What and Where is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern Soul

by Richard La Rue Swain

I should never crowd a child in his acquisition of religious knowledge; but when he wants to know, if we ourselves know the way, it is much better to start him on the right track.

4. What does God do?

"What does God do all day?" asked a little boy of his mother.

We used to think that He made the universe in a week, and that ever since He had been keeping Sunday. During this long Sabbath we believed Him to be engaged in religious work; though He may have regulated the universe a bit now and then. Now, however, we see that nothing is finished. Even new worlds are being formed, and the old ones are constantly being changed. It is deeper truth to recognize God as making the universe all the time, to think of nature as God at work. For, should God cease working there would be no world. We used to say, and rightly, too, that the world is crammed so full of meaning and purpose that it must have had a wise Creator; that there never could have been such a world without a God. With equal propriety, we may now say that there could no more be a God without a world than a world without a God; because a God who was so indolent and purposeless as to think nothing, and feel nothing, and project nothing, would not be worthy of a second thought.

At last we have come to the point where we can see how science, in a peculiar way, has saved religion. Men have always been pondering over God's relation to the wonderful forces of nature that envelop us. They could get along pretty well with either a God or a world, but found it difficult to harmonize both thoughts. There appeared to be a spirit world over against the great lump of a dirt world. The bulk of things often seemed such a hindrance that men dreamed of deliverance by ultimately getting rid of the material universe altogether. Even God, it was thought by some philosophers, did the best He could with the stubborn clay at His disposal. When my brother was killed, I could not decide whether God or the great machine world killed him. Just when the world acted, or just when God acted, was to me a profound mystery. For, in my thought, the world was a great automatic machine, that ran entirely by itself, except when God occasionally interfered. Whether He was a sort of spiritual ether penetrating all things, or what, I could not at all decide. But like the Yale professor, I still believed that if He existed, He must have a visible nucleus all His own in heaven. God, at the center, was a ghost, whom His ghost children would find only after death. According to the common teaching, Jesus had left His Father and happy home in heaven, having come to this sinful earth to be clothed with a physical body. Of course, the Father's spirit was represented as being with Jesus, but the Father Himself had remained in His far-away home. So my confusion was worse confounded by thinking.

During many centuries, scholars were grappling with the thought of spirit; and they did some good thinking in spite of their mistakes. Spirit was being more and more clearly defined. It increasingly appeared to be a self-conscious will, but how this Infinite Will was related to the great lump of nature, was the supreme difficulty.

Finally the scientists took the lump into the laboratories, when behold! it melted as quickly as a lump of sugar melts in the mouth of a boy. They discovered that nature was no lump at all, but a bundle of beautiful, complex energies. Nature as substance scientists have driven to the vanishing point; so much so that no great physicist would dare to say that there is any substance. Yet nature was never so potent in the lives of men as since it has been reduced to invisible energies. The knowledge of these invisible forces and the power to manipulate them make men almost like gods in their achievements.

The present situation, then, is a little like that of putting the tunnel under the Hudson. One gang beginning on the Jersey side, and another on the New York side, they bored down and onward, sometimes going far below the water; but when the workers came together under the Hudson, they had varied from each other only by the least fraction of an inch. Just so the philosophers and theologians began on the spirit side, reducing spirit to purposeful energy; while the scientists began on the nature side reducing it to purposeful energy; and when the two sets of workers broke through, they were apparently at the same point. The Christian scholar looked up with joy and amazement, saying, "Why, this invisible, purposeful energy of nature is simply what God is thinking, and feeling, and willing. Whether there is any substance we do not know, but whether there is, or is not, nature is Will in action. God continually purposes all these energies and they go forth. Light-energy, and all other beautiful forces constituting nature, are the modes of God's continuous will."

"What does God do all day?" Why, everything that is being done in the universe, except that which other wills are doing. And the child will is only combining his Father's energies and thinking his Father's thoughts. The child never works apart from his Father's enfolding powers. If we could comprehend all the dynamics of the universe, we should know what God is doing on that plane of His activities. Or, if we could know all His loving thoughts and higher purposes concerning His children, who are striving and building in the midst of these simple, enfolding energies, we should know what God is doing in the moral realm. The wall of partition is broken down, the veil is rent in twain; we live in the Holy Presence, since there is no other place to live. With Browning, we feel that the atmosphere "Is the clear, dear breath of God who loveth us." The pavement on which we walk is the power of the Great Will bearing us up. Likewise, the buildings along the street are more of His beneficent energies, providing shelter and rest for His loved ones. Our bodies are also His energies, highly sensitized, through which we become beautifully aware of our surroundings. All the vitality in the quivering beams of ships, and all the propelling force in their engines, is but the power of a Will, and that Will is the Father of our spirits. Leaving out of mind for the present the thought of the vast universe, measure, if you can, the ocean in its breadth and depth, which in its ceaseless rising and falling raises and lowers ship-cities as if they were snowflakes; and then remember that, if rightly applied, there is power enough in each cup full of water to destroy a ship, and that all the energy of the boundless worlds is but the will of Him in whom we "live and move and have our being." Having done this, if you are not something less than a man, you will fall down and adore in wonder, love and praise. To be brought face to face with God in the beauty and awfulness of nature is the only cure for the irreverence of this generation.

But some one says, "This makes God too great. Have you looked, and staggered before the limitless heavens?" Yes, but is it not claimed that God is Infinite?—and we have not yet found the equal of infinity. With all our insistence upon the infinitude of God, perhaps it offends some to think of Him as being equal to His universe,—or even to the little part of it that we can imagine. However, God must be greater than all His works.