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Chapter One:

The Architecture of the Void

“God became man that man might become god.” 

– St. Athanasius of Alexandria

         For most of my life, I believed God was outside of me.

         Growing up in the United States in the last quarter of the 20th century, I’m not sure there was any other choice.  I wasn’t very smart, struggled to pay attention in school, and had a hyperactive imagination.  The ideas of quantum physics and quantum mechanics had been around for decades but were not taught to nor understood by everyday people.

         Simply stated, quantum physics reveals that every atom in the universe, including the 7 x 1027 atoms that comprise every human being, are made up of 99.9999% empty space.  At a fundamental level, all matter is energy in motion, and its properties are determined by its unique vibration.

         Back when the population of the planet was just two billion people, Albert Einstein observed that, if you took just the physical matter of everyone on the planet, it would fit into a sugar cube.  We are energetic beings.  Such thinking rarely made it over into Sunday sermons.

         Without going too far down the rabbit hole of Creation, much of scientific thought has revolved around the idea that matter somehow gave rise to consciousness, that inanimate “stuff” produced life.  The counterpoint is the idea that the Big Bang, a messy term for an incredibly specialized event, occurred as the result of a Creator.

         Consciousness, then, operates within a universe that is fundamentally relational, dynamic, and energetic, not solid and mechanical.  This means our experience of solidity and separation is a useful interface; it is not the underlying truth of reality.  This idea has given birth to Biocentrism, the theory that life and consciousness are central to the universe, creating reality rather than being accidental byproducts of physics.

         In esoteric spiritual circles, this gives rise to sayings like “you are the universe” or the Persian poet Rumi’s gem, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.”

         The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were “God” in the denominations of Christianity but, aside from Jesus and His walking the earth 2,000 years ago, there wasn’t a clear picture of the Father or the Holy Spirit.  For me, admiring Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, with a very paternal “God” extending an outreached finger to Adam, I imagined that God the Father looked like a cross between Thor’s father Odin and Charlton Heston’s portrayal of Moses in Hollywood’s 1956 film, The Ten Commandments.

In my own experience of Christianity, I could never quite “get” the idea behind the Trinity.  In my upbringing, and in my understanding, Jesus was one divine person.  The Father was another.  Prayer, though not consciously connected to Spirit with the strength of ruach, was divine communication between them.  The Hebrew word ruach means breath, wind, and spirit.    

I suspect I am not alone in viewing the Trinity through this lens.

Such ideas are born from moments like the Transfiguration, where the voice from the heavens says, “This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased.”  In this moment in the biblical narrative, Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus.  It is traditionally understood to be a dramatic meeting of the minds, where Yahweh is endorsing Jesus.  If, however, we view the Transfiguration through the lens of the Logos, it is not a conversation between separate figures, but the translation of divine unity into humanly perceptible form.  

In this light, Moses (the law) and Elijah (the Prophets) are the internal, constituent dimensions of the Logos itself, suddenly rendered visible as the Light of the Ein Sof expands through the “Vessel” of Jesus’ humanity.  Ein Sof in Hebrew means “Without End” or “No Limit” – the Kabbalistic term for the infinite, unknowable God as He existed prior to the creation of the universe, before any definition, restriction, or manifestation.  Think God before He becomes ‘the Creator.’

It is the moment where the vertical line of divine presence becomes so concentrated that history can no longer maintain its separations, revealing that the Root and the Offspring are and always have been a singular, luminous reality.

When we stop looking at the Transfiguration as three separate entities and see it as the unveiling as a singular Being, the Trinity reveals itself.

If the Transfiguration is the Maximal Expansion of the Logos, then the Father, Son, and Spirit are the very frequency of life itself: Consciousness, Presence, and Authority operating as one.

To inhabit this reality is to realize that the voice from the cloud is the resonance of the Root speaking through the Offspring.  This shift in perception is the final eviction of the visual separation that keeps us feeling like orphans in our own bodies.  When we see the Transfiguration for what it is, we understand that Jesus is the Light in which both God and humanity finally find a common home.

But if the transfiguration is the unveiling of a common home, it necessitates a change in how we view the “Throne” within that home.  

We are conditioned to think of a throne as a seat of distance – a place where a King sits apart from his subjects to hand down decrees.  For most of my life, the idea that I was going to stand before the Throne of God and be judged was filtered through this extreme lens of separation.

         Because I lacked the oneness framework of the Logos, I defaulted to the imagery of my upbringing.  It was a genuine form of ignorance, guided by the belief that others knew better than me.  God was on His Throne, and I was literally going to stand before it.  Where the Bible speaks of the “Judgment Seat of Christ” in 2 Corinthians and Romans, I didn’t envision a biological alignment or a re-tuning of my soul.  I envisioned a cosmic courtroom.  That’s where I expected to encounter God the Father.

From the pulpit on Sundays, there was no substantial talk of oneness.  If there was, my lack of focus precluded me from picking up on it.  

By their very nature, religions create boxes – there’s “us” and then there’s “them” – “we” are inside the box; those of a different belief system are outside the box.  At a young age, I could not grasp the idea of the church as “one.”  I didn’t think of “unity” when I looked at my family and friends any more than they did when they looked at me.  We were physically separate, and that was that.  The spiritual world, if one existed, was decidedly distant.  Heaven was incomprehensible, because God was somewhere far away on His throne, and science could not find Him.

Fear of the Unknown

         Much of what we call disbelief or resistance is actually unfamiliarity.  We avoid what we have not yet learned how to see.  In school, I did my best to avoid math and science, subjects around which my mind at the time lacked the ability to organize itself.  When graduation dictated I take certain classes in these fields, my grades reflected my belief about my skills.  The same was true for most mechanical things.  When I became an adult, I usually hired someone for household and car maintenance, while some friends easily handled similar chores.  I excused my lack of skill in these areas by telling myself I just wasn't born with them.

         When it came to religious beliefs, I largely avoided anything that wasn’t aligned with my Christian upbringing.  My exposure to different cultures gradually dulled this resistance.

