In Job, Ecclesiastes, and much of the Proverbs, we find a rational counter argument to other witnesses that insist that God is active in human history and that there is a divine plan that justifies human suffering. This progressive church chooses to accept that Job got it right. Things don’t happen for a reason unless we can choose to bring meaning to the events.

The belief that humankind, created in the image of god, is the center and purpose of the universe, has been smacked down over the last 500 years by three revolutions in human self-awareness. The first was the Copernican discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe. Prior to Copernicus publishing his theory in 1543, the medieval worldview imagined that all the heavenly bodies revolved around earth and humanity, while god pushed them in their orbits through the sky. Today, thanks to Hubble, we gaze in fascination at photos of galaxies in outer space. We are not the center of the universe.

What we we think is perfection, and what Jesus and the ancients meant by it, are different. When he said, “Be perfect, even as God is perfect,” he did not mean without error; or, as some have assumed, as merely complete in who you are (as if one’s own uniqueness is different from another’s, and that everyone needs to only be true to their own selves).

Today I am talking with author Josh Grisetti about his very unorthodox near death experience. He uniquely terms his event as an hallucination with the God in his head, which occurred after a nearly lethal drug interaction while undergoing a dental procedure.

In a late night session on February 7, 2017, during Jeff Session’s confirmation hearing for U.S. Attorney General, just weeks after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the United States Senate voted to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren after she read comments made decades earlier by Edward Kennedy and Coretta Scott King that criticized the civil rights record of Senator Sessions. Warren was censured because Senate Rule XIX prohibits ascribing “to another senator or to other senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator.” To silence her, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell led a party-line vote that forced Senator Warren to take her seat and refrain from speaking. McConnell later said “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

If God is love, if love is an integral part of God’s essence, then God must act with and by love — no exceptions. If God does not condone violence, injustice, hatred, and vengefulness in humanity, then God would need to live up to at least as high of a standard.

Our conception of God needs to be revised if it does not lead us to emphasize the virtues of compassion, peacefulness, justice, mercy and love in God and in ourselves.

God, you made your good creation and you hold it in your care —
From each starry constellation to each forest under-layer.
Tiny creatures, mountain splendor, rivers, lakes and ocean floors —
You are loving, kind and tender in your care for what is yours.

Robin Meyers is Senior Minister of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City.

These interviews were conducted by ProgressiveChristianity.org at a Westar meeting as part of a series on Christianity, spirituality, religion, church, God, Jesus, sacred community, social justice, youth, and social transformation. More to come soon!

As the moment for humanity’s Grand Awakening draws ever closer the energy of the Tsunami of Love continues to intensify to assist you in your preparations for this most wondrous event. I know that many of you have doubts, because it seems that you have been waiting for this divinely promised event for a very long time, while chaos and conflict throughout the world seems to be increasing and intensifying. You do have a lot of issues to resolve, each and everyone of you presently incarnate as a human, before the awakening can occur. It is a question of acknowledging all that you are aware of having thought, said, or done that is not in alignment with God’s Will, namely judgment, bitterness, resentment, hatred etc., and the letting go of any right you feel you have for restitution for wrongs done to you.

God and I began our hike at the arroyo behind the museums at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico.  I was not particularly aware of my Companion as my boots imprinted themselves on the fine sand.  It was a hot day, for which I prepared by soaking my shirt and handkerchief in water.  Zig-zagged up the trail of pale dust, then along a ridge stippled with rocks, spiky yucca, and scrubby junipers.  The vast gouge of the Piedra Lumbre basin appeared to the west, streaked with layers of red sediment.  The yellow-orange walls of the canyons above Ghost Ranch to the east glowed in the roaring sun.  Clouds slowly boiled out of pale mist high in the northern sky.  Shadowed cliffs radiated back-lit color.  I turned my slack-jawed head one way to drink in the beauty, then turned, turned again, and on returning my gaze discovered fresh aspects of light and shadow: never the same view twice.  

Has humankind invented God to look after life after death? One can say this in connection with many of the Gods in the Bible and elsewhere in man’s evolution, but is there a Creator of the Universe? If so, after studying the cosmos, one must conclude that it must be entirely different from what we have assumed, so far. If so, this might explain why we have produced such a cruel world with most of us thinking only of our own survival. But, again, there are so many examples of selflessness and good!

A denomination not known for controversy is taking stances on issues such as assault weapons, universal health care and President Donald Trump’s border wall.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) adopted a declaration during a meeting of the denominations leaders in St. Louis to stake out positions on several social issues, leaving it up to the church’s 10,000 congregations and 1.7 million members to decide whether to stand behind the declaration.

I have been on a journey much like John Spong’s for almost 67 years. I have followed his work over the years with interest and used to be on his regular mailing list. I just finished his “last Book” and found it both enlightening, and frustrating. I appreciated the insights and the bio of his and our shared journey, and resonate with many of his conclusions. Where I part company is his “insight” that we human’s alone have “self-consciousness,” which allows only us to grasp: life, death, fear, joy, God, spirit etc. Sadly Spong trots out the age old notion that humans are mentally & spiritually superior to the “lower” beings on our planet. This attitude has justified our human lethal domination of this planet to the detriment of every species including human beings. Worst of all it is a conjecture that can neither be proven nor disproven (which I personally think is the easier of the two tasks) because we humans lack the ability to communicate with our fellow travelers. Stating this opinion and maintaining it as “fact” throughout the book diminishes, Bishop Spong’s logic and conclusions, because it is so basic to every argument that follows. I pray that as we humans expand our own spiritual consciousness we will outgrow all of the assumptions we’ve nurtured about our innate superiority.

In the modern age science has been winning its centuries—old battle with religion for the mind of man. The evidence has long seemed incontrovertible: Life was merely a product of blind chance—a cosmic roll of an infinite number of dice across an eternity of time. Slowly, methodically, scientists supplied answers to mysteries insufficiently explained by theologians. Reason pushed faith off into the shadows of mythology and superstition, while atheism became a badge of wisdom. Our culture, freed from moral obligation, explored the frontiers of secularism. God was dead.

Why does God exist? How have the three dominant monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—shaped and altered the conception of God? How have these religions influenced each other? In this stunningly intelligent book, Karen Armstrong, one of Britain’s foremost commentators on religious affairs, traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present.

I  read Bishop Spong’s fine book “Unbelievable”; in one chapter, he talks about advances in science (such as the size of the universe) that have forced us to reconsider the tenets of our faith that were codified before those things were understood.

I also read Neil Degrasse Tyson’s most recent book: he says the universe is estimated to be 90 billion light-years across and contains 100 billion galaxies.

My question: where is God in the universe? Is God bigger than the universe? How can God be both so big but small enough for us to have a chance of comprehension?