The God Who Is Happening

The nature of God is not best approached as a concept to be defined but as a presence to be encountered—continually, intimately, and unavoidably present in the unfolding immediacy of each moment. God is not elsewhere, nor was God ever simply a distant initiator of existence. Rather, God is the very aliveness of being itself, the infinite mystery manifesting as our breath, our sensations, our longings, our griefs, and the very texture of the world around us. As was said, “creation is absolute and perpetual”—not something that happened, but something that is happening—and we are not spectators to this reality but participants in it, constituted by it. God is the presencing of presence itself.

To experience God in the immediacy of our everyday lives begins with a deep shift in perception, a contemplative seeing. This is not about acquiring new knowledge or fixing ourselves morally; it is about allowing the veil to lift just enough to behold what has always been true: that we and all things arise in God. The child’s laughter, the ache in your chest, the pigeon cooing on your porch, the conversation that lingers into silence—each of these is the announcement of divine generosity poured out and given as your life. Each moment is an annunciation, a birth, a death, a resurrection—not metaphorically, but in actuality, if we are quiet enough to notice.

When we say “God is within and beyond,” we are pointing toward a mystery that can’t be dissected. Sometimes God within us moves out toward the beyond, and sometimes God beyond us floods inward—like two shooting stars crossing through our consciousness. But ultimately, there is no border. There is no gap. The felt sense of separation is real to us, but not true in the ultimate sense. It’s the source of our fear, our sorrow, our violence. Yet even in our forgetfulness, God does not become absent; the divine continues to pulse through everything that is, waiting for our return to awareness.

We experience this reality not by striving but by surrender—surrendering our demand to understand, our compulsion to control, and our fear of the unresolved. Instead, we bear witness. We allow life to become transparent to the mystery that saturates it. We listen for the music behind the words, we feel the silence underneath the noise. The practice is not about explanation but about attentiveness. To sit still, to walk slowly, to hear rain as if for the first time—these are thresholds to the Real.

So when we ask, “What is the nature of God?” we are invited into a response that is not an answer but a way of being. It’s a reverent listening. A humble beholding. A wordless knowing. And when we live from that place, when we allow that unexplainable divinity to shine forth from the very ordinariness of our days, we are no longer separate. We are no longer seeking. We are simply here. Alive in God. Awake in this.