God Immanent in Man - Paragraph 1
Some mornings I wake with the sense that something inside is shifting again, as if a quiet movement at the center of my being is trying to make itself known. It rarely announces itself clearly. Instead it feels like a subtle nudge, an invitation to pay attention. That soft stirring came to mind as I read this week’s passage from Roberts.
In recent weeks we’ve explored Roberts’s reflections under the subtitle God in Nature. She described Omnipresence as the experience that God is always present and everywhere, and that when we encounter it “it is like looking at nothing.” This week she turns from the outer to the inner, writing under a new subtitle: God Immanent in Man.
God Immanent in Man
“Up to this point God was revealed outside ourselves, but here now, arising from a hitherto unknown center in ourselves, God reveals Himself. Experiential reports vary from this being a quiet disclosure to a powerful infusion. To communicate ‘that’ which has been revealed, people use different terms, such as the sudden appearance of ‘light,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘power’ depending on the dynamics of the experience. The common denominator, however, is that it arises from the depths of our being, a mysterious space or center that, till then, we never knew we had. Above all, we know this dynamic Presence is not ourselves. It is its own cause deliberately revealing Itself to us. Although Presence is utterly personal to us, it is also totally independent of us, has a life of its own. In short, this Presence is totally ‘other.’”
I understand her words because I too have encountered this inner center. The rising up from within of something unknown. Until that center revealed itself, I would have sworn it wasn’t there at all. It is unnerving to discover a part of yourself you never knew you had, and yet the longer I walk this path, the more I see that the unknown is not a disruption of the journey but its very terrain. Our lives become an unfolding awareness of what we are and never knew.
As for a word to describe this inner space, none of Roberts’s quite fit, though I understand why she chose them. When you go to bed with one understanding of the world and wake with a gaping black hole at your center, language falters. I might choose her word “power” was it not for feeling utterly out of control. For weeks I was disoriented, dizzy with vertigo, unsure of my footing. Tears and sadness rose without warning. It truly felt as if I might be losing my mind, yet something beckoned from within this space.
And that is the word that feels truest; beckon. Even though the opened space was painful, it carried a subtle pull, a magnetic encouragement that kept me moving toward the emptiness instead of away from it. Without that pull, I’m not sure I could have trusted it. And Roberts is right: the Presence has a dynamism to it, something undeniably not my own, yet arising from within me.
When she says it has “a life of its own,” I relate. But it doesn’t feel like being overtaken. It feels more like recognizing something that isn’t my habitual Enneagram patterning. Something other. It is personal because it lives in me, yet not identical to the self I cling to. Strangely wise, leading me where my familiar self would never think to go.
Still, when Roberts names this Presence as “totally ‘other,’” I feel the rising fear in following what I cannot predict or control. This is where Johannes Metz comes to mind and his book Poverty of Spirit. Metz’s phrase “poverty of spirit” is not about psychological lack but an existential posture: the part of us that knows we cannot generate our own meaning. It is our radical dependence on Mystery. In this way, Roberts and Metz speak in harmony. Both affirm a dynamic we do not initiate. Something moves in us first, and our role is to consent.
I recognize this pattern in my own unfolding. Whenever I try to rest in what I already know, life feels small. But when I stand at the edge of what feels like nothing, undefended before the nameless Mystery, something in me wakes up.
Perhaps this is the shared thread between Roberts and Metz: Roberts reveals the Otherness arising from within, and Metz names our poverty before the Mystery we cannot master. Together they show that our limits are not walls but thresholds. When we stop trying to rest in ourselves, we begin to sense a rest not of our making, a rest that takes shape as we yield to the Presence that holds us.
What I hear in Roberts’s words is an invitation to stay with this unfolding. To keep walking, even when the way feels dark. And it’s true what the mystics say: if you walk long enough in the dark, your eyes do adjust. You see more than you expected.
And how I am doing in staying true to what I hear in the text; the answer is as true as I can today. After encountering so many fragmented and contradictory parts of myself, I am beginning to sense a new kind of wholeness. It feels like the “light” Roberts describes, a light with warmth and compassion toward the world I could not generate on my own. As long as I am willing to remain in the unknown, I continue to learn the shape of my own poverty.
I tend this wholeness through simple practices: meditation, Enneagram work, and a communion of saints. And mostly by remembering to turn toward that inner beckoning whenever it stirs.
Reflection Question:
Where in your own life do you sense an invitation toward something unfamiliar, and what might it mean to trust it long enough for your inner sight to adjust?
