Communion With All

One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in all. Ephesians 4:6

We easily confuse religious activity with communion with, and in, God. When we do, we assume that God and fellowship with God is found more in some activities than others. We are dividing our world into the sacred and non-sacred, and are imagining a God who is not omnipresent.

Certainly our encounter with God is not the same, or even apparent, in all we do. But this has more to do with us than whether God is truly present. We are the ones who are not really present in the activities in which we do not experience communion with God. God is there, but we are not.

We have to think of our being present not as when we are the one simply having an experience. Our true presence has to do with our being our true self, the one who is intrinsically in relationship with God and conscious of that union. That self always finds God present.

What we call religious activity, which is not really any more participatory in the divine than other actions, but where we may be more attuned to God, is valuable as a way of getting us to become aware of the divine reality in everything. Religious activities are remedial training for life, not the height of spirituality.

Spiritual life can be described as the degree to which we relate to what is beyond us, the infinite, even though we are finite beings. Spirituality is that awareness and participation with what transcends myself, and manifests as perceiving an interconnectedness, or relationship, with all that is.

As much as we view ourselves in relationship with the expansive reality of all things, the source and continuing existence of reality that we call God, we are living spiritually. Without that, we are living in what Paul calls a fleshly manner, a mere animated being with no real sense of the transcendent.

Given this understanding, we recognize the meagerness of thinking religious activity is communion in and with God. If that were true, God is not the ground of all being, the source and presence of all we experience, but only the grounding of religious activities, such as prayer, worship services, or reading scripture. These types of activities would be the only places to find communion if God were only there. But God is omnipresent.

We don’t commune with the God of church buildings, worship services, or prayer times. Instead, through those activities we are learning to find ourselves as resting and having existence in the eternal Love which is all and in all.