         Over the past several years, I have read at least fifty books on the Christian faith.  

         Many focus on how the Bible came to be, or the evolution of God from polytheism to monotheism and the birth of the Abrahamic religions.  Some offer insights into Paul’s letters, or how Jesus became God.  Recently, I came across one that pulled on the thread of the Bible as a Hebrew marriage contract.  Among these books, precious few focus on the idea that we are meant to be habitations for God.

         This is not an indictment on the church or on any of the authors who dedicated the time, research, and energy needed to create their works.  It is the realization that we have made it very easy to distract ourselves from what is most important in life, and that the answers do not come to us by avoiding the qualities that make life challenging.  They come from facing them.

         The Bible can be read in many different ways. It can be reduced to behavioral principles or sin management, a moral checklist aimed at keeping us within acceptable bounds - I should live according to the Ten Commandments. Read this way, Scripture reinforces a guilt-and-innocence framework, training us to monitor ourselves rather than to be transformed from within. It treats being human as a problem to be controlled, not a dwelling to be inhabited. 

But the Bible is not primarily concerned with making people behave better. It is concerned with making them habitable for God.

When read only through the lens of historical accuracy or timeline mapping, Scripture becomes a museum: artifacts preserved, events cataloged, meaning safely kept at a distance. When read to affirm doctrinal systems, Christ Himself is often reduced to a theological argument rather than encountered as a living presence. In both cases, something essential is lost.

The Bible is not merely recording what happened. It is revealing what is happening. It is not inviting us to observe a story, but to enter one.

The most difficult aspect of Scripture is also the most staggering, and it is precisely the reason it rarely fits into a Sunday service: the Bible assumes that resurrection is not only something Christ accomplished, but something humanity must consciously participate in. We are not merely readers of the story. We are its authors. The question Scripture presses upon the individual is why resurrection is a must for us.

Chasing Feelings

In the West, it’s easy to get caught up in the physical world.  For years, I was a retailer’s dream.  I used to buy things because of how they were going to make me feel.  And then, once I owned the thing, the feeling went away quickly.  So, what did I do?  I looked for something else to buy.  I was constantly chasing a feeling, and dependent on something outside of me to obtain it.  I was like Pavlov’s dog; the difference was, the ringing bell was inside of me.  I could not answer it myself, because I didn’t know how.

         Sometimes the feeling lasted a few days, maybe even a week.  On other occasions, it faded after just a few hours.

         Long before Amazon’s same-day or next-day delivery, the sense of anticipation over getting something in the mail was palpable.  Before the dawn of the internet, there were no tracking numbers; I mailed off whatever prerequisite was required and checked the mailbox every day after school.  The sense of this experience is best captured by poor Ralphie in the holiday classic, A Christmas Story.

         As an avid fan of the Little Orphan Annie radio show, Ralphie mails off the necessary information to earn a membership pin.  Weeks go by.  Every day, he checks the mailbox – nothing.

         Then, when it finally arrives, he uses it to decode a secret message from the show, only to be crushed by the underwhelming result - Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!  

This anti-climactic feeling isn’t just limited to the shopping bug.

         When, after eleven years of misfires, I at last got the monkey off my back and published my first book in 2017, I was over the moon.  I sat at my kitchen counter, waiting for news from my publisher. Finally, just past 8:30 in the evening, they delivered it – the book was a #1 international bestseller.  

         That feeling of accomplishment lasted about three days.

         In publishing Love Letters to the Virgin Mary in December 2022, a shift occurred.  I didn’t do any marketing for the book’s launch.  I’d been so focused on getting it published by December 8th, I’d overlooked a handful of typos that made it into the final draft.  Part of me knew it wasn’t about what publishing the book was going to do for me, how many people were going to read it, or if it became an international bestseller.

         What was significant to me was who I had become in conceiving of and writing the story.

         From the book’s initial inception of October 2019, just as my three-and-a-half year relationship was crashing down around me, it took me more than two years before I had a sense of how to tell the story.  During that time, I journaled almost every day.  I wrote about my experience of the pandemic, my comprehension of God, and my effort to unscramble the confusion about my identity.  Still, I didn’t know how to approach Jesus.  I was afraid to.

         That fear had been groomed by my own perception of the indecent life I’d lived.  The noble idea that had guided me for decades had driven me to become someone I didn’t always like spending time with.  How could Jesus save me?

         I also toyed with different book titles, doing my best to understand what this story inside me was and how to get it out.  Part of that process was developing the voices of characters, searching for their authenticity and congruency.

Once I had my breakthrough moment in November 2021 and arrived at the title, I completed the first draft within three weeks. The experience left me so unsettled that I delayed writing the second draft for five months. 

         It was also one of the most powerful journeys of my life.  By the time the book was released, I’d become a different person.

         It isn’t about what we get.  It’s about who we become in getting there.  I realized that relying on food or drink, shopping, or others for comfort was just my way of trying to fill an inner void only I could address through a relationship with Christ.

         What greater gift is there than the embodiment of everlasting life?  Everything we need to be successful on that journey is already inside of us.  This upends the idea that God is outside of us.  Thankfully, Scripture does at well.

The Revelation of God in Silence

         In seeking to embrace a more relational definition of God, we first look to the God’s revelation to Elijah in 1 Kings 19:11-13:

         Then He said, “Go out, and stand on the mountain before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.

So it was, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave. Suddenly a voice came to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

As awe-inspiring as Nature is, God is revealed in the interiority of silence itself.  The Hebrew phrase is qol demamah daqqah – the voice of a gentle silence.  God’s presence is not only transcendent and awesome, but also immanent – encountered in the quiet center of the human spirit.  Silence is the subtlest form of God’s voice, an inner knowing.  The 99.999% empty space physics finds in our atoms is the gentle silence where the Logos speaks.

From Transcendence to Immanence

From this immensely profound discovery, we venture some nine hundred years forward to the time of Jesus and John 14:23: “Jesus replied, ‘Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching.  My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.’”

