Presence of God

My friend, Pastor Dorcas, (of ECA) has ask those of us on that list to discussion our sense of feeling the presence of God.The reader can find her refelctions on this topic on the link on the right side bar to the blog "the Owl's song."

Just to tackle it from a phenomenologial persective, that is, to record the sensations and sense of it without commentary or attempt to categorize or expalin.

I have many different experiences which I associate with the presence of God. It's hard to describe and sometimes easy to confusse the thing itself withe certain affects. For example if I say "I have a great sense of peace," that doesn't really speak to the sense of God's presence but the affect of God's presence; yet sometimes that's all that can be said.

My frist such experince,when I really said "hey there's some reality here beyond anything I've known," was the night I got born again. At that time I a sensation of being looked at from some great height. I had a sense of being cleaned, especially inside. I felt a sense of all pervacive peace and cleaness and as it washed over me I felt I was being cleaned. I felt loved. I felt that someone was looking at me with great love.

When I got baptism of the Holy Spirit I sensed something like elecricity. another way I've descbied it is "liquid love." I don't know why I say "liquid" becasue even though the sensation was akin to wetness, I remained dry. I also felt a tingling all over lik electricity. Physical affects included palms of my hands burning and tingling, a force like a magnet pulling my arms up and I could actually feel waves of it washing over me and I could feel a gentle pull guiding my arms upward as I began to speak some lanague I dind't know. My mouth was heavey like it was a chore to speak (I was saying "prise god" and stuff) and so I began to speak the way my mouth wanted to go, and it sounde like some language I'd never heard before. I did say two word I found latter in national geographic as Myian place names.

Also a phenomenon of dizziness. I would feel dizzy and like passing out after praying for some time, and that would be accompanied by a feeling of great exceptional peace, but also like I wash rag that jut got wrung out, no stength left. I would feel like I was flaoting, sometimes like floating over the world.

But all of these things are basically affets on me. I still find it impossible to describe what exactly the thing is that I call "the presence of God." I can say it's a sense of cleaness, like everything around has been scrubed. Sometimes a sense of urgency, or a sense of importance, as though some great and imporatnt visitor is coming. I have a sense of shrinking in signficance and standing before the infinite, before the sublime. That's like when you stand in the desert at night under the stary sky, only even moreso.

Sometimes a sense of "utter dependence." That is the feeling that everying is connected and the whole that is connected is depepndent upon some greater thing that pervades the universe.

I used to get that feeling in my patio at night. I'd sit out under the stars late on a summer night and listen to the traffic on the freeway just a few blocks off, and get a sense of the connection between me, and my garden, my house, my neighborhood, the freeway, the cars, the factors that made the cars, the world as a whole the stary sky, it's all one thing and all created by some higher all pervasive form of being which creates and holds things together.