Above All, Through All, In All

Discovering the Divine Seamlessness in an Atomized World

The modern mind is a labyrinth of partitioned rooms. We are taught, without being told, to divide. From the moment we enter the machinery of modern life, we learn the subtle art of separation. Work and rest. Mind and body. Sacred and secular. We parcel our days into tidy segments—emails, errands, exercise, quick meals, occasional prayers—each confined to its own shelf, time-boxed and efficiently lit. We live in a world of folders, dashboards, and progress bars. A thousand windows open at once, each vying for our attention, none allowed to bleed into the others. Integration becomes a liability. We survive by disconnection.

Even our souls, those restless pilgrims, are forced to clock in and out of spirituality like part-time employees. We worship in increments: a prayer app on our walk, a meditation between meetings, a psalm scrolled past ads for ergonomic chairs. God becomes another window on the desktop, minimized when the spreadsheet demands our gaze. A sacred hour in a week of otherwise urgent living.

We assign Him a place—perhaps at the edge of the day, or in the quiet between obligations—but never the center. Never the whole. We learn to speak of God as "up there" or "out there," as though He were another item in the inventory of reality, hovering above like some benevolent executive presiding over the dashboard of the cosmos. He is rendered remote, other, almost optional. A distant CEO of the spiritual life, available for quarterly updates and crisis calls, but not present in the soil of things.

I supposed it’s no accident that we’ve built Him in the image of our infrastructure. We who’ve spent lifetimes optimizing systems—streamlining code, scaling cloud architectures, analyzing digital ad performance—cannot help but engineer our metaphysics. Divinity, in this schema, is a server in the sky: omnipotent but remote, all-knowing but impersonal, a cosmic admin processing our petitions from some celestial cubicle. We speak of “work-life balance” but never God-life balance, as if the sacred were a hobby rather than the oxygen we’ve forgotten we breathe.

The Heresy of the Atomized Age

This is the heresy of the atomized age: the delusion that God can be siloed. That He is a department, a weekend retreat, a bookmark in the chaos. We’ve inherited a Gnostic sickness, though we dress it in secular garb—a belief that spirit and matter are estranged, that the divine dwells out there (in rituals, mountaintops, the “supernatural”) while we remain here, marooned in the mundane.

This was the shape of my own vision for far too long—logical, ordered, and profoundly insufficient. After decades in the tech world, I had come to see life through a lens polished by efficiency, systems thinking, and functional analysis. I didn’t realize I had dragged that lens into my spiritual life as well. God, too, had been slotted—into a belief system, a quiet time, a theological framework that kept Him perfectly labeled and out of the way. It wasn’t malice. It was habit. It was survival. It was how I made sense of a world that never stopped moving. I didn’t yet know that the most essential things cannot be grasped by sense.

I believed in God, yes—but mostly a compartmentalized one. One who was "real," yet strangely absent from the actual fabric of my day. Like an elegant theory tucked away in a textbook—true, but untouched. What I did not yet know was how deeply this view impoverished me, how much it kept me from the shimmering reality I now see, however dimly: that the world is not merely a stage on which God occasionally enters, but a vessel through which His presence continually pulses.

We live among burning bushes. We breathe in sanctified air. And still we miss Him—not because He is absent, but because we have been trained not to look.

The Veil in the Parking Lot

Then, one day recently, I was untrained.

It didn’t happen in a monastery. Not in a maloca hut on some Ayahuasca retreat. Not in silence, not wrapped in incense or psalms.

It happened in a parking lot, just off a busy thoroughfare, outside a store that sold freeze-dried bison treats and orthopedic beds for aging Golden Retrievers.

I was not praying. I was not reading Scripture. I was thinking, if anything, about what I needed at the grocery store afterward. I was steering into the lot with the same mild efficiency I’d steered into a thousand lots before, distracted, half-listening to a podcast I’d already forgotten.

And then it happened.

There was no warning. No crescendo of music, no voice, no flashing sign. Just a sudden lifting – a tearing of the veil. Not slowly, not gently, but as if a fissure had split the firmament. One moment, the world was the world: shopping carts glinting dully under the sun afternoon gaze, asphalt steaming in the Colorado sun, the distant Rockies a postcard backdrop to the tedium of errands. The next, the air itself seemed to vibrate.

A soundless hum radiated from the pavement, the cars, the pine resin bleeding from some distant tree. The light—God, the light—did not brighten so much as deepen, as though every molecule had been dipped in a liquid gold older than stars. The red of a Toyota’s taillight burned like a sacramental flame. The gray of the asphalt glittered like crushed galaxies. Even the shopping carts, huddled in their corral, gleamed with a silver that sang.

I slowed the car, my foot hovered over the brake. The steering wheel trembled under my palms—the supple grain of Nappa leather, stitched by hands in some distant factory. Yet now, it hummed. Not with the sterile luxury of German engineering, but with the raw frequency of the infinite. The wood-grain inlays of the dashboard, polished to a showroom gleam, throbbed like the rings of an ancient oak. Even the Audi’s quattro emblem, that four-ringed sigil of human achievement, seemed to pulse in time with the Rockies’ glacial heartbeat. The car—a marvel of calculated ergonomics—had become a reliquary. A machine transfigured.