Here is the biblical equivalent of a “smoking gun” – a revolution in divine geography.  Where in the Old Testament, God’s presence descended upon mountains, temples, and prophetic moments, Jesus reframes the dwelling place of God as the human heart itself.

In the Old Testament, the Ark of the Covenant was housed in the temple.  A veil hung between it and the faithful, signifying separation.  One day out of the year, the high priest could move past the veil into the Holy of Holies.  This is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, or the Day of At-One-Ment.  

As relayed in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, the veil was torn from top to bottom “at the moment” Jesus yielded up his spirit.  This moment signifies the habitation of God in human form – No longer transcendent, God is immanent.

In picking up our Cross, we confront the potential for malevolence within ourselves and within the world.  We voluntarily take on the suffering of the world and its evils to foster within ourselves the greatest levels of growth.  This may seem extreme, but how else are we to undergo biological or physiological change if we do not aspire honestly to follow Jesus’ path, guided by the conviction that He is Risen?  He is the ultimate trailblazer.

This path is oriented around those three points of navigation: Truth, malevolence, and suffering.  By its very definition, a genuine pursuit of this path matures us, and leads us to embody the Father on earth.  This gives breath to the idea espoused by Jesus in John 14:23 – by abiding in His teachings, we become habitable for both Father and Son.

This metamorphosis arrives with a piercing truth of its own - no one comes to the Father except through Jesus (John 14:6).  

This non-negotiable provides us with the greatest clarity.  Its recognition sharpens our focus towards Him and guides us back to the Cross, and into undergoing whatever internal transformation is necessary to know with absolute certainty that His victory over death is universal and eternal.

This is a watershed moment, early in our journey.  Between Elijah’s discovery of the voice of a gentle silence within and Jesus’ revelation that we are to be habitations for both He and the Father, we now find ourselves asking, how does this habitation take place?  How do I make room for the Father and the Son, and what part of me remains intact through this transformation?

This radically overturns the common frame through which Jesus is understood and invites us to consider a far more daring journey, that of awakening the Kingdom inside each of us.  

Elijah teaches us where to listen; Jesus reveals who speaks within. 

Indwelling Presence 

This tectonic epiphany is a fundamental reorientation of how many people have been taught to see God and themselves.

Most traditional church teachings, over centuries, have often emphasized a God who is “out there” – separate, distant, and primarily encountered through external rituals or ancient stories.  Theology has treated the Father as though he stands behind Christ, upstream in some metaphysical hierarchy.  But the Gospel of John dismantles that picture entirely.  “No one has seen God,” John writes, “but only the Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made Him known” (John 1:18).  

Through Jesus, the Father is revealed.  Without the Logos, the Father remains unknowable and imperceptible.  What is both more breathtaking and intimidating is the realization that God’s dwelling is within, that the heart of each believer becomes the new Holy of Holies.

This distinction matters, because it tells us something radical about the nature of reality itself: what we perceive as God’s distance is a reflection of our own receptivity.

What these moments of revelation unveil is not a privilege reserved for prophets, popes, or saints, but a truth about the very structure of human existence itself.  The “still, small voice” and the divine indwelling that Jesus speaks of reveal something essential about what it means to be human.

Every person, by virtue of being conscious, receptive, and capable of love, already participates in the divine reality from which consciousness, being, and bliss flow.  The shift made is from God appearing to God as the very ground of our capacity to appear, to know, and to love.

The divine presence is nearer to us than our own breath, the hush of life within all life.  It is not exclusively somewhere else in a different dimension we call heaven.

Chapter Two:

The Ground of Being

How best to define God?

Most modern readers approach the Bible assuming that the word God is a stable reference point – a clear and obvious term whose meaning has remained intact across time, language, and culture.  Yet this assumption collapses almost immediately under scrutiny and historical calibration.

Hebrew Scriptures speak of God through a constellation of names – Elohim, Yahweh, and Adonai – each pointing to a distinct mode of divine reality; power and creative order, intimate presence, and covenantal being, authority and relational sovereignty.  These names function as theological precision tools, allowing the text to describe movement, relationship, and experience rather than a static object.

As Scripture passed from Hebrew into Greek, then Latin, and finally English, these distinctions gradually collapsed.  The divine Name was replaced by titles; relational presence was absorbed into authority, and a rich interior of grammar of divine life was reduced to the single, catch-all word God.  What the modern reader gained in simplicity came at the expense of intelligibility.

This linguistic compression has consequences.  When the language we use for God becomes generic, the experience we expect of God becomes abstract.  God drifts outward – into doctrine, distance, and deferred hope – rather than inward, as presence, ground, and lived reality.  Faith becomes something we believe about God.  The invitation is participation.

It is within this flattened landscape that contemporary debates about God take place, with believers and skeptics alike arguing past one another, each assuming a definition that Scripture itself never required.  Before asking whether God exists, we must first ask a more fundamental question: what do we actually mean when we say the word God?

I am borrowing from David Bentley Hart’s masterful book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss as the definition he provides is nothing short of brilliant.

I focus this definition further using the lens of a precept established at the book’s outset – that we are to be co-heirs with Christ.  

Contemplating such an internal transformation packs all the punch of a colossal juggernaut barreling down on us – precisely because it must be contemplated by each individual.  The magnitude of this revelation cannot be overstated.  In correctly discerning that co-heirship is the endgame, we must harness within ourselves the greatest sense of resiliency, while abandoning limiting beliefs, of which we may be heavily burdened.

We must recognize whatever gap we perceive in our conviction of Christ’s ultimate triumph and His promise of everlasting life.  However great and deep our investment in our mortality, by whatever gravity we have assigned to the transient nature of life, we must surrender our attachment to what is fleeting and redirect our aim towards what is eternal.  This is closing the gap.

This shift does not come lightly.

In the summer before I was laid off from Cisco, I vividly recall the look of consternation on my senior director’s face during one particular video call.   To some degree, he’d known I was struggling with something since we’d started working together sixteen months earlier.  

