God is nowhere. God is everywhere. God is.
These aren’t contradictions. They’re co-ordinates on a map that doesn’t exist.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence? – Psalm 139:7
The ancient psalmist asked what mystics, theologians and poets have whispered through centuries. But what if the answer is not only that God is everywhere, but that there is no where apart from God at all?
Not even the space in which the question arises is free of what we try to name.
Not even the silence between thoughts is untouched.
This isn’t omnipresence like wind in a chapel.
It isn’t that God fills space.
Space is inside God.
In every tradition, this truth shimmers like heat on the horizon.
The Qur’an says, “He is with you wherever you are.”
The Upanishads: Brahman is that which pervades and is all things.
Meister Eckhart: “God is at home. We are in the far country.”
But even these affirmations tremble within language too small.
God with us. God in us. God above us.
Each phrase still draws a line, as if God sits beside, behind, beyond.
But what if even withness is too much distance?
What if God isn’t a guest in the room,
but the architecture of being itself,
the impossibility of walls,
the fire that makes form possible?
To say God is everywhere is still to imagine “everywhere” as a cup to be filled.
But what if that very idea of cup is an illusion?
God doesn’t fill a container.
God is the overflowing that renders all containers meaningless.
Not presence in a place.
Presence as the fact of place.
Not an eye that sees all,
but the seeing, the light, the very possibility of vision.
And even that is too much.
This is where language begins to crack.
To speak of God is to feel the floorboards of thought buckle.
We say God is Being itself—and already we reduce.
We say God is not Being—and already we vanish into fog.
The truest speech may be silence.
Or a tongue that knows it’s burning.
The mystical path doesn’t give better answers.
It dissolves the need to ask.
We can’t say “God is in things,”
nor even “God is the ground of things,”
because both betray a split: source and stream, flame and ember.
But if the truth is more intimate—more terrifying—
then there are no “things” apart from God.
No location more or less holy.
No time before God arrives,
no exit once God departs.
There is no arriving at God.
There is no being distant from God.
There is not even a we that could move towards or away from.
So too must dissolve the cherished binaries:
transcendence and immanence,
near and far,
divine and dust.
God isn’t closer than your breath.
God is your breath,
and the lungs,
and the air,
and the silence between each inhale.
God isn’t “this” or “that.”
God isn’t even “is.”
The categories fail.
They burn up on contact.
To say God is nowhere to be found and nowhere to be lost is not a riddle.
It’s a surrender.
We don’t find God.
We don’t experience God.
For experience presumes subject and object,
a seer and the seen.
But if God is all, there is no subject left to seek,
no object left to behold.
Only the undivided blaze.
“We are part of this apartness,” I’ve written.
And God includes even that.
This isn’t pantheism.
Not panentheism.
Not metaphysical theory.
Not spiritual claim.
It’s the unravelling of every place
where theory and claim once stood.
God isn’t a thing.
Not a no-thing.
Not Being.
Not the absence of Being.
There isn’t even what is.
Only this:
the non-local, non-conceptual,
non-differentiated flame
that can’t be spoken of without lying,
and can’t be denied without lying, too.
And so we don’t end.
We vanish.
Not with a resolution, but a relinquishment.
Not with a discovery, but with the disappearance of the one who seeks.
God isn’t here.
God isn’t there.
God Is.
And that is all.
Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh
“I will be what I will be.”
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image: George Payne