Not metaphor. Not poetry. Physics. A love so vast it was physics. The Rockies pulsed in the distance, their snowcaps blazing like halos, while the cracks in the parking lot asphalt throbbed with veins of light. There were colors here I had no name for—indigos that vibrated like cellos, golds that tasted of honey and thunder—and yet they were not alien. They were memory. They were home.

The colors deepened. Not just brighter, but fuller—lush with a richness I’d never known existed. There were shades that I had no name for, frequencies of color I could feel more than see. The edges of things seemed to glow, as if outlined in meaning. The mountains were no longer distant, aloof—they were present, vibrating with the same love that burned in the texture of the steering wheel. Everything was drenched in belonging. Even the inanimate—stones, signs, rubber tires—were not excluded. Somehow, impossibly, everything was included. Everything was connected.

A quiet, impossible opening of the world—as though reality, tired of my inattention, had decided to show its true face. I remember the way the light hit the windshield—golden, yes, but more than that. It wasn’t just light, it was something through the light. It shimmered, pulsed. It seemed to carry its own breath, its own knowing. Everything around me, every object, every shape and texture, began to hum with life. Not metaphorically—literally.

Love as Substance

And it was love. The most beautiful love. That’s what undid me. Not a feeling of love, but love itself—as substance, as structure, as ether—as the thing that held it all together. It wasn’t sentimental or vague. It was dense. Thick. The air itself felt saturated with it.

But more than that—this love was not of this world. It had a supernatural quality, an intelligence, a kind of holy coherence. It did not originate from me, or pass through me like a mood—it came from beyond yet was somehow within. It didn’t merely wrap around things gently; it wove them together. It threaded through stone and bone, leaf and light, binding opposites without tension. It knew what it touched. And what it touched, it held. Every molecule seemed suspended in it, suspended by it. There was no place it was not.

And it was not passive. This love desired—not in the grasping way we humans love, but in a radiant way that delighted in all it connected. It rejoiced in holding everything as one. And I felt, in the deepest part of me, that it had always been doing this—long before I ever noticed. Always holding. Always connecting. Always loving.

The boundaries had dissolved. That old atomized lens shattered in an instant. There was no inside or outside anymore, no sacred and secular, no observer and observed. Only this seamless, radiant whole. A living tapestry of the divine. It was as though God had pulled back the thin veil that normally protects us from the unbearable truth: that He is here. Not hidden in the clouds. Not confined to churches or scriptures or whispered prayers. Here, now, in everything.

I pulled into a space, shifted to park, and collapsed. Not into the seat, but into the current. All of it—steel, flesh, pine resin, light—thrummed with the same electric mercy. A love that did not “belong” to God, because it was God. Not in the pantheist’s soup of sameness, but as a symphony: distinct notes fused into a single chord.

My hands fell into my lap. My chest felt split open in the gentlest way. I sat there, still, suspended. A man in jeans walked past with a poodle on a leash. A crow lifted off the rooftop above. Somewhere, a door chime rang. But I couldn’t move. The weight of glory—that was the only phrase that fit—had filled the small interior of my car like smoke in the Holy of Holies. And it was too much.

I wept.

Not just for joy, but also for the sheer violence of being unsealed. How many years had I spent parsing the world into binaries—sacred and profane, spirit and matter, God and everything else—only to discover it was all one shimmering verb? Paul’s words “above all, through all, in all” rang in my skull, no longer doctrine but diagnosis. The parking lot was a cathedral. My protein bar a communion wafer. My Audi, a chariot of fire.

When the Colors Fade

But, of course, the veil that lifted fell again. It did not stay. The world, once burning, went dim. The steering wheel, which pulsed with glory, became again just leather beneath my palms. The parking lot returned to its grayness. The birds were only birds. The wind was only wind. And the soul, once caught in the grip of unspeakable Presence, found itself staring once more into absence.

This is the hardest part.

There is a peculiar kind of grief that settles in the heart when the vision fades. Ecstasy is replaced by yearning. You begin to wonder if it happened at all—if the light was real, or some soft malfunction of the mind. You replay it in your memory, but memory becomes an enemy, growing brittle, thin. The colors you once saw feel like a lie. You reach for the Presence, but your fingers pass through silence.

And yet the mystics, too, walked this path.

They knew the bitter edge of light’s retreat. “Where have you hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning?” John of the Cross wrote in his Spiritual Canticle, a love poem penned in the dark, in a cell, in solitude. He knew that absence could be as holy as presence. That God sometimes cloaks Himself in ordinariness, not to punish, but to deepen. To stretch the soul.

And so we return to the kitchen sink. To the cubicle. To the markets and the slow evening walk. We keep our gaze soft. We keep our hearts cracked open. We speak to the silence, and trust it hears. We sit, even when we feel alone, and we whisper—

“I remember. You were there. And I know You still are.”

