Chinook & Awe
Stop chasing. Start noticing. God is closer than you know.
Last week, a Chinook showed up and chose violence. Gusts up around 85 kph. Dust everywhere. Garbage cans making a break for it. Branches coming down. A shingle or two trying to relocate. One driveway basketball net getting introduced to the ground with a thump.
Inside, the furnace kept the peace. The cats were on the couch like—absolutely not. And no matter what you do, Chinook grit still sneaks in. Into the entryway, the seams, your soul.
Watching through the window, coffee in hand, I found myself thinking: Chinook winds can make a mess, … but love is still in the mix.1
Which is maybe why we miss it so often.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of religious energy trying to move myself and others.
From here to there.
From “outside” to “inside.”
From “lost” to “found.”
From “far from God” to “close to God.”
A good chunk of the Christianity many of us inherited has functioned like a spiritual relocation program. Start in the wrong place, learn the right beliefs, say the right prayers, clean up the right sins, find the right tribe. Maybe, if you do it properly, you’ll finally arrive somewhere holy.
Then Jonathan Foster drops a line that quietly kicks the legs out from under that whole map:
Small sentence. Big shift.
Because if God is already present, everywhere and within everything, then the primary spiritual task isn’t travel. It’s learning to see. Not performing. Not climbing. Not escaping. Just learning to notice what has been the case all along.
The “God Over There” Problem
Most of us were handed an unspoken assumption: God is somewhere else.
God is “up.” God is “beyond.” God is “out there.” And we’re down here in the messy, physical, ordinary world. The place where we spill coffee, lose our patience, pay bills, and try not to doomscroll ourselves into a crater.
Even when we say, “God is with you,” we can mean it like someone shouting encouragement from the other side of the Oldman River. Nice sentiment. Still… distance.
And once God is “over there,” we do what humans do. We build bridges, barges, and boats.
We invent categories: close/far, clean/unclean, sacred/secular, in/out. Prayer becomes a way of reaching God. Worship becomes a way of summoning God. Holiness becomes a way of qualifying for God.
It’s exhausting. And if we’re honest, it can make God feel less like Love and more like a nitpicking supervisor with a clipboard power flex.
So what if the real issue isn’t that God is absent or somewhere else?
What if the issue is that we’ve been trained to look right past Presence?
Luke 17:21: Inside, Among, or “You’re Standing in It”
Luke 17:21 is one of those lines that has launched a thousand sermons and a few potluck debates. Jesus says the kingdom of God is entos hymōn, and depending on translation, it comes out “within you,” “among you,” or “in your midst.”
Modern translations often avoid “within you,” partly because some argue Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees, who were not exactly the poster children for a rich inner life. Having never met a real-life Pharisee, I‘d prefer not to comment.
But I’m not convinced we have to dodge “within you.” Even the Pharisees—trained to look for God’s reign out there (land, temple, king, borders, scoreboard)—may have had the kingdom closer than they knew. The tragedy isn’t that the kingdom wasn’t within them. It’s that maybe they couldn’t recognize it.
But here’s my take: we don’t have to choose.
Because the Kin-dom, if it’s real, is not just an internal warm feeling or a future place you go when you die. It’s not a spiritual postal code. It’s the way reality is when Love gets to be real.
So yes, the Kin-dom is “among you” (relational, embodied, communal).
And yes, it’s “within you” (perceptual, awakened, reshaped).
And yes, it’s “in your midst” (present tense, not later).
Which means the Kin-dom is not a location. It’s a living, relational reality we learn to participate in. And because the Bible is often sneakier and more psychologically honest than we give it credit for, there’s this other little moment that just might clear some things up (no pun intended).
Two-Touch Faith: Blurry First, Clearer Later
In Mark 8, a man is healed of blindness, but not all at once. Jesus touches him, then asks, “Do you see anything?” And the guy answers, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” (Mk 8:22–25)
Which might be the most honest spiritual sentence in the Bible.
Not blind anymore, but not seeing clearly either. Blurry. Partial. In-progress.
And as it turns out, “I see people like trees walking” is a fairly accurate description of my spiritual life on any given Tuesday.
So Jesus touches him again, and the blur continues to clear.
I love that story, not just because it’s strange, but because it’s kind. It tells the truth: learning to see is often gradual. And it suggests God isn’t offended by our half-seeing. Love meets us there and keeps healing the vision.
God Isn’t Far Away. God Might Just Be Deep.
This is where panentheism earns its keep.
Not pantheism (God is everything), and not deism (God is far away), but this: God in all things and all things in God. Creation exists within God, and God is intimately present within creation, without being reducible to it.
In plain language, God is not a visitor to the world. God isn’t occasionally “breaking in.” God is already here. Like depth in the ocean. Like meaning in music. Like love in the middle of a hard conversation.
Or, if you prefer Foster’s phrasing: yes to the supernatural, but not as an escape from nature. As the inside of it. The Holy threaded through the ordinary.
Which is good news if you’re tired of chasing spiritual fireworks, tired of trying to manufacture feelings, tired of treating God like an elusive roommate who only comes home when the house is finally clean.
Entanglement, Minus the Quantum Flex
Panentheism names God’s presence. Entanglement helps me picture how that presence shows up: relational, woven, interactive.
