The Oates Journal (ISSN: 1098-1446) is a publication of the Wayne E. Oates Institute addressing issues related to spirituality, ethics, and healing from the perspective of pastoral care and counseling.

The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”

(The Book of Common Prayer, 1979)

Lately I have been reading a book by Marcus Borg (2003) in which he writes: “In a religious worldview, there is, to use William James’ term…, a ‘More’” (p. 63). Borg also speaks of the sacred, of an extra dimension of reality, a ground of being, of Being itself, isness, radical grace. I think of mystery, breath, surrounding-ness. Some years ago, my spiritual director asked me what image I had of God. “Lava,” I said.

I can embrace the image of a “More.” Nothing, of course, can define that which is beyond understanding but somehow imbedded in being. I can’t describe who it is that I have trust in and call upon or even exactly how I do that. Sometimes I have an image of being held in great and powerful hands like the Rodin sculpture that captured my imagination when I was 16. At other times I don’t feel anything; at others some kind of Presence. Sometimes I even question whether there is a More. When I was undergoing chemotherapy in Little Rock, I didn’t wonder about More at all.

Yet here I am today, alive, deeply drawn to the images of the Church—the Eucharist, the broken body, the blood poured out. I stand in the midst of a spruce grove at Pemaquid Point, Maine, or looking out into sycamores on Mockingbird Hill in Kentucky, or surveying Cincinnati’s textured roof tops from our apartment downtown. I stand, breathe and take in More. And then More. More than I am or think or feel or believe. More than I understand.

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