“Where shall I go from Thy Spirit, or where can I flee from Thy Presence?” Ps. 139

“The indwelling presence of Christ, the fragrant grains of wounded incense, make our poverty rich and our brokenness whole.”  Martin Laird

“Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” The Gospels

Perhaps one of the most pernicious and poisonous faith perspectives is that there are places where God isn’t.  Consider that for a moment.  What place, event, thought or action in your life have you disassociated from the Presence of God?  And then consider the effect it had, most likely guilt, regret and shame.  How unfortunate, for there is no place and no-thing where God is not.

In ancient times the wilderness was seen as a place void of God and inhabited by demons.  Thus it should come as no surprise that with the Exile from Egypt God leads the Israelites exactly there!  The primary lesson of the forty years, in my opinion, is that God was with them through it all!  This carries over and into the life of Jesus when, after His baptism, He is led by the Spirit into the wilderness.  True, it is there that He encounters the devil, but I believe the message conveyed here is that God can be found, and in fact is found, everywhere, even and especially where one might least expect to find God!  Evidently the Desert Fathers and Mothers believed the same as they intentionally sojourned into the wilderness. It is unfortunate that the belief took root, due in my opinion to ecclesiastical desire for power and control, that God can be found only in cathedrals made by man.  More on this in future posts. 

One of the rich elements of Celtic Spirituality is the recognition that the Spirit of God dwells everywhere.  It is the reason why the Celtic cross had a circle on it, indicating the significance of sun and moon and the supernatural cycle of nature.  The Celtic Christians did not believe that nature was/is God, as some mistakenly believe (pantheism), but that God the Creator could be seen and heard and felt in creation (panentheism).  One can only wonder what the affects would have been on the world as we know it if that perspective had been assumed by Christians who saw the earth as a place in which to have dominion instead of the domain where one encountered the Spirit of the Living God, and thus to be treated with reverence and awe.

But the Presence of God is not only encountered “out there”, it is also found “in here”.  Within Us!  The Mystery of God is that Christ dwells in us. So says St. Paul.  But that means that God is found not only in our well-intentioned acts of righteousness as perhaps most of us are led to believe, but also in the poverty of our spirit and the brokenness of our lives.  Dare I say that God is found in what is seen as the sinful wilderness of our souls?

There is NO PLACE that we can flee from the Presence of God.  If we really believe what we claim then when God breathes the Holy Spirit into us, then the Spirit is living in every part of us!  The Spirit is present in our hurts and our failures and our shames and even in our temptation.  Just as the Spirit was present with Jesus.

Isaiah says prophetically that the Messiah is one who was wounded for our transgression and that he was a man of sorrows and was stricken and smitten and afflicted.  I believe that only does this mean that Jesus carried all of our sins for us, but that He is found dwelling intimately with us in the midst of our sins and sorrows and everything that wounds us! 

It is in the midst of what we see as our worst times in life that God is doing His best work!  It is in our weakness that God is strong, as St. Paul says.  It is in the wilderness that God walks most closely with us.  It is in temptation that we see His salvation.  It is in our woundedness that we receive the balm of Gilead.  It is when we are no longer able to walk that God carries us.  That’s the lesson of the familiar Christian story of the footprints in the sand.

I ask you, how true is this for you?  As you reflect on your life, or you consider your present situation, where do you see God most present?  How does that transform the regrets into reasons to rejoice?  And how does that re-frame and refocus us on the Presence of God even and especially in places where it appears absent?