Seeing God’s Spirit everywhere in the world

I sit with Brother Martin Gonzales, over sixty years a monk and reflecting on the nearness of life’s end. We are at Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey on a day when the perfume of magnolias stretches across the way and birds sing, as he reiterates words he likes to share: “I don’t care what anyone says, but the spirit world is the real world. Just think about your life. I mean, at one point you weren’t. Just think about that, because most people don’t. At one point, you weren’t. And you have this spirit…” Here he talks about the body as different from spirit, referring to our collection of cells constantly dying and changing, transforming us from youthful to elderly; the cells that started with our parents. “Your parents made you,” he continues, “but the spirit part of you came from somewhere else. They didn’t give it to you.”

In the story of “Jacob and the angels,” Jacob journeys on the road from Beersheba to Haran when he stops to camp. As he sleeps, he dreams of a stairway connecting heaven and earth, with spirit-beings traversing the rungs of the ladder—up and down. Then God speaks to him of the relationship God has with Jacob’s people, reminding him how they will thrive. Beside himself with terror and wonder, Jacob wakes. He exclaims, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it! … How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Gen 28:16–17). He builds a pillar-altar at the site to mark Beth-El, the house of God.

The collection of stories that is the Bible is also, in its anthological form, a mega-narrative chronicling a movement of human understandings of God. At its core, this movement is the slow drawing-close of God, with views of God as remote, above, or far away gradually giving way to understandings of God as not only near but also within, or in-herent in creation. Christian theologians who later reflect on the story will come to see the soul as the house of God, and the Christ as the very essence of God seeded throughout creation and brought to awareness through the intuition of this man named Jesus, who came to recognize it in himself and surrender to it, and thus to speak and act as one with God. It is truly a remarkable progression!