Finding God
by Blakelee Ellis
It feels like from my very beginning,
I was camping, hiking, fishing, star gazing and singing around the campfire. Both of my parents spent so much of their own formative years doing those same things so when it came to raising my siblings and I they decided to pass on their love of the outdoors.
It was always very clear to me that nature is where my dad best connected with deity. The stress of his daily life, including his career as an emergency medicine physician, wore him thin. But no matter how busy he was, he took us camping almost every weekend in the summer. There I could see the stress melt away from him. He relaxed. He laughed and he was contemplative as he reset his heart and mind. He always expressed gratitude and awe at the natural beauty that God had created. To this day I can still recall EXACTLY what his voice sounds like when he looks around and says, “It’s beauuuutiful.” He never questioned that something greater than himself had crafted this beautiful world.
I have always connected with God through nature and leaving my everyday life behind, but it took on a new meaning and a new reverence in the past few years. When I suddenly couldn’t find God at church, at the temple, or even my own home, I felt completely lost. I didn’t know where I could connect with the spirit at all anymore. I felt totally alone.
I wish I could say I remembered my pull to nature and went looking for God there of my own volition, but I’m not nearly that clever. When I could no longer find God, God reached out to me through nature. I was smack dab in the middle of my faith deconstruction. I was broken, alone, constantly heartsick and spiritually adrift. After church one Sunday, my sister-in-law suggested that we should take our families on a short hike to see a waterfall. It wasn’t a “normal” Sunday activity that we engaged in, but we decided to give it a try. We made it to the waterfall and let the kids splash around in the water. I was so devastated by my lack of connection with God during church that day. I was desperate for any feeling of God in my life. I planted myself at the base of the waterfall, closed my eyes, breathed deep and reached out my entire being to God. And out there, without expecting it, I collided with God more forcefully than I had in months of longing. I didn’t hear a voice or have any words come to mind. I just felt a breeze, heard the rushing water and felt seen and heard and known. I had experienced God simply by being, by breathing and by yearning. By turning in on myself and crying out with my soul. It was a type of prayer I had never tried before. Less formality, fewer words, much more contemplative, much more visceral. I felt like I had been thrown a lifeline. That afternoon I decided that I would develop a new ritual to try to find God.
In comparison to the complex worship rituals I had experienced up until then, especially in the temple, my new ritual was extremely simple. Many people would just call it “meditating.” While that may be true, for me it was more significant. This was one of the first times I truly took ownership of my spirituality. Church was no longer working for me. I longed to make something work and I got to decide what that was. For someone who has had a lifelong struggle with self-confidence this was a huge area of growth for me. It was the beginning of a new me. Every evening I would take my dog on a walk and stop at the field attached to an elementary school. I would unleash my dog to run free and intentionally start my practice. I didn’t have much to offer God. I didn’t know anything anymore. But God says all we need is a broken heart.
3 Nephi 9:20
And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit. And whoso cometh unto me with a broken heart … , him will I baptize with fire and with the Holy Ghost
On those nights I would close my eyes, tip my head to the sky, breath deep and imagine my physical heart opening wide. As my heart cracked open so too would my entire self. I would lay myself bare to the universe in hopes that God would see me open wide and decide to step in.
It’s February 26, 2024 at 9:23 AM. I don’t remember all the details of the day, but some situation left me feeling desperate. I only have the specific date and time because of my handy phone. I wish I could remember what set me off, but for the life of me, I have no recollection of the specific circumstances. I only know that in my desperation I stomped out of my house, turned north and walked until I was at the top of a nearby hill. It was maybe 200 yards from my house and “hill” is a generous term. It was a slight incline. But it gave me the space to breath and calm. I rage dictated into my phone everything that I was feeling and this is what came out:
My family and I were on vacation in St. George, Utah. We had heard that the shores of the Virgin River were a fun place to take the kids. In the heat of the summer the shallow waters get as warm as a bathtub and kids are free to skip rocks, make sand castles and bask in the warm water. Again, I was feeling so disconnected from the God I once knew. The one I found at church and with my community didn’t exist anymore. I was still in the deep trudge of unlearning and relearning everything about my spirituality. In his book, The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr calls it our “inner journey.”