I had been reluctant to say too much, because I could not fully grasp what I was going through, and did not know how to appropriately express it in the workplace.  A strong Christian, he verbalized his admiration the first time he saw the cover for Love Letters to the Virgin Mary.

I do not recall exactly what I said in response to his appreciation; I only know the doubt I expressed led to the dismay I saw on his face.  With the psychological toll writing the book had taken on me, I knew I had damaged my reputation at the company.  I wasn’t thinking about what the book would mean for the world.  I was worried about losing my job.

I was wondering how I was going to support myself.  For thirty-two years, I had operated within very conventional paradigms of structure.  In the Marines, there was no shortage of rules and regulations, and all my basic needs had been provided for by the United States government.  When I left active duty and joined Cisco, the regimentation I’d known in the military faded in the wake of productivity, efficiency, and responsiveness to customer needs, but there was still a very well defined framework of how “corporate life” was.

My future was unknown, and I saw that reflected on my supervisor’s face.

He sat back in his chair and drew a hand to his chin.  Looking back, he saw I was too focused on earthly matters, and not on the bigger picture.  A little more than three months later, he informed me I was being let go.

Our patterns around “how life is” are deeply held, and many are framed by the work we do.  We see ourselves as project managers, programmers, or senior directors, and live within the culture of our employers.  We measure time by Agile Sprints, project plans, and quarterly reports.  We plan our days, weeks, and months around school, vacation, and aim toward something called retirement.  We think of life in the discreet lens of mortality and do our best to forestall what comes next.  

At Cisco, my value was in my performance against quarterly goals and metrics.  In the Marriage of Heaven and Earth, my value is my ‘habitability’ – my capacity to simply be the space where the Father and Son make their home.

It takes incredible courage to open ourselves to a reality that transcends mere survival and invites creation and participation in the everlasting.  And yet, that is the journey.

Resurrection is the language of eternity breaking into time.  It does not belong to the past; it is the pulse that keeps creation from collapsing into meaninglessness.  To experience it is to remember that life itself is always rising.  Everything in life grows or it dies.

The purpose of my writing is focused on resurrection as the ultimate human experience of transformation.  Like the caterpillar becomes the butterfly, through trust in Christ, we rise to be co-heirs with Him.  By what other means can we apprehend such a destiny, if not consciously?

         My approach to Bible story is that, by picking up my Cross and following Jesus, I will realize His victory over the grave.  In realizing it, this will lead to embodiment.  

Given that all authority in heaven and on earth is entrusted to Jesus after His resurrection, it follows that our entry into the eternal dwelling promised in John 14:23 is not based on sentiment, effort, or inherited tradition—but on relationship with the risen King Himself.  A conscious, heartfelt relationship.

Jesus is not a passive gatekeeper.  He is the governing authority of heaven—the One through whom every promise flows and by whom every soul must be received.

Before we can fully realize the reward of divine habitation, we must first be recognized by the One who builds the house. Christ is the cornerstone, and the basis for all eternal structures.  We are flirting with the marriage motif and will delay our deep-dive into it for now.

All access to the Father comes through Him. All authority resides in Him.

And therefore, He alone determines who becomes the habitation for God.

         As such, there must be a definition of God that speaks to both the infinite and the significance of Jesus’ role as Messiah.  I believe Hart, without directly mentioning Jesus, addresses both.

Being, Consciousness, and Bliss

Hart’s definition is structured around three interlocking dimensions:

1.             Being (Sat)

·      God is not one entity within the universe but the absolute ground of all that exists.

·      Everything that is, participates in being, but God is being itself.  

·      This means God cannot be reduced to an object or thing, since all things depend on Him for existence.

2.    Consciousness (Chit)

·      Consciousness is not an accidental by-product of matter; it points to a deeper reality.

·      God is the infinite horizon of intelligibility and awareness – the condition for any act of knowing or experiencing.

·      Our finite consciousness is a reflection of the infinite divine mind in which all knowing is grounded.

3.    Bliss (Ananda)

·      Existence and awareness alone do not capture the fullness of God; God is also the absolute good, fullness, and beatitude.

·      To know God is to participate in a reality of joy, love, and fulfillment.

·      This recalls the classical idea of God as the summum bonum – the supreme good in which all longing finds rest.

In understanding Hart’s definition of what God is, it is equally important to acknowledge what, in his eyes, God is not.  

Many Christians grow up imagining God as a kind of supreme being “out there” – a cosmic agent who occasionally intervenes in the machinery of the universe.  This way of thinking, shaped by centuries of mechanistic and Enlightenment assumptions, subtly turns God into a thing within creation rather than the source of all being.

Classical Christian theology, however, offers something far more profound.  God is not a competitor to created causes, nor a divine tinkerer lurking beyond the cosmos.  According to the Nicene confession, God is one essence (Ousia) eternally shared by three persons (hypostases): Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Often this understanding leads to the idea that they are separate divine minds, instead of a single, indivisible life of love and self-giving.

When God is understood as one essence, passages like John 14:23 open from the inside out.  What once sounded distant or even metaphorical – “We will come to them and make our home with them” – suddenly becomes intimate and possible.  The conventional distance of the Trinity collapses, revealing instead a single, shared life inviting communion.  In later chapters, we’ll see how this understanding of God as one infinite act of Being naturally unfolds into the promise of eternal participation and shared life with Him.

Hart also rejects reductionist atheism, which dismisses God as unnecessary because of physics or evolutionary explanations.  Finally, any view that makes God smaller than the infinite source of being, consciousness, and bliss is not considered by Hart.

In short, God is the transcendent source of reality.

This leads us to ponder…can we connect the Bible’s ending to Hart’s definition?  I believe we can.  In making this connection, what conclusion might we be drawn to?

The Bible ends with the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.  Though recent works of fiction have popularized the Rapture and the faithful ascending from earth to join Jesus in heaven, we must steel ourselves to the greater task – heaven and earth coming together through our own internal transformation.

