The Youness of the Universe

Image: Karl Stapelfe/ESA/Hubble, NASA

This is the fundamental insight of religious theism: that the reality we encounter when we encounter reality most powerfully is a Someone, is a "you". This is the insight that the universe has a quality of "youness" to it. 

While other religious (or nonreligious) approaches may encounter an "it", the theist encounters a "you" - a "you" that we label as "God". There seems to be no way to judge the truth of an approach that finds a "you" versus an approach that finds an "it", and that might be a very fruitless thing to try to establish. But I think it helps to clarify this difference.

What theistic practices of prayer are designed to do is to open you up to a real-life encounter with the "you" - the "you" that is always and everywhere present and always available, and always seeking relationship. The sure sense of faith that theists rest upon is not some intellectual proof that the universe is designed or created, but that in the encounter of the heart we encounter one is a "you", and fundamentally one who loves. This is the most profound statement given to Moses at the story of the encounter with the burning bush - "I Am What I Am" says the voice - this is the central insight: that the encounter is with a "you" that speaks as an "I". 

We grapple for ways to talk about this, and most of us settle on a language of ecstatic love. The encounter is not observation or the receiving of information or knowledge, the encounter is erotic, bodily, ecstatic, joyous, it is love.

So the way to know God, even if the idea of God makes no sense to you, is to begin to treat the universe as a "you". Once we begin to speak to the empty space, to listen to it, to be in its presence, and to literally say in our minds: "Who are you? What are you? Do you have anything to say to me?" then we begin to hear, very dimly, the still small voice of calm.