Where?

God lives where men live because men live where God lives. We live where God places us. We live here in this material creation. We live in one another’s proximity, able to see and hear and touch one another through the materiality of our bodies. We are not ethereal. And if we were, how would any disembodied being be able to meet any other disembodied being? You perceive me because you see my body. Even when you write to me, you send your message to any of the various addresses from which my body will eventually hear or read it. Our body is our address. Wherever my body is, there you will find me. This will continue to be true until the day I die, after which it will not be possible to say anything about me with certainty.

The created and material world does not hold God in or hold God out. God may be distant or he may be close. We simply cannot say. We can only say what scripture says: ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ He may be right here where we are. The space we live in is our place; it confines us and it enables us to find one another. The space we live in does not confine God, either to keep him away or to fix him so that he comes into the field of our perception. He may come and go without our ever being aware of it. We live in the place he has made available to us. Perhaps he is present here first, and we are only present here because of his hospitality.
We may be at once mortal-and-immortal. We do not jettison our biology with its limits, but by the grace of God its Creator, our biology may become the idiom of our ongoing, unlimited life in communion with God and with all creatures.