If the ending of Scripture is to be believed, then the Being, Consciousness, and Bliss Hart describe are the very reality destined to be shared by every living soul — the final unveiling of unity with the Source. If Christ’s salvation truly embraces the whole sweep of human history – from the dust of David to the cells of the modern reader - then “God living among His people” signifies a universal awakening.  It is a consciousness that pulses through the entirety of humanity, binding heaven and earth into one unbroken experience of God.

But if we are looking for a way of being that isn’t built on shifting sand – a kind of internal architecture that provides a certainty the world can’t shake, what kind of foundation is needed?  If we are to participate in this divine Being, how do we identify the specific Figure who bridges the gap between the infinite Father and our finite cells?  How does the “Lord” of David’s line become the living axis for the Trinity in motion – the point where the Father’s intent, the Son’s biology, and the Spirit’s breath finally move as one, single, unstoppable frequency within the human heart?

Enter, The Messiah: The Trinity in Motion

How does Jesus fit into Hart’s definition of the Trinity?  At first glance, the Incarnation seems to directly contradict the metaphysical absolute – how can the infinite, unconditioned God exist in a singular, human form?  This is why we have made the decision to define the Trinity as the three-fold movement of one Divine Life: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.

Hart defines God as Being itself, the ground of all existence.  Jesus declares, “I am the resurrection and the life.  Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives by believing in me will never die” (John 11:25-26).  Here, the Father as the “Source of Being” and the Son as the “Expression of Being” are revealed as one.  Jesus is the local manifestation of the Infinite Root.

With the importance of light, both in the Bible and as a symbol of awareness – en-light-en-ment – rather than thinking of the Infinite moving into the finite like water being poured into a cup — think of it more in the way light shines through a glass.  

In the person of Jesus, the human vessel becomes completely transparent to the Infinite Being of the Father.  This understanding is vital; without it, we cannot grasp the “Smoking Gun” of John 14:23, where Jesus promises that both He and the Father will make their home within our own biology.

According to Hart, consciousness is the condition for all knowledge, the infinite awareness in which all finite knowing takes place.  Jesus states, “I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).  Light is a symbol for intelligibility.  By claiming this title, Jesus reveals Himself as the Logos-Consciousness – the “Son” who is the perfect mirror of the Father’s mind.

Just as light is the precondition for vision, Christ is the precondition for conscious awareness.  He is the “signal” that makes the “Source” intelligible.  He is the very structure of consciousness itself, the Logos that holds together our capacity to perceive reality.  When we “put on the mind of Christ,” we are essentially tuning our biological hardware to the frequency of the Divine Mind.

Finally, Hart defines God as Bliss – the absolute good, fullness, and beatitude in which all longing finds rest.  In the Trinity, this is the Holy Spirit, the “Breath” of “Bond of Love” that flows between the Father and the Son.  Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11).  In Jesus, this abstract Bliss becomes a personal, sacrificial love.

The Holy Spirit is the “Resident” that Jesus – the Bridegroom – brings into the “Home” of our lives.  This Bliss is the Abundant Life that secures our habitability.  It is the energetic “Consummation” of the marriage between heaven and earth.

Hart gives us the philosophical scaffolding – God as Being, Consciousness, Bliss.  Jesus animates that scaffolding, turning the Trinity into a lived, biological reality:

·      The Father (Being): The Ground of all existence walks among us as our Root.

·      The Son (Consciousness): The Infinite Awareness speaks into history as our Bridegroom.

·      The Holy Spirit (Bliss): The Fullness of Love is poured into our DNA as our Breath.

The word “apocalypse” literally means unveiling.  What is unveiled in this Trinitarian alignment is the truth of where God now dwells: in us, with us, as light within light.  By recognizing Jesus as the “Offspring” of our humanity and the “Bridegroom” of our souls, we see that the Trinity is the very architecture of our own being.  We are Co-Heirs by constitution – designed to be the permanent habitation for the Source, the Signal, and the Breath.

The Logos Made Flesh

If God is the act of existence itself, and Jesus is God incarnate, then Jesus is the eternal Logos who, for some thirty-three years, localized as a Nazarene rabbi and carpenter.  The Logos is what sustains and enlightens all people: “The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world” (John 1:9).  This means every person’s existence is already held in and by Jesus Christ.  This is another moment of enormous import early in our journey.

To perceive the reality of Christ’s rule, it is necessary to step back from observational faith and step into participational faith.

We will examine the nature of this statement more deeply when we explore the relationship between King David and the Messiah.

The New Testament writers echo this.  Paul says, “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17) and Luke writes “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).  This universal participation internalizes Christ; He is the very life-source of each human.  Whether acknowledged or not, every person’s breath and being already flows from Him.  Paul addresses this in 1 Corinthians 2:16, “For who has known the mind and purposes of the Lord, so as to instruct Him?  But we have the mind of Christ.”

This is where Christianity’s paradox shines: Jesus of Nazareth is a particular man in history, yet also the universal Logos.  By taking on one human life, He reveals that every human life is already bound up in Him.

If this feels heady, let’s simplify things.  God is not an external being.  He is the ground of our being, the consciousness animating us, and the bliss we all long for.  All this can feel abstract until we feel it in our hearts.  Jesus’ sacrifice wasn’t solely for a group of people called “Christians”; He was in fact fulfilling the prophecies spread across the centuries foretelling Israel’s Messiah.  That sacrifice was for everyone, regardless of what they look like, where they’re from, or what they grew up believing. 

It took me a long time to understand; I couldn’t see God in myself if I didn’t see Him in everyone.  If the light of the Infinite shines into each of us the way light shines through a glass, I was largely opaque.  The light of the world is a breathtakingly beautiful understanding of Jesus as universal consciousness.  Just like the sun shines on everyone irrespective of what they believe, so shines the Light of Christ.  

Light reveals without judgment, shines without preference, and remains constant across every perspective.  What changes is the observer.  Our lenses – belief, trauma, culture, conditioning – filter the light, shaping what we see and how we interpret the world.  It isn’t the light that needs to change.  It’s us.

In this sense, Jesus as the “light of the world,” is the constant reality of divine awareness.  Humanity’s subjectivity – its fractured perceptions – creates the illusion of separation.  To awaken is not to find a different light, but to see truly by cleansing the lens of self. 

