The author of Genesis clearly limits the omnipresence of God. The Lord walks in the Garden with Adam and Eve in the evenings. When they anticipate the Lord’s arrival and hide, the Lord calls “Where are you?”

Stories in Genesis repeatedly describe God’s “hearing” about violence, even the voice of the slaughtered crying from the ground, and coming to investigate together with divine Watchers. At the Tower of Babel, the narrator informs us God heard what the people intended and descended together with Watchers to investigate. Prior to visiting Sodom, God and two Watchers visit Abram and Sarai to announce the impending birth of Isaac, the long-promised son. As they walk away and Abram accompanies them for a distance, God tells Abram about hearing the groans and complaints of Sodom’s victims and going to investigate. Abram challenges God to investigate carefully and to base judgment on the exact numbers God discovers.

Those who believe the doctrines of omnipresence and omniscience laugh off these stories, or laugh behind their hands in derisive superiority. They recognize when anthropomorphism is being used to help human audiences less sophisticated than themselves grasp the complexity of human-divine interactions! Despite what the text says, they know better, because they have logic on their side: how, they ask—nay, demand, for they are not sincerely asking—can a deity be truly God Most High apart from being present everywhere at all times, knowing all things past, present and future, both real and potential (omniscience), and being able to effect “his” will in all these situations (omnipotent)?

As I have spent my life laughing behind my hand derisively at them for their simplistic, rigid addiction to the plastic child toy of logic, I am not condemning them for their reaction. I recognize our shared joy in childhood discoveries and shared fear of incomprehensibilities.

And let me be clear, I feel deeply attuned to the power of the practice of being fully present to Presence.

I do not deny I can meet Presence anywhere I go. With the psalmist my heart humbly sings, “though I flee to depths of the Sea, still thou art with me. In the valley of the shadow of Death, thy presence comforts me. Where can I flee from thy presence?” I will not indulge the psychological possibility the psalmist means God is there because God is with and in the psalmist, inseparable as soul and spirit, joints and marrow. At least for now, I will indulge the assumption common among commentators and Christians generally the psalmist means he meets God external to himself in all places, and cannot conceive of a place God is not.

Further, however, I will indulge the possibility explicated by the panentheists, that God is within everything God created—every living cell bright with God’s life; every spinning atom held together by God’s power; every black reach of empty space filled with God’s singing. Do rocks, boulders, mountains have awareness? Are the stones alive with God’s Spirit? In some quiet sense insensible to us, does a potential for voice lie in each stone along the road such that, were the praising children silent, God could make the rocks cry out “Hosannah!”? He who can loose the tongues of rocks must surely be everywhere, mustn’t He? She who nurtures us from the breasts of the world and promises to supply our every need must needs see every need then, mustn’t She?

Ah, logic again. Our fear, our longing, expressed in grasping for logic, trips us up. We fall flat on our noses against the full wording of the text.

The indwelling of the Holy Spirit of Christ is called upon by the psalmist to not leave him. The Spirit comes and goes upon prophets and kings, providing a promise of a day in history when all who believe may be indwelt and filled with Spirit’s presence, the way a drunkard may be filled with wine. Then the Laws of God will be written on human hearts; not before. Then you will not need a teacher; not before.

And so we conclude with nuances: degrees of presence, ranging from hearing from a distance and by means of the reports of Watchers to seeing face to face; and carrying the presence of the Spirit within us in degrees of fulness depending upon our yielding, honoring obedience. Now we see through a glass darkly, shifting images of presence, longing for the beatific vision and fulness of glory which no one can know and live.  And we, being changed from glory to glory, shall enter The Presence when it is our time, and we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as he is.