Once the real inner journey begins—once you come to know that in Christ, God is forever overcoming the gap between human and divine—the Christian path becomes less about climbing and performance, and more about descending, letting go, and unlearning. Knowing and loving Jesus is largely about becoming fully human, wounds and all, instead of ascending spiritually or thinking we can remain unwounded. (The ego does not like this fundamental switch at all, so we keep returning to some kind of performance principle, trying to climb out of this messy incarnation instead of learning from it.)
I was having a difficult time wanting to take my kids to church at all and longed for something different. I was so pleased when my husband suggested a Sunday afternoon river visit. I sat in the sand and watched my kids play. I marveled at the tall reeds, the warm water and the sun warming my skin. I felt such joy and wholeness in that moment. My kids were joyful and so was I. I paused and thought, “God, are you here? You are more present in the river and reeds than you have been in a church building in years. I’m so grateful to encounter you today. Thank you for making your presence known.” After a few hours we jumped back in the car to head home. Before we could even pull away I turned and I said to my kids, “I felt God today. I felt God out there in the water and the wind and the sun. I’m so happy I found God today with you.”
Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing “contemplation.”
—Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ
This definition of contemplation teaches us that location is not a determining factor for finding God. In fact, the scriptures are full of stories illustrating that God will meet us where we are, as we are. Haggar is cast out into the barren wilderness. She cries out to God and receives a blessing that lasts for generations. Jacob wrestles with an angel on a river bank. God appears to Moses through a burning bush. After much fear and exhaustion, Elijah flees into the wilderness where he finally stills and hears God. Deborah, a prophetess and judge of Israel, lives under a tree and receives God’s blessing to help destroy the Canaanites. Ruth believes God called her to follow her mother in law into her home land. Priscilla constantly travels through her ministry. Jesus himself fasts and prays in the wilderness for 40 days.
In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus did not wait for her to come to Him. He went out of his way to meet her where she was. She was shunned and broken. She was desperate enough to break all societal conventions and journey to the well midday. Jesus showed up for her in a desert place where society and religion had left her parched. Jesus not only met her there, but changed her life.
19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.
20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”
21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.
22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.
23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.
24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
This woman is lamenting the fact that she cannot worship God in the place she has been told is THE ONLY PLACE to worship. She is literally banned from the temple. She believes she has been exiled from God. But Jesus gives her hope. Jesus basically introduced her to an entirely new way of thinking. It isn’t about location at all. It’s about spirit and truth. It’s about coming to understand that every encounter in our lives can be an encounter with the divine. Because we can take spirit and truth with us WHEREVER we go.
In his podcast episode, Jesus H. Christ: Part 4 - The Whole Thing Is A Temple, Rob Bell says:
This is a new understanding in human history about what it means to be human because what this story keeps insisting is that a human is where the divine dwells… Now his first followers took this and went with it because…in the letter to the Corinthians, Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in your midst? [Jesus] comes to show you that the whole thing is a temple, that you are a temple.
The more I learned about grace, about my true divinity as human, the more I understood that we are all divine. I mean, I had always heard that, but I began to internalize it on a different level. I began to REALLY understand that. We are all divine. The rubber really met the road and I put that into action. I surmised that if I really am divine, if I really have God within me, then I encounter God by being my highest self. By putting aside my ego, my pain, my selfishness and looking for God within myself. To quote Richard Rohr AGAIN (sorry, y’all. He is just the best):
You see, we do not earn or find God. We just get ourselves in the way. We let go of illusion and the preoccupations of the false self. As the cheap scaffolding falls away, the soul stands revealed. The soul, or true self, cannot be created or worked for. It is awakened. It is, and it is already. The soul is God’s ‘I AM’ continued in me. That part of me already knows, desires, and truly seeks God. Here ‘I’ and God seem to be one ‘I.’