The labels we use to define ourselves and others precluded me from understanding – Jesus isn’t a by-product of the religion He inspired.  The religion He inspired is a by-product of His resurrection.

When I flipped the script, when I accepted that He is the light of the world, expressed in billions of different human experiences, something happened.  I realized that every person I encounter is a co-heir.  I’m more confident and more present with people, because I know He’s in them, however that shows up for them.

God is not distant.  He is the ground beneath our breath.  And if this is true, then why does God sometimes feel absent?

Chapter Three:

God Contracts

I had a conversation with my mom last weekend.  She’s 84 and has lived by herself since my dad passed away seventeen years ago.  I wanted to give her an update on my writing.  I also wanted to hear her thoughts on the subject.

As someone who has gone to church her entire life, she understands the Bible story well.  That being said, she was curious – Why was so much of my writing focused on King David?  As I explained to her the importance of David’s relationship to Jesus, she confessed…this was not a story or angle of the Bible she was familiar with, or one that had been addressed at Sunday sermons.  As I got ready to leave she asked me; did I ever think this is how my life would turn out?

I am not a Bible scholar.  I didn’t arrive at this theology from a position of comfort.  People have spent their entire lives studying the Bible; I have given myself a crash-course since 2020.  I arrived where I am by loss of structure. 

The pandemic stripped away the social scaffolding I’d created around my identity; I had trouble explaining to people what I was experiencing, as my life became filled with uncertainty yet oriented toward an exacting truth.  It was the experience of space being taken away so that something deeper could emerge.  I encountered too much Light too fast, and the Old map I had for God was no longer useful.

This is the lived experience of what the sages call Shevirat HaKelim – the ‘Breaking of the Vessels.’  In the story of creation, the initial structures (vessels) meant to hold God’s light were too rigid and too small.  When the infinite voltage of the Divine poured into them, they shattered.

My 2020 experience was a breaking of my own vessels.  My career, my identity, and my social scaffolding were vessels built for a ‘Contracted God.’  When I touched the “Third Rail” of the actual Infinite, those vessels couldn’t hold the charge.  The shattering was the only way to make room for a vessel that could finally resonate with the Word.

My mom’s question stayed with me as I drove home.  Is this the way I imagined my life would turn out?  Yes and no.

After a lifetime searching for the woman who would lead me back to God, to have my search realized during a pandemic, amidst a flurry of extraordinary encounters felt like a triumph for the ages.  The decision to use her image as the inspiration for my third book came within seconds, almost as if I didn’t care the cost – I knew what the image represented.

And no, I never could have planned a life that required such a violent dismantling of my own certainty.  But it was only in that void – where the familiar pillars of my career, my relationships, and my pride were stripped away – that I began to see the pattern of the Creator’s own hand.  My life had become a microcosm of a much older mystery: the necessity of a ‘hollowed out’ space.  Just as my social scaffolding had to vanish for my true voice to be found, ancient wisdom suggests that even the Infinite must pull back to allow the finite to breathe.

The Physics of the Soul and Universe

This is a pattern that emerges in heroic stories.  A person loses everything and then rises to become something greater.

This pattern is present in the Bible.  It is a story of withdrawal and return, of divine fullness contracting to make room for love to be freely chosen.  This provides us an answer to every good-natured high school or college student who has ever stood up and asked, “If God exists, why is there evil in the world?”  Unconditional love cannot be coerced.  It must be chosen.

Before we can explore how to “breathe with God,” we must understand why there is a gap between us and the Divine in the first place.  This gap is explained by a concept known as Tzimtzum. 

Where ancient Biblical thought focused on Covenant, Presence, and Law, the mechanics of how an infinite God makes room for a finite world went largely unaddressed until Kabbalistic thought arose in the 3rd to 6th century AD.  

The purpose of Kabbalism was to answer the physics of the soul and the universe.  The rabbis who formed it wondered: if the heavens cannot contain God, how could a small tent?  The Ark of the Covenant was located in a tent before David’s son, Solomon, built the temple.  Their answer was that God contracted His presence to fit into the Holy of Holies.

This contraction – this holy “shrinking” – reveals that the Small Space is a theater for His joy.  It explains why King David danced with such unbridled intensity as the wooden Ark entered Jerusalem; he was celebrating the impossible proximity of the Infinite.  He was dancing at the event horizon where the Creator had focused Himself into the creation.

This same ecstatic frequency ripples through time to the moment of the Visitation in the New Testament.  When Mary, the New Ark of the Covenant, enters the home of Elizabeth carrying the embryonic Logos, the unborn John the Baptist leaps in his mother’s womb.  It is the same dance across a thousand-year gap.  Whether the vessel is a tent of skins or a womb of flesh, the biological architecture of the image-bearer cannot help but vibrate when it recognizes that the Infinite Resident has taken up occupancy.  This is the first indicator of habitation: the Small Space begins to move in harmony with the Great Presence.

This harmony is not always a gentle dance; sometimes it manifests as a violent struggle.  Before the Cloud filled the Temple, and before the Word entered the Womb, there was the night at Jabbok River.  In Genesis 32, we see the primordial precursor to the nation of Israel: Jacob wrestling with a “Man” who is also God.

This is Tzimtzum as a physical collision.  For God to wrestle with man, He must first contract His omnipotence into a frame that a human can actually touch without being instantly consumed.  It is the Infinite “funneling” itself into the anatomy of a single, struggling man.

By wounding Jacob’s hip and renaming him Israel, God was setting the legal and biological coordinates for an entire people.  He was narrowing the focus of the universe into the grit of one man’s resolve, proving that the “Small Space” of our own resistance if often the very place where the Eternal anchors a new identity.

Tzimtzum refers to the primordial act of divine contraction – God concentrating or focusing His Shekhinah(Presence) so that it may dwell within the Mishkan (Tabernacle).  Said differently, the tabernacle is God agreeing to be locatable.  Imagine a Light so absolute and all-encompassing that nothing else – no planet, no person, no thought – could exist within it.  This is the aforementioned Ein Sof.

