Seeing God — Thomas Williams

Who is God? What is God? In what sense can we say that God actually exists? How can a good, omnipotent God permit sin and the suffering of innocents to exist? Theo Lee, a young minister in a small suburban church, confronts these questions head on when his infant son unexpectedly dies. Wrestling with his grief, he comes to a deeper understanding of what the reality we call God means. To bring his congregation to a spiritual rebirth beyond all creeds and dogmas he begins a series of sermons taking as his text a paraphrase of John 1:1. In the beginning was the mystery, and the mystery was with God and the mystery was God.For the nature of God is surely a mystery, the biggest mystery of all. Every one of us of us comes face to face with this mystery at some point in our lives. In the dark of night, in our own beds, and alone with our own thoughts, it suddenly occurs to us that these lives of ours appear out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, are going nowhere, and will soon enough disappear.We come face to face with this mystery because we alone among creatures have something called consciousness.We have eaten the fruit of the symbolic tree of knowledge. We have minds of our own.' We know ourselves both from within and without. We see ourselves, and also see ourselves seeing ourselves. And this goes on ad infinitum, like those endlessly multiplying images one sees in the opposing mirrors of a barbershop. Consciousness is both our greatest glory and the source of our most nearly unbearable torment. Because we are conscious we know that we will die.The story told in Seeing God explores the way in which this same consciousness can lead us to a rebirth, to an understanding that the world­—the universe itself—is a spiritual reality.