Where Is God?

Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet Cosmonaut, was the first human to orbit Earth on April 12, 1961. He reportedly radioed, “I don’t see any God up here.” There is no record of Gargarin actually having made the comment, although then Premier Nikita Kruschev later alluded to such in a speech to the Central Committee of the CPSU. Regardless of who actually spoke the words, they were a direct rebuttal to the religious notion that God resides in a heaven that is above the Earth (and for some religions Satan resides in a hell beneath the planet’s surface). When I began this tangent, I attempted to contrast the distinctions between religion and theology. I would hope that this example serves to further illustrate that religion implicity asks the question, where is God?; if by nothing more than claiming to know where God is: e.g. heaven. Authentic theology, however, more appropriately asks, where is God not? I believe there’s more to ponder here than mere semantics. For Lent I am trying to give up those things that interfere with my relationship to and with my Creator, and an almost insurmountable obstacle to that is to somehow try to locate God. If I put God “out there” it immediately negates the personal intimacy of God everywhere. Omnipresence is no easier for the human mind to comprehend than any ultimacy, but that doesn’t really excuse my attempt to restrict or limit God’s whereabouts just so that I can feel more comfortable. To be true to my Lenten quest of connecting more fully with the Divine, I am going to have to give up any such paradigm that would allow for the comment, “I don’t see any God up here.”