In Jewish theology, the Shekhinah is the feminine, indwelling presence of God – the bridge between the Infinite and the intimate.  This is psychologically analogous to Carl Jung’s insights regarding the Anima and Animus.

For Jung, the Hero’s Journey is the process of individuation; the arduous task of integrating our internal dualities.  For a man, this means navigating the Anima – the feminine gateway to the indwelling Presence.  For a woman, it is the integration of the Animus – the masculine ray of logic and authority that gives form to her internal depth.  For Jung, these figures are about polarity – symbolic dimensions of the psyche that must be integrated for wholeness.

Whether we are integrating the Anima or the Animus, the goal is the same: the creation of a Mishkan, where the Masculine (Logos/Word) and the Feminine (Shekhinah/Presence) are no longer in conflict.  To be whole is to ensure we have a “house” that is not divided against itself.  Individuation is when the visual separation of gender and identity dissolves into the singular reality of the Image Bearer.

A readily-accessible metaphor to frame Tzimtzum is a dimmer switch – God is turning the brightness down to make relationship possible.

For God to create a world of “others,” He had to perform an act of supreme self-limitation.  He had to “withdraw” His infinite presence into Himself to create a “Sacred Void” – a vacated space where finite biology, human choice, and the messy beauty of our lives could take root.

This void is not truly empty.  In Kabbalistic thought, this contraction leaves behind a Reshimu – a divine residue or impression of the light that was once there.  Think of it as the scent of a Rose that remains in a room after the flower has been removed.  It is this Reshimu that calls to us in our loneliest moments; it is the phantom breath in our lungs that tells us we were made for a fullness we cannot yet see.  In Jacob’s story above, his limp became the Reshimu.

From the standpoint of Contraction, Tzimtzum is the ultimate “inhale.”  It is the Divine holding His breath to give us ours.  Throughout this book, we will see this contraction manifest as a funneling.  In these three moments, we see the maturation of the human vessel across history.  With Jacob, the vessel is wrestled into submission – the ego is wounded so the nation can be born.  With David, the vessel is aligned through dance – that struggle has turned into a rhythmic celebration of the Throne.  And finally, with Mary, the vessel is perfected into a home – the struggle and the dance have quieted into absolute occupancy.

This is the trajectory of the Davidic line, and it is the trajectory of our own awakening: we move from wrestling with a distant God, to dancing with a present King, to finally breathing with an indwelling Father.

For you and me, our lives often feel like the result of this contraction.  We feel small, finite, and “contracted” by fear, trauma, or the perceived silence of God.  In my own life, unable to define the bridge to an intimate relationship with Jesus, God felt distant, and life was chaotic and filled with pitfalls.  I railed against the limitations of my own knowledge.  This distance was the withdrawal that gave me room to exist before I realized I need to become a home for Christ.

This is the “visual order” – the world of boundaries and death.  We suffer, and in suffering, mistakenly believe that we are being punished.  The truth is it is the concentration of power within us.  

Just as a Shofar must be narrow at the mouthpiece to create a sound that can shake the heavens, our human vessel must be compressed by the physics of this world to prepare us for what comes next.  The Shofar, crafted from a ram's horn, represents the “voice” that emerges from limitation and emptiness.  The Shofar must be narrow to produce its blast.  Similarly, our human larynx – the physical gateway of the Word – must experience the ‘contraction’ of history and individual struggle to become a vessel capable of the Awakening Blast.

After the inhale comes the exhale.

Resurrection is the Expansion standpoint of Tzimtzum.  If the first act was the inhale and making space, the second act is the exhale – the re-infusion of that vacated space with the radiant Logos.

When Jesus walked out of the tomb, He demonstrated the “Maximal Expansion.”  He proved that the human frame, though contracted by DNA and death, is actually designed to expand back into the Infinite.  He broke the “biological four-minute mile,” showing that our lungs are capable of breathing the very atmosphere of Source.

Understanding this duality is the first step in the “Inside Job.”  We are not just biological accidents; we are the Architecture of Certainty built specifically to house this Divine Breath.  

As we move forward, we will see how King David’s “incapacitated” memory is the point of maximal contraction, and how Christ’s victory is the point of maximal expansion.  To “awaken” is to simply realize that the Resident is standing at the door of your own vacated space, waiting for the invitation to turn the lights back on and fill the void with Himself.  

This is why Jesus speaks of leaving the ninety-nine sheep to find the lost one.  We hear it echoed in the words of John the Baptist when he states, “He must become greater, I must become less” (John 3:30).  Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, explains how God creates space.  Jesus shows how humans become fit to share that space.

This is the spiritual law of the Shofar.  It is why Jesus consistently speaks in paradoxes that baffle the logical mind but perfectly satisfy the physics of the soul: “Whoever wants to be first must be last” (Mark 9:35) and “those who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matthew 23:12). 

In the logic of Tzimtzum, the ‘last’ and the ‘humbled’ represent the point of maximal contraction – the narrowest part of the funnel.  To become ‘last’ is to intentionally vacate the ego, creating the Sacred Void that the Infinite requires to manifest His power.  We often mistake humility for moral virtue, but in the architecture of the Covenant, it is structural necessity.  We cannot be exalted into the maximal expansion of a resurrected life until we have first allowed ourselves to be compressed into the absolute humility of the ‘least of these.’

Just as the breath must be squeezed through the narrow mouthpiece of the ram’s horn to produce a sound that can shake the heavens, our own sense of self must be narrowed through the “zero point” of surrender.  To find the ninety-nine, the Shepherd must first become the One who is willing to be lost in the narrowness of the search.  The exaltation Jesus promises is the inevitable reaction of the Light when it finally finds a vessel that has been hollowed out enough to hold it.

Tzimtzum is the architecture.  Christ is the embodiment.

And co-heirs are those who learn to live by that same law: to contract ego, to create room for love, and therefore to be entrusted with glory.  What later Jewish mysticism describes cosmically as Tzimtzum, the apostle Paul articulates personally and relationally through what Christianity comes to call Kenosis.

