by Gerald May

For the past two years, my Shalem News articles have been about learnings from the wilderness. Now I want to say why solitude in the wild has been so important for me. I felt encouraged to do this last March listening to Constance FitzGerald sharing her groundbreaking work on Wisdom. I am sure I have met Wisdom in the mountain forests, Wisdom not as just an attribute of God but as an actual presence of God's very self.

I do not know why, but ever since I was a little boy I have been seeking a real, substantial, palpable sense of relationship with God. When I was very young I tried to have such a relationship with Jesus. I asked him to come into my heart, to be with me in a way I could really sense. I pictured him, pretended he was with me, and had imaginary walks and talks with him. But even at that young age I knew it was mostly my imagination. As I grew older, I became increasingly frustrated and finally downright angry with a Jesus who promised to be with us yet never actually showed up for me in a direct way. I quit trying and gave myself instead to beginning my career and starting my family.

But the desire never left me, and by the time I was thirty I was back to searching. I tried many meditation practices, most of which just confronted me more and more with my longing for direct, felt relationship. My desire only deepened. I also learned some theology. In Christianity and other faiths there are countless experiences--from mystics at one extreme to fundamentalists at the other--of direct, here-and-now encounters with the Divine. God can and does become manifest in an immediate and personal way to some people. Yet mystical theology also says the Original First-Cause Being, the Naked Godhead, is utterly beyond all apprehension, completely mysterious. God is "Nada", no-thing. Some theology interprets this by saying we cannot expect to see God directly, but only in hinted-at ways, through a glass darkly. We must wait until death for the real encounter. Yet, even if my mind might have accepted that theology, my heart could not.

I did have many indirect experiences. First as a physician and later as a spiritual guide, I saw grace abounding in people, in their healings and in their capacity for love. Time and again I was awed by the intricate just-rightness of nature, the power of Spirit in human community, the whole marvel of creation. I felt God's love for me coming through other people and flowing through me for them. But I wasn't satisfied.

As wonderful as these experiences were, they still were mediated rather than immediate. They were radiant expressions of God's Spirit but not the direct person of the One I knew was hiding behind them. It was not that I wanted to prove God's existence; I had seen too much grace to have a need for that. I didn't want to put my hands in Jesus's wounds to make sure he was real. What I wanted was to put my arms around him, feel his around me. I still wanted the direct encounter, the tangible relatedness.

Then I went to the mountain. In truth it is not much of a mountain, just an Appalachian ridge. But it is very wild, and it was there I had my first direct encounters with God's immediate presence. At first I felt strangely welcomed, as if by a palpable hospitality, and I sensed myself responding with a depth of friendliness I knew I alone was incapable of. At times I felt a physical touch, as if someone were taking me by the shoulders helping me be still or guiding me here and there, gently but powerfully showing me things, teaching me, even healing me in ways my mind could not understand. The very same presence simultaneously arose inside me as a slowing, centering, urging energy in my belly. It was at once me and not-me, transcendent and immanent, a presence both with me and incarnate inside me as me. The first name that came to me was "The Power of the Slowing," probably because the presence slowed my mind and body and opened my senses to being there more completely than I had ever felt before.

But the presence was far too personal to call "It." Nor was this the Father-God or the Son-Jesus I might have expected. Instead, I found myself thinking of a "Her." In my experience the presence has been consistently, undeniably feminine. At first I thought of the Holy Spirit, but this "Her" was far more substantial than anything I would call spirit. Slowly I recognized Her from scripture as Wisdom; "Hokmah" in Hebrew, "Sophia" in Greek, the dynamically touching, guiding, creating, urging, and distinctly feminine presence of God in us and in the world. I cannot deny that these experiences might be hallucinations. But I also cannot deny that they are completely real for me, in many ways more real and certainly more intimate than any encounter I have ever had with anyone or anything.

It is not surprising that my theology is changing. I still see the primal Godhead as being beyond all attributes, including gender. And I still have my tender images of the historical man Jesus. What has changed is my understanding of the real presence of God in the world, the risen Christ, the One who fills the whole creation. In this One, the masculine "Logos" and feminine "Sophia" are not only Immanuel, God-with-us, but also God incarnate in us and, astoundingly for me, God as us.

Thus my anthropology is changing as well. I used to think the human spiritual heart consisted of desire and intent. Desire, the passion of the human spirit, is fundamentally a yearning for God and is God's birth-gift to each person. Intent, the freedom to claim our desire and dedicate ourselves to it, is empowered by the Holy Spirit of God within us, the incarnate presence of the risen Christ. So we are very much ourselves and free to choose, yet both our desire and our choosing are gifts from God. In other words, our choices are very important but it's still all grace. I continue to believe this, but now I see that desire and intent alone do nothing but increase one's longing and dedication--the story of my life before the mountain forests.

A third quality is necessary, namely receptivity. This is a real openness, a radical willingness for the desire and intent to be fulfilled. Like intent, our receptivity is to some degree a matter of choice, but it too must be empowered by grace. We cannot achieve it on our own. I sense now that empowerment of intent is a Logos gift and empowerment of receptivity is a Sophia gift. And instead of neither male nor female there are both male and female in the incarnate Christ. And instead of a wholly transcendent God relating to separate human beings, this entire flow of grace and freedom is the way God loves God's self as us. Sophia and Logos, Wisdom and Word, are simultaneously God's gifts to us, our gifts to God and to one another, and God's gifts to God. I am overwhelmed with gratitude to be a part of it. I feel more whole and more confident than ever before. Most of all, I feel deeply free. But my desire is not satisfied. Not by a long shot.