In The Gap

Lake Alpine-Lakeside Trail--photo by Libby Fife 7/2015

One of the recurrent themes in the reading that I am doing is that "God meets you wherever you are." (That's a conceptual and loose translation of the idea and variety of expressions that are out there.) It's difficult for me to really understand this idea. I did come across an explanation in Margaret Silf's book, Inner Compass. She describes God as being wherever it is that you truly want to be. She describes acting as your true self as opposed to acting as your false self. Roughly speaking, the two points describe how we sometimes need to live on a daily basis and how we would really like to live if we weren't constrained by social conventions, the need to earn a living, or family obligations. As an example, if someone asks you how you are doing you might reply that everything is fine. That's socially acceptable. You probably wouldn't say that everything was screwed up, thank you very much, and that you were despondent. It's an extreme example but there is this gap that exists between how things are and how we would like them to be. Our realities are frequently grounded in falsehoods, as I suggest in the above example. Once you acknowledge that there is this gap, this tension, then you are on your way to living more honestly. The idea then would be to move towards a truer position, one in which you are acting and thinking honestly before God. When that happens, where that happens, that is the place in which God meets you. 

So often I show pictures of nature. Why is that? Well, it's what I do for starters. I take photos of landscapes and objects to use in my artwork. But, I also get something else out of the images. Nature is very complex of course but it also just "is." It's basic: living, dying, growing, existing, sharing, taking, and providing. All processes done without too much thought. It's a very honest (if not brutal at times) position from which to operate. I think about the above statement, of God meeting you where you are, and  of questioning how to see this every day. I wonder about looking to nature (and hence to God) for that answer.

Libby