In Philippians 2:5-9, Paul preserves an early hymn that asks believers to share in the mind of Christ.  

“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross!  

Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name.”

Jesus, though existing in fullness, does not grasp at equality with God.  He restrains, empties, and descends.  This is deliberate self-limitation.  Power withheld.  Glory veiled.  Authority expressed through restraint rather than assertion.  The logic is identical: love creates space by contracting itself.

The Romans perceived the Cross as the ultimate humiliation.  In truth, it is the fullest expression of divine contraction.  Christ holds infinite power without deploying it, absorbs violence without retaliation, and remains present without coercion.  And it is precisely therefore that exaltation follows.  Paul’s “therefore” is ontological necessity – contraction creates capacity, capacity receives authority, authority expands.  What Tzimtzum explains as the structure of creation and kenosis reveals as the pattern of Christ’s life, becomes the pathway for co-heirs.

To reign without distorting love, the self must first learn not to grasp – the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.  We’ve been taught that humility is a personality trait, a kind of pious down-casting of the eyes.  It isn’t.  It’s the physics of the funnel – the necessary narrowing of the ego so the Breath can actually move through the horn.

To carry the cross, then, is the active, voluntary demonstration of our structural fitness.  It is the process by which we prove that our internal architecture can hold the integrity of the Logos – the frequency of Christ – without buckling under the weight of mortality.

Carrying the cross isn’t about earning salvation; we carry it to manifest the reality that death has already been conquered.  It is a journey from having a conviction that He saved us to becoming a participant in His universal victory.  In this light, the ‘Inside Job’ is a refusal to let the signal of the Word be distorted by the pressures of the world.  From vessels that believe in the Resurrection, we are becoming vessels that are physically and neurologically incapable of being overcome by death.

My cross thundered onto the ground at my feet July 4th weekend in 2020.  In that reckoning, some part of me understood what I was about to step into was absolutely necessary.  Another part of me recognized how ill-prepared my vessel was for the journey I was about to embark upon.

The Structure of Creation

         Scripture does not speak of God with a single name.  Each name reveals a different mode of divine presence within the contraction.  While there are at least 72 names of God in the Hebrew Bible, we are going to direct our focus to three previously mentioned: Yahweh, Elohim, and Adonai.

Yahweh is not a function or a role; it’s not a name God uses – it is Being.  Yahweh is existence speaking itself.  “I AM” is existence unqualified.  Crucially, Yahweh never contracts.  Being itself cannot withdraw without everything collapsing into nothingness.  Creation does not exist apart from Yahweh but within Yahweh.  This is why divine absence is always experiential, never ontological.  Tzimtzum does not remove Yahweh, it removes awareness of Yahweh.  This leads to Elohim.

         Elohim is the name most often associated with creation’s structure.  It is the God who separates light from darkness, land from sea, one thing from another.  Elohim is God as intelligibility - Consciousness.  In the language of Tzimtzum, Elohim names the architecture of the contraction – the laws, the limits, and boundaries that allow something other than God to exist at all.  This is God as order, pattern, and constraint.  

         Elohim is Yahweh perceived through the lens of order.  If Yahweh is the Light that never leaves, Elohim is the structuring of that Light inside the void.  Elohim is the language of creation, not the source of Being.

         Adonai, then, names God as encountered – Lord, Master, the one who speaks, commands, covenants, and walks with His people.  Adonai is Yahweh meeting humanity inside the space Elohim structures.  It is relational presence within contraction.

         This aligns with Hart’s Bliss, not as pleasure, but as fullness, goodness, and desire fulfilled through union.  Adonai is God experienced.  This is why Adonai, as we will see, points toward covenant, kingship, messianic fulfillment, and ultimately, Christ.

Death and Resurrection

         In light of Hart’s definition, the death and resurrection of Jesus can be understood not merely as an event within history, but as the revelation of what reality itself has always been – the self-giving life of God made visible within creation.  If God is infinite Being, Consciousness, and Bliss, then Christ’s crucifixion is the temporal manifestation of eternal Being’s self-emptying love, and His resurrection is the unveiling of that love’s indestructibility.

         In this regard, the Cross does not purchase salvation for a select group; it discloses the very structure of reality – that all existence already participates in divine life.  The resurrection is not simply the vindication of Jesus but the cosmic affirmation that Being itself cannot be overcome by nonbeing, that Consciousness transcends death, and that Bliss, or divine joy, is the final word spoken for all creation.

         Belief, then, becomes the conscious alignment with this truth, not the condition for it.  Faith is participation, not permission.  Faith allows one to awaken to the reality already established in Christ.  It does not confine His reality solely to those who believe.  The scope of the resurrection is ontological, not denominational.  It concerns what is true of all that is.

         Thus, the universal applicability of Christ’s death and resurrection lies in their revelation of what has always been true: that creation itself is grounded in self-giving love, that every consciousness arises within and from divine Consciousness, and that every being subsists in Being.  To affirm the risen Christ is to recognize the unity of all things in God – a unity that does not wait for belief to exist but invites belief so that it may be known.

         If the Tzimtzum is the cosmic inhale that created a vacated space for our existence, and the Logos is the “Light” that fills it, we are left with a staggering mechanical question: How does the Infinite communicate with the Finite?

Once contraction has created space, and consciousness has structured it, and covenant has made it relational, abstraction is no longer sufficient.  Being must speak.  Consciousness must take form.  Bliss must become personal.  At that point, the question is no longer whether God will enter history, but how.

         And if the Father and Son truly desire to make their home within us, then the question turns inward.  We cannot inhabit a kingdom we cannot perceive, and we cannot perceive a reality our biology isn’t tuned to receive.  To understand how the ‘Still, Small Voice’ of the Spirit becomes a physical conviction in the soul, we must move from the metaphysical to the mechanical.

         We must seek belief in our biology – the neural scaffolding that turns the “Inside Job” from a theological hope into a physiological reality.

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