No matter what language we use to describe the Divine, for spiritual seekers the hope is that our understanding and connection will continue to expand and deepen. As Richard Rohr reminds us, “God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not spend too much time protecting the boxes.” In Episode 242, Cynthia and Susan take another look at the spaces where their own ‘god-boxes’ used to be: It’s two women getting personal about what’s new, what’s not, and where and how they’re seeking communion and/or communication now.
Notes & Quotes:
ALSSI Ep. 78, Are You There, God? It’s Us, Cynthia and Susan
At Last She Said It: Honest Conversations About Faith, Church, and Everything In Between, by Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward
The Opposite of Faith, by Nadia Bolz-Weber, The Corners, 8/14/2024
Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground, by Mirabai Starr
Active Latter-day Saints increasingly abandoning orthodox views, by Tamarra Kemsley, Salt Lake Tribune, 10/6/2025
Slow Work, by Susan Hinckley, Say More: At Last She Writes It | No. 47, 10/2025
What is Prayer and How to Begin, Krista Tippett with Roberta Bondi, On Being podcast, 5/22/2025
Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, by Mirabai Starr
God Is Intent to Bring You Home, by Patrick Kearon, 04/2024
Unpacking Spiritual Atheism, Rainn Wilson with Britt Hartley, Soul Boom podcast
99 Stories of God, by Joy Williams
Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, by Diana Butler Bass
Nothing to be Frightened Of, by Julian Barnes, New York Times, 10/3/2008
Enriched By Difference, Krista Tippett with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, On Being podcast, 4/25/2016
Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship, by Gregory Boyle
“So if you feel a distance right now when it comes to God, it might be that the distance you feel isn’t between you and God, it’s between you and the ideas you have had of God up until this moment, and that’s different. And more interesting. And actually hopeful. Because sometimes ‘growing in faith’ looks like reconsidering all of it. Our old ideas that might have worked for us in the past sometimes need an update, and that too, is a form of faith.” —NBW
“Organized religion can, in fact, be an obstacle to direct experience of the sacred. Most religious institutions insist that you purchase their brand of God and forsake all others. Not only do they demand exclusivity, but they require intermediaries for anyone to even hang out with the divine. [...] The function of most clergy and their customs is to get you to live whatever they deem to be a godly life, not to actually connect with God. Let alone to become one with God.” —Mirabai Starr
“And often I tell people to set a timer for this because it’s still hard enough for them that they have to know that it has an ending to it. And then to sit there and read the novel or work a crossword puzzle or do hand work or something, and then when the timer goes off, say, ‘Thank you very much, God, that was very enjoyable. And then go and do something else.
“After a while, that’s a way of learning that God is a safe person to be with. And you know, maybe it takes 6 months, maybe it takes 2 years, maybe it takes 10 years. God’s got plenty of time, and we’re not doing this because we want to be good people or we’re following a command, but because we’re made to long for God and it’s for our own wellbeing and happiness. And so we find it for that reason, not because we ought to.” —Roberta Bondi
“It never occurred to me that we all create God for ourselves; we don’t know what God looks like, no one does. Joseph Smith had a mental image, but I can’t fully understand the nature of his experience; though he has described it to us in words, that’s not the same as seeing for ourselves. So we each conjure something.” —Susan Hinckley
“God is always much bigger than your imagination will allow. So go beyond your ability to imagine.” —Richard Rohr
“Pretending God is a dude hasn’t exactly worked out for the vast majority of the human family, let alone the animal and plant communities or the air or the waters.” —Mirabai Starr
“We are being yearned for even as we yearn. [...] Remember that our desire for God is already within us. God is already within us, desiring us.” —Carmen Acevedo Butcher
“God is in relentless pursuit of you.” —Elder Patrick Kearon
“Tell me who you are and I can tell you the kind of god you believe in OR tell me what kind of god you believe in and I can tell you who you are.” —Britt Hartley
“Our ‘God view’ came to resemble our worldview.” —Barbara Brown Taylor
“We can only know what God is not, not what God is.” —Joy Williams
“Thus, there are four American Gods: the Authoritarian God (31 percent of the population), the Benevolent God (23 percent), the Critical God (16 percent), and the Distant God (24 percent).” —Diana Butler Bass
“I don’t believe in god, but I miss him.” —Julian Barnes
“Please let God be bigger and more mysterious than a man.” —Susan Hinckley, (p. 51)
“The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. “When Moses at the burning bush says to God, ‘Who are you?’ God says to him three words: ‘Hayah asher hayah.’ Those words are mistranslated in English as ‘I am that which I am.’ But in Hebrew, it means ‘I will be who or how or where I will be,’ meaning, ‘Don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you.’” —Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
“No one escapes the notice of God. So we try to find the joy there is in God’s finding us. God intends our happiness. We pull up our antennae to its furthest peak and place ourselves on the lookout for glimpses of joy at its most unleashed. The path is cleared and God’s own tenderness is locating us. We never stop looking, until we realize that we have already been found. Good job.” —Greg Boyle
”It wasn’t until middle age that I finally decided if something makes God look like a jerk, I don’t have to believe it.” —Cynthia Winward
”As a very young child, one of my first church memories is of being on my grandmother’s lap and hearing her sing, God is Love. I had kind of a hard time feeling and believing love—it didn’t seem trustworthy to me as a kid. But this grandmother was one of the foundational pillars in my life. I believed the deeply familiar safety of her off-key voice. I felt the truth of it—one of my first witnesses of truth—because I knew and felt known by her.
”I’ve often struggled to hear or believe God’s love in my church life, but that childhood experience came to my mind many decades later as I began to find and understand God’s love for me through my personal life experiences. The memory and the feelings that accompanied it helped me begin to trust that God IS love, and that I’d misunderstood the relationship I thought we were supposed to have. Standing at the threshold of old age, I now know what to listen for. If something doesn’t speak love, it doesn’t come from God.” —Susan Hinckley, (p. 86)