Is God 'Out There' or Only Found Within?

This Friday on Unity.FM Rev. Dr. Thomas Shepherd's program "Let's Talk About It" will feature an interesting topic: "Praying to the Ceiling - Is God 'Out There' or Only Found Within?"

"Let's Talk About It" always has interesting themes for its programming, but this one promises to be extra intriguing, in my opinion. As a Unity student in the Unity movement I'm certainly of the belief that God is most certainly found within. The living Christ is fully present within every human being as the Divine Ground of Being, and, as such, is God immanent.

However, since God is not relegated to being present only within one individual, but is present in every individual, God is also found outside of myself in the being and life of others. I can encounter God not only through the Christ innate in myself but also in my interactions and relationships with others. The back-and-forth movement of inter-relatedness discloses God as Being, Life, and Love in my relationships with other human beings.

The Christ in me is fully God, but this presence is not all of God, it doesn't exhaust God's being. This leads me to a decisively panentheistic (all-in-God) viewpoint: God is fully in all creation, but God is also equally beyond creation. God is both immanent and transcendent. Faith in this experiential truth, for me, leads me to claim that I find God "in" myself and also "outside" myself. That is, I experience God as being part and parcel of myself, my own subjective awareness, but also not limited to me as subject -- experienced as object or that-to-which-I-relate.

I'm looking forward to hearing what Rev. Dr. Shepherd and his guests have to say about this fascinating and important topic of theology for the Unity movment.

Listen on Friday Oct. 9, 2009 at 4pm CST to "Let's Talk About It" on Unity.FM.