The Nearness

THE DAY IS LONG, THE NIGHT IS SWEET
In emptiness, God can be found

What is God?

I don’t know.

I have been reading the book of a friend of man, Fully Alive, with eh sweet idea: Jesus came not to make us Christian, but to make us Fully Alive. In it is a chapter that skims glories of believing in the God at the start of all, God as the creator, God as the Force behind all that we know. It speaks of atheists and scientists and the chances of DNA getting all that together and the Big Bang and scientists who think the Big Bang was God happening (I’d say, God farting, but the book is not, perhaps luckily, written from my sort of humor.). God is real, or God is not real.

People believe in God or don’t believe in God.

All this you know and it don’t make no difference.

God is what you can love when you want something to love and you don’t know what to call it.

God is what you can “explain” the “big picture” with when you want to blame the starting/ creating/ beginning of “it all.”

God is a story that has enthralled millions over the ages.

Or God is the Reality that hold us all is His/ Its hands.


And still, it don’t make no difference.

I keep riffing out this grammatically incorrect phrase because it is the title of a book that will lead you closer to God than a hundred Bibles, a tale of two friends, one rich and white and learning how to give and heal and serve and the other black and illiterate and full of street wisdom understanding of life and of “real religion” and formerly homeless (he now lives with the white art dealer guy, whose amazing and love filled wife died in the book before this book. Well, didn’t die in the book. Died in Texas. Her story was reborn in the first book, Same Kind of Different as Me.)


So God is out there, or God is in us.

Don’t make no difference, no how.

Life is pulsing through us right this moment. That makes a difference. If we find God in that, or feel this living-ness as God, or sense that a God is responsible for this living-ness, that is all good.

And since I’m so slippery about “God,” why did I even subtitle this chapter: In Silence we can find God.

And looking back, that isn’t the “right” words: In Emptiness, God can be found.

Silence, emptiness, and Buddha’s question: who are you really?


It’s a good question and any set of words that you string together for the answer, won’t be an answer. So, what is left?

Ask the question and answer without words?

How can we do that?

This is meditation, perhaps, or contemplation, of “just” Being Here Now.

Think about it, a bit. Any now, is just: What Is. Any set of words to describe the table or the sky or your nose or your fingers is a set of words pulled out of the past, out of our brains and our learning. The sky will keep being whatever it is whether we call it sky or cielo or ciel or der himmel or sora, it’s that stuff up there, and up is a word, and it’s usually blue, and blue is a word, and its blue in the day, and day is a word and there’s the sun/ word up there, and there’s the sun.

See the “problem” when we try to pin down the What Is of the world, the What Is of this miracle in which we appear to be drifting, or floating, or clawing, or dancing, or scheming, or rushing through, or playing in, or working in and around and about.


It’s about you?

And me.

And what is it about?

That’s another question, for another day, and I suspect it has no answer.

But the “sun” just came “out,” and it’s time to climb on my “bicycle” and move across the Earth a little.


If my mind is soft and quiet and silent or near silent, chances are that the bike ride will bring me close to God.

Or will be God?

What do you think?


If you empty your mind of words, what do you think?

Who are you, when you empty your mind of words?

Are you still you?

Do you feel nearer to God, even if you don’t know what God is?