And I’ll admit, entanglement is a word I keep reaching for. I just try to use it carefully.
I’m not interested in the “quantum physics proves God” thing. That’s usually a shortcut, and shortcuts are how we end up in ditches.
But as a metaphor, entanglement names something deeply true.
We are not isolated objects bouncing around alone. We are knitted together: body and soul, self and world, grief and joy, earth and heaven. What happens in one place ripples into another.
Teilhard saw this coming a mile away. The universe isn’t just made of stuff. It’s a long story of increasing complexity, consciousness, and communion. The cosmos growing capacity for connection, more consciousness, and maybe even more complex and consistent Love.
So when we talk about God being “in everything,” I don’t mean God is hiding in your toaster like a divine Easter egg. I mean God is present as the deep relational pulse of things: the Love that keeps offering life, the Presence that keeps whispering possibility, and the invitation that keeps showing up in the form of each other.
Omnipresence, Without the Stalker Vibe
Here’s where Open and Relational theology helps me breathe.
Traditional omnipresence can sound like spiritual surveillance: “God is everywhere,” meaning you’re never not being watched. Comforting if you’re doing well. Terrifying if you’re not.
Open and Relational theology nudges omnipresence into a more humane key. God is present as relational Love: participating, responsive, faithful, without controlling or coercing.
Not puppeteer. Not micromanager. Not cosmic policeman.
More like the steady, stubborn presence of Love that keeps offering possibilities, keeps luring us toward over-all wellbeing, keeps suffering-with, keeps refusing to ditch us.
Which means we don’t have to interpret pain of loss as “God leaving.” We don’t have to treat doubt as exile. We don’t have to perform our way back into belonging. We can begin right where we are. That’s kind of the point.
The Mystics: The Original “Pay Attention” Crowd
When the mystics talk about “waking up,” they’re not trying to be mysterious. They’re being practical.
They’re naming the simplest thing: God is not absent. We are often distracted.
Sometimes it’s like we’re sleepy. Numbed. Over-busy. Over-defended. Living from an overstimulated amygdala, hypersensitive to threats everywhere, trained to treat the world like a machine and ourselves like a problem.
That can blind us to the lovely and inspiring. We miss what’s right in front of us.
Mysticism, at its best, isn’t escape. It’s attention. It’s the slow recovery of a sacramental worldview: the ordinary is luminous. The Holy isn’t locked in special places. It’s braided into life.
So the spiritual question shifts.
Not: “How do I get to God?”
But: “How do I become available to the God who is already here?”
If God Isn’t a Destination, What’s Prayer For?
A few things get simpler.
Prayer stops being persuasion and becomes communion. Not “God, please come,” but “God, help me notice.”
Spiritual practices stop being ladders to climb and become ways of clearing the fog.
Silence doesn’t earn God. It makes room.
Scripture isn’t an answer book. It’s a lens.
Community isn’t a border fence. It’s a practice field for love.
Holiness stops being separation and becomes presence, and greater wholeness. Not “get away from the world,” but “be in the world with Love.”
And honestly, this is why spiritual direction makes sense to me.
I’ve spent years sitting with people as a spiritual director, and the work isn’t about getting anyone “over there.” It’s about slowing down long enough to notice where God is already present, right in the middle of real life: grief, questions, beauty, mess, and the next faithful step.
Not Later, Not Elsewhere: Here and Now
If Foster is right, and if Jesus is right, then we don’t need to move people from “here without God” to “there where God is.”
We need to learn to see. To wake up to what’s happening around us.
The Kin-dom isn’t a far-off realm we reach once we finally get our poop in a group. It’s the reality of God’s relational Love within and among us, available now, experienced as we become receptive to love.
Yes to the supernatural. But not as bypass. Not as denial. Not as escape pod.
Yes to the supernatural as the depth of the natural. The radiance within it. The Love entangled with everything.
Which means the invitation is not (always) to go somewhere else.
The invitation is to become present, to take our place, to pay attention, to soften, to consent to Love.
The wind rearranges the neighbourhood. Life rearranges us. The invitation isn’t to escape the swirl. It’s to learn to see Love in the middle of it and respond to it.
To discover, again and again, that the Holy isn’t waiting on the other side of life.
It’s woven into life.
And the only real question is whether we’ll learn to see.
Sola Caritas,|
𝞃Michael
Before you go …
May the Source who is closer than our next breath
open our eyes, not with fireworks, but gently with Love.
May we glimpse the Holy hiding in plain sight:
in the kitchen light, the half-finished conversation,
the courage it takes to be human.
May the Love that holds all things together
hold us, too, especially on the windy days
when the world feels like it’s coming apart at the seams.
And may we remember, with the old mystics and the tired saints:
we don’t have to go there to find God.
Just open our eyes here. And now.
This is a Jonathan Foster-ism that I have adopted as a regular mantra - usually held on the breath of a sigh.
I lived in Calgary growing up, from 0 to 18, and remember chinooks well. I always loved them. The temperature could go up 60 degrees F (we used F in Canada then, not C) in a matter of minutes. From utterly frigid to what seemed balmy back then (though now living in Tennessee, it is the new frigid).
Love it!