Where is God?

In High School English class I had an (excellent) teacher, Mrs. Barbara Beaver, who made us memorize several Emily Dickinson poems.  I thought this to be no less than high-intensity torture and protested wildly.  However, as years have gone by I still remember bits of them, and all of one which I reflect upon often.  Here it is:

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

People often say that they are looking for God.  I find this interesting and curious.  Is God located in a place?  While Ms. Dickinson seems to imply such in her poem (“spot”)  I think she also is saying something quite different – that God must be everywhere, in the moor and the sea and the heather and the wave.  In the seen, and the unseen; in the known and the felt.

But this morning I expand that to ask this question: If God is present in the pleasant sea and the placid moor, is God also present in the unpleasant and the challenging?  In the droughts and floods?  In the boys of the Boston marathon bombings?

Rabbi Rami Shapiro writes in his book The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness: Preparing to Practice that there is a Jewish legend that every single one of us has an angel walking before us calling out “Behold the Image and Likeness of God”.  To this Rabbi Shapiro challenges us to honor our own angel and to hear everyone else’s as well.

What would happen in the world if we began to honor everyone’s angel?  How would our interactions with others change?  What if we began to see God in everything – the things in which we delight as well as in the things for which we are prone to curse?  How would our experience on this planet be if we did these things?  And how would it change the experience of this planet for everyone else?

Food for thought…