IDEA 19
What Does GOD’s Immanence Actually Mean?
Both transcendence and immanence can only be suggestively imprecise indicators of how we feel GOD to be related to us – as One Who is utterly Beyond what we know or imagine, and yet One Who, through our prayers and innermost moments, at the very core of our being, is closer to us than our jugular vein (Q50:16). If that verse is not an emphatic assertion of immanence, I do not know what is. (IIQ, page 30)
When I look down from an airplane window at a landscape full of houses and apartments, or out of a car window while passing a roadside crowd, or step into a market and regard the throngs of people all around me, my mind recoils from what my heart has barely glimpsed — the immanence of GOD in a form that staggers the imagination.
Every ‘dividual’ (my term for what we mistakenly think of as ‘individual’) who is either seen directly by me or inferred from his/her dwelling place has an interaction with the Divine as lively and detailed as my own … even if he/she is unaware of that relationship. GOD is intricately and immediately involved in that person’s life — watching, listening, informing, judging, guiding or misguiding, and above all sustaining everything he/she is thinking, feeling, doing, and becoming.
His or her unconsciousness of that Subtle Presence does not in any way negate it or render it less meaningful to GOD. And if I, by contrast, am even occasionally and superficially conscious of Him in my life, that evidence of His Mercy does not in any way detract from the complexity and depth of His Compassion for every other being in this universe. The profundity and scale of GOD’s attention and care for all these dividuals, whom I see only in passing, and who represent but the thinnest and briefest slice of life in this cosmic laboratory of Love, are infinitely beyond what I can refer to, let alone imagine.
Mentally, therefore, I am completely unfit to say what GOD’s Immanence means. I can only report on how it feels when I try to think of it. Put your finger on your neck, just under your jaw, and sense the pulse of blood flowing beneath it. That is as physically close to GOD as you will ever get in this world. But the meaning you extract from that touch, and then the feeling that overwhelms as you absorb that meaning, are millions of times nearer to Him than that.
Immanence and transcendence are ultimately just words we use for the experience of being close to GOD or far from GOD. When we try to grasp those two experiences discursively, ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ are the two words we utilize … but both fall short of expressing what we dimly feel. GOD is always Near to us, but we are only near to Him when these two words are given time to influence our emotions and redirect our lives.
Divine Transcendence only matters to us when His Immanence is felt to be real as well. Without the feeling, both terms are little more than indecipherable scrawling on the surface of our brain.
Download the PDF version for free at Ideas Inspired by the Qur’ān – Mont Redmond complete version, or purchase a hard copy at Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an: Redmond, Mont: 9781738842506: Books – Amazon.ca.
