This might not always be obvious but a tension often arises the moment we begin to speak about God.
There is, on the one hand, a danger in defining God too clearly even though we might do it in the name of meaningful discussion – and that danger is that we risk reducing what cannot be contained.
On the other hand, if we do not clarify what we mean by God, we risk speaking past one another – each of us hearing something different while using the same word.
So rather than take either of those rocky roads, I’d like to start somewhere else – somewhere that’s right in the heart of our experience. It’s the place where mystics almost always start.
A Mystical Tradition
There is a long tradition within Christianity that suggests that what we seek is not far from us. Augustine spoke of God as closer to us than we are to ourselves. Meister Eckhart suggested that what we search for is already present, though rarely recognized.
Now, if that is even partly true, it offers us a really useful and perhaps more productive path of inquiry so that our question no longer is, What is God? but What is it like, at times, to encounter what we call God?
There are moments of quiet, often fleeting, when something in our usual way of being shifts.
You may have noticed this.
A moment where the constant commentary in the mind subsides. Where you are not rehearsing your response, not defending, not comparing, not judging, not categorizing, and not even naming.
A moment where you are not standing apart from what is happening but simply, uncomplicatedly, within it.
In such moments, when, for instance, our gaze falls upon someone, the usual designations of role, category, agreeability, risk assessment and so on just fall away. And in their place, an almost child-like, unfiltered seeing of the unnamed being, no longer an ‘other’.
Or, in unexpected moments of stillness that we helplessly fall into, say, when nature does her daily serenade of setting her sun over the ocean, the sense of being a separate observer loosens,
And in that soft diffusing of self and world, something changes.
The obligation To Care and the Unlearned Desire to Care
In these moments, and in their spacious afterglow, we might notice that the need to care and be kind, for instance, no longer holds meaning. Instead, we might notice that our posture, both physical and psychological, rearranges itself into a mode of unlearned caring.
It comes with a kind of clarity – not imposed, not commanded – but spaciously felt.
That felt sense is what some philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty have suggested perception actually is – not an abstract act of meaning-making by a detached subject over an objectified other, but rather, a felt recognition within the body that is already meaningful.
It’s a recognition from inside the relationship of our body with the world and with another – the I-Thou relational field of experience that the philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber, talks about. Quite distinct from the I-It relationship in which I see you as an object ultimately in my service.
I think that most of us have experienced such moments of instant, felt recognition that are not mediated by thought – where we are not outside the world looking in, but already woven into it and knowing as and from it:
Now, if I were to describe this experience post hoc, I might use words like stillness, or openness, or boundlessness or truth. Or even Love or God.
Its immediacy can be startling, yet in some quiet way, it feels undeniably true.
This direct experience, in which these moments feel so complete, so fulfilling, where nothing feels missing is nothing less than mystical. It finds a striking echo with Simone Weil’s observation – that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.
Attention, taken to its highest point, is the same as prayer
Simone Weil
A different kind of More
But the mystical nature of this type of experience doesn’t stop there. It continues to unfold as the realization that while the moment is complete, it is never exhausted.
No matter how long you remain with it or in it, it neither empties out nor becomes fully known, fully used up or fully grasped.
There is always more.
Not more to top up a depleting source. But more of something that is inexhaustibly unfolding.
Gregory of Nyssa spoke of this as an endless deepening – not because God is distant, but because what is present can never be exhausted.
So here we arrive at something like a paradox:
What is given is already whole. And yet, what is whole is never finished.
Now, when we have this kind of experience, if only occasionally – that is the experience of an unlearned and unadjudicated kindness and caring – we’re likely to notice that it doesn’t come unaccompanied. Rather, it caries the gravitas of a realization which may take the form of this question:
Why, if God is within, do we rely so heavily on rules?
Why is moral life so often structured around what we must do, and must not do?
Why do we need to be told to love, to forgive, to care?
Why must we be told to love, to forgive, to care?
Perhaps because we do not yet truly see.
