On Questions

about God

“Where does God live?”

Asked a six-year-old me, as soon as he started pondering about the Bible stories he heard from the adults. I don't remember my thoughts from back then, but I know it was something in Genesis that first caught my eye, that made me want to understand the Divine.

Around that time, the adults began telling me to talk to God. That I needed to say things to Him. Well, if I needed to tell Him things, I need to know where He was. Or at least where to send a letter. I sent letters to Santa Claus. Santa lived at the North Pole. So where did God live?

I would need an address. Probably a couple of stamps, too.

So I did what curious kids do. I asked my parents:

"Where does God live?"

"Well, in heaven. God lives in heaven."

"And where is heaven?"

"It's something like the sky."

"So is God like a bird?"

"No, not this sky, not where the birds are. Above it."

"So is God an astronaut?"

"Well... [“kind of”, my dad would say].

Why don't you ask your Bible study teacher?"

So I did. I went to my Bible study teacher and asked her: "Where does God live?" And to my dismay, she said:

"Well, God is in heaven, dear."

"Yes, but where is heaven?"

"Way, way, way up above us."

"Above the sky, right?"

"Yes. Way above the sky."

"What is He doing there alone?"

"He's looking after you and your family. He's caring for all of us."

"But what is His house like? Where does He live? I want to talk to Him."

What surprises me most, looking back, is that none of these adults told me to ask Him.

The answer I was never given, I set out to take. Disbelief came first. Then the slow erosion of faith in favour of borrowed certainties. Then years of spiritual and religious zigzagging, always searching, always knocking, always with the feeling that none of the answers were true.

It was only by irrational fortune that I finally heard the suggestion, and heard it from Him.

Well — ask Me.

He said it in the calmest, most tender, wisest voice I have ever heard. I will never forget that voice. The sheer depth of it, with glimmering overtones, said it all —even though I heard it only within my own being, it enormously plucked the very strings of my heart. It carved space inside my bones for new blood. It made me recognise how warm emptiness is.

I could not comprehend it. Yet I knew it was true.

But I couldn't get myself to ask Him where He lived. Because He made me see His suggestion was the answer.

See, we tend to look at these questions —the fundamental, mind-bending, theological ones— as if they demand an answer in order to be complete. We treat our wonderings about the Spirit, about what lies beyond, as if they can only exist as engines: machines built to carry us to a resolution. An absolute, unquestionable —or worse— dogmatic answer.

The problem with that? God doesn't seem interested in our answers. He is not moved by our meanings.

He seemed interested, though, in what we don't know. In the very gaps of our comprehension, the places our minds cannot fill with thought and reasoning. That is where He wants to be, to warm the emptiness of our lack of understanding.

For ages, across all sorts of civilisations and beliefs, people have tried to raise up the importance of Faith. But Faith often gets mistaken for optimism, or worse, for a mental, bulldozing way of manifesting one's desires onto the world. I have faith I will get promoted. I have faith God will cure my son. I have faith the drought will be over soon.

And don't get me wrong: in rough situations, we should, by all means, live in that state of mind. But it is not Faith. It is asking. It is hope. Hope that things will follow the path where we feel the least pain, where we lose the least, get damaged as little as possible. Completely understandable, a need for our fragile human condition. And the core of uncountable beautiful stories of how we carry on living in grace, because we ask and we mysteriously receive.

But it is not Faith.

I came to see that Faith happens in the gaps of what we seem to know. Faith grows its roots in what I recognise I do not grasp. It is saying: I do not know what will be tomorrow, but I trust You, God. It is being in battle, bleeding out, and being at peace with whatever path He opens ahead. It is having one’s wishes ground to dust and yet believe He’s doing what’s sacred.

Because Faith is not asking Him to respond the way we want Him to respond. Faith is posing a question — Will my beloved survive? Will He give me a long, prosperous life? Will we ever be delivered from slavery? — and smiling as His silent remarks rumble in our inner chambers.

“Where does God live?”

Asked a six-year-old me — not knowing that He had made His home in that very question.