by John Singarayar SVD
We have made a quiet deal with God: you stay spectacular, we will stay distant. We will show up for the burning bushes and angelic announcements, but please do not interrupt our Thursday mornings. This arrangement protects us from what terrifies us most—that divine presence might actually demand something of our ordinary lives.
God does not avoid the mundane, we do. We have convinced ourselves that spirituality lives somewhere else—in cathedrals and mountaintops, in crisis prayers and deathbed conversions. Anywhere but here, in the relentless nowness of homework and dishes and the same damn arguments we had last week.
What the Incarnation actually costs
Jesus did not theorise about God in everyday life—he insisted on it. Bread, seeds, fishing nets. He chose the texture of human existence deliberately, almost stubbornly. The Incarnation was not God visiting humanity, it was God refusing to be anywhere else.
Yet we keep trying to extract him. We want spiritual experiences we can schedule and control, moments that feel sacred enough to count. We have turned faith into a category we can manage rather than a presence we must encounter. This is not theology—it is avoidance dressed in religious language.
The question nobody wants
But here is the uncomfortable truth: if God shows up everywhere, how do we distinguish encounter from self-deception? Not every feeling is divine inspiration. Not every coincidence carries meaning. Some moments are just moments—empty, frustrating, void of revelation.
This matters because bad discernment causes real damage. People mistake their prejudices for God’s voice. They baptise their anger, their greed, and their fear, calling it righteousness. “God in everything” can become the most dangerous theology if it means “whatever I want is holy.”
And what about absence? Not the pregnant silence that precedes revelation, but the crushing void that follows unanswered prayers? What about suffering that teaches nothing, grief that transforms no one, and pain that simply destroys? Presence in suffering’ sounds profound until you are the one suffering.
What survives scrutiny
Still, something remains. Not easy answers, but an invitation: pay attention anyway. Not because every moment contains God, but because inattention guarantees we will miss the moments that do. The practice isn’t finding God everywhere—it is staying awake enough to recognise when we actually encounter him. That is the difference that matters.