For when attention becomes radical, stripped of grasping and ego, love does not need to be commanded; it answers of itself.
We have learned not to Trust
Part of the answer, I think, is pretty straightforward:
It’s because we do not live from this awareness. Or at least not all the time.
Our attention is typically fragmented, hijacked by habit, by fear, by craving, by the need to secure ourselves.
And so we turn to rules – social rules, cultural rules, rules of justice and conduct and so on.
But I think that there is something else that turns us away from these moments of inner awareness and turns us toward external rules. Something that we might be reluctant to admit to:
That it is not only that we do not live from this awareness. It is that we have learned not to trust it.
We often say that God is within us…but we do not live as though that were enough.
We are comforted by the belief that God is essential, necessary. But we don’t really act as if God is sufficient.
necessary but not sufficient
It can seem, at times, as though we treat God as essential, necessary – but not sufficient. As though something else must always be added before we can trust how to live. And to love.
And so we turn, again and again, to what feels more stable – rules, systems, structures – not because they are more trustworthy…but because we have learned to trust them more.
These rules have been enforced, repeated, reinforced and embodied so that they become the filters through which we see and try to manage and even control the world.
It’s true that at first, these rules might be helpful. They might guide us when we are confused. They might restrain us when we are reactive. They might offer clarity where perception is still untrained and unclear.
But over time, something begins to happen. What was once a guide can become a substitute – no longer orienting perception, but replacing it. And in certain moments – especially moments of strain or crisis – the limits of this reliance become glaringly visible.
Consider a moment of conflict – A rule may tell you to be patient, to be kind, to forgive. But in the immediacy of hurt, resentment rises faster than the rule can be applied.
Or what about a situation of moral complexity where no rule quite fits. Where telling the truth may harm, and withholding it may also harm – a moral test set by the philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, and for which his radical response was that telling the truth is non-negotiable.
Or consider a moment of crisis – grief, loss, fear – where the structures that once felt stable no longer feel quite so secure.
In such moments, rules can become discomfortingly thin. Not wrong…but insufficient.
They do not carry the full weight of what is required.
And when we rely on them alone, one of two things often happens:
Either we force ourselves into compliance – becoming rigid, strained, disconnected, oppressive…Or we quietly bypass them – justifying ourselves, bending them, reshaping them to fit what we were already going to do.
In both cases, something is lost or at least missed.
Not because rules have failed entirely…but because they were never meant to carry the whole weight of moral discernment.
the more pressing question
So the question returns, more urgently now:
What would it mean – not to abandon rules – but to no longer rely on them as primary?
What would it mean to trust, even slightly more, that deeper clarity we sometimes glimpse?
Because when that awareness is present – if even faintly- something shifts in very practical ways.
For instance, in conflict, you are less driven to win and more able to actually hear and sincerely seek to understand – not because you are following a rule, but because the other person is no longer abstracted and objectified.
In moments of irritation, the reaction still arises, but it does not fully take over.There is space around it, buffering it. Someone I know calls it patience.
In decisions, there is less frantic calculation and more attentiveness to what is actually quietly being called for.
Caring becomes less performative and more immediate rather than a morally adjudicated obligation.
And perhaps most quietly: The need to constantly justify yourself begins to soften.
Not because you have become morally perfect but because you are less divided and conflicted within yourself.
So perhaps the persistence of rules does not tell us everything about morality. Rather, perhaps it tells us something about ourselves.
About how we have been formed.
About what we have learned to trust.
About how easily we lose contact with what we, at times, clearly glimpse.
And so, this question remains for me, and hopefully for you too – not as imperative, but as invitation:
What would it mean to trust, even slightly more, those moments in which nothing is lacking and nothing is exhausted?
What would it mean to live – not perfectly, not constantly – but even occasionally, from that place where what is given is already whole yet endlessly deep?
Because if that is what we mean when we speak of God within, then perhaps our calling is not so much to obey… but to learn to see and to listen and to trust what God within makes quietly clear.
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