As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once observed, God is not simply a stopgap for the holes in our knowledge of the world, nor is He merely the source of ultimate answers to personal and human problems. In other words, God is not simply the one Whom we reach when we are extended to our limits. He is, on the contrary, the ground and center our existence, and though we may conceive ourselves as “going to” Him and reaching out to Him beyond the sphere of our everyday existence, we nevertheless start from Him and remain in Him as the very ground of our existence and reality.
He is not merely “out there” in a vague beyond. He is not merely hidden in the shadows of what is unknown and pushed further away in proportion as we come to know more and more. He is the very ground of what we know and our knowledge itself is His manifestation: not that He is the cause of all that is real, but that reality itself is His epiphany.
THOMAS MERTON Opening the Bible