Maybe nature really just gives me the opportunity to get out of my own way. To connect with the divine that is inside me. It gives space, time and quiet for the spirit in me to connect with the spirit everywhere. If God is within me then a major part of encountering God is becoming my highest self. Nature facilitates that for me. So the question isn’t, “WHERE do I find God,” or “HOW do I find God,” but “Where do I find ME? How do I find ME? Where and how am I most connected with myself?”
At the beginning of October my dad and I decided to summit the Pfeifferhorn, a peak near the Salt Lake Valley. The peak stands at an elevation of 11,326 ft. For context, the Salt Lake Valley has an average elevation of 4,327 feet. We would nearly triple our elevation in this climb. Our schedules only allowed us to summit on a Sunday. So instead of going to church with my family, I went on the 12 mile summit climb with my dad.
I was physically exhausted at the end of the day, but my heart was full. Even though I had left my family for the day, I had done something that brings me true joy as a form of worship. My worship was savoring this beautiful world that God created, being centered in my body, pushing myself to my physical limit and silencing my mind enough to let my spirit reach out to the God within me and the presence all around me. I stood in awe of the world around me. And I experienced all of this with someone who has shaped my life and spirituality, someone I love so deeply.
In this moment I felt gratitude, I felt connection. I felt God.
As I hiked I listened to another episode of The Rob Cast, and almost on cue, almost as if God orchestrated it to be so, Rob says:
…This life that you and I have in this house, it flows from something, it flows from somewhere, it flows from someone.
It is a gift that we receive. When you took your first breath, that is a gift. The breath you just took, a gift.
You are the recipient of this extraordinary gift of life itself. The universe has been generous with you. Before anything else can be said about any one of us, we are the recipients of an overabundant, overflowing act of generosity, which I think is all of the people I have interacted with over the years who have gone through tremendous trauma, tragedy, suffering.
It’s like you have to, you absorb that, you feel it, you grieve, you weep, you are angry, you shake your fists at the heavens. You give it all its proper expression, because you are human and you need to, otherwise it is stuffed down in there. But what I have observed is how many people at some point, after working through all of the very real human emotions of difficulty, suffering, it’s so interesting to me how many times people will tell some version of the story in which, and then one day they got up and thought, but I am here, I survived, I am still breathing.
It’s like the gift keeps giving. So in spite of all the ways that the world feels unfair, all of the betrayal, loss, injustice, every reason any one of us have to say, come on, house, goodness, seriously, there is this truth that is the truth that undergirds everything else. The first word about any of us is not everything that’s gone wrong.
The first word about any of us is that before anything, we received this extraordinary, generous gift of life itself…In some ways, …you begin the prayer by acknowledging source.”
I’m here. This is before anything else a gift. And I begin by returning to that primal, original impulse of gratitude for the gift.
The RobCast, Ep. 210, Jesus H. Christ: Part 2 - 66 Words
Blakelee Ellis
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Much respect for Richard Rohr and the quotes you shared. But I have noticed I have found myself quoting you with my daughters. And that's a wonderful thing. Plus this -- "This woman is lamenting the fact that she cannot worship God in the place she has been told is THE ONLY PLACE to worship. She is literally banned from the temple. She believes she has been exiled from God." so wonderfully described my relationship with our temples. I could never find peace in who is excluded. And those thoughts consumed my participation for many years. (And I will be thinking of your hike the next time I wince at climbing our stairs.)
Thank you Blakelee for this heartfelt vulnerable message. Father Richard and also Barbara Brown Taylor have spoken about panentheism—that god is in all things.
I’ve been thinking about that as I’m in Hawaii this week and have been meditating on the beach. I feel god in the waves. In the turquoise water. In the wind in the palm trees. And you too find god out in our gorgeous Utah mountains. We’re already at the party, right?