Even now, I do not fully understand what happened. But I know this: the world is not what it seems. It is more. It is charged, as Jesuit priest Gerard Hopkins wrote, “with the grandeur of God.” And if the veil could be lifted once in a dog food store parking lot, then it can be lifted anywhere. Because it is already thin. Thinner than we think.

Debugging the Divine

This atomized view is a tempting one, especially for those of us shaped by systems thinking, by years spent optimizing, refining, organizing reality into manageable parts. The world encourages this lens. The business world requires it. But the spiritual life does not begin until we let it go. Because that view—so effective in managing complexity—is also a thief. It robs the world of its depth, of its coherence. It turns living things into data points, moments into transactions, mystery into problem.

More dangerously still, it turns God into a concept.

But God is not a variable. He is not a node in the network or an outcome to be measured. He is not even the sum of all things. He is the fire beneath the things. He is the “in whom” of all that exists. And once you begin to see Him this way— above all, through all, in all—you begin to realize that there is no "over there." There is only here. There is only now. There is only God.

And if that’s true, then the spiritual life is not a separate sphere we enter and exit. It is not a room we visit, or a ritual we perform. It is the sea in which we swim.

The Sacrament of the Ordinary

Once the veil begins to lift—whether in a cathedral or a parking lot—one is never quite the same. The great illusion begins to dissolve: the illusion that God is confined to certain places, certain moments, certain moods. That He is met only in the sacred, and absent from the ordinary. That the divine whispers only in the silence of monasteries, and not in the low hum of refrigerators, the turning of door handles, the sound of a child’s spoon clinking against a bowl.

But the mystics knew better.

They knew that everything is burning, if only we have eyes to see. That every bush is aflame with divine presence, and every moment—no matter how unremarkable—is saturated with the eternal. They knew, as Brother Lawrence once wrote from his humble kitchen, that “we can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of Him… It is enough for me to pick up a straw from the ground for the love of God.” No incense, no choir. Just the grace of the moment made holy by attention.

This is the sacrament of the ordinary: the slow realization that nothing is beneath God’s gaze. That all things—brooms, boots, spreadsheets, and late-night dishes—are invitations to communion. And that God, far from being distant, is disarmingly near. “God walks among the pots and pans,” St. Teresa of Avila said, likey with a sly smile. She, who spent her life reaching toward divine ecstasy, also knew that heaven is hidden in the very things we overlook.

Once you begin to notice God in the ordinary, the categories collapse. No moment is “just” anything. There is no filler, no wasted time, no space that does not bear His fingerprint. Even the forgotten corners of the day—where you are not efficient, not impressive, not productive—those too are drenched in mercy. Those, perhaps, most of all.

That is the sacrament of the ordinary. It is not flashy. It is not thrilling. It is better—it is real. And it is available always, now, in this moment. If you are reading these words, then already you are within reach.

Already, He is here.

Unbuilding the Grid

To dismantle the atomized worldview is to surrender the delusion of control. It is to admit that the spreadsheets and sprint cycles and five-year plans—all those carefully curated grids—were incantations against the terror of infinity. We fragmented the world because we could not bear its wholeness. We named the shards departments, disciplines, devotions—but the naming was a spell, a way to pretend the glass was never a window.

Yet the parking lot’s revelation left me no such luxury. Once you’ve seen the code behind the pixels, the grids dissolve. The divine does not reside in the cells of a database; it is the current that animates the query. This is the scandal of panentheism: it demands we see the steering wheel as sacred, dog food cans as vessels, the cracks in asphalt as capillaries of the infinite. Not because these things are God, but because God is in them—as a composer inhabits the symphony, distinct yet inextricable. “For in him all things were created… and in him all things hold together,” says St. Paul.

But how to sustain this vision? How to unsee the grids when the world insists on their necessity? The answer, perhaps, lies in the via negativa of the digital age: not adding more rituals, but deleting the delusion of separation. It means auditing the mind’s code, line by line, and outing the functions that parse the world into spiritual and secular. It means kneeling before the ordinary until it cracks open like a tomb.

We are the ones who forgot. We who built silos in the soil and called them progress. But the parking lot is still there, its asphalt cradling the imprint of my tires. Sometimes, in the bleached light of dawn, I swear I see the cracks pulse—golden, alive.

So how do we, children of the algorithm, relearn this liturgy?

Begin here: debug the soul. Audit the code that splits the world into binaries—sacred/profane, eternal/temporary, spirit/matter—and out every line. Replace it with Paul’s proclamation: “From him and through him and for him are all things.” All things. The Excel formula. The school pickup line. The cracked screen of your iPhone. The mystics call this acquired contemplation—not a spiritual hack, but a slow rewiring of vision.

Not just in a chapel, but in the commute, the conference call, the crumpled receipt at the bottom of your pocket. God is not a commodity to be consumed, but a current to be conducted. “In him we live and move and have our being,” St. Paul insists. Not near him. Not despite him. In.

I strive to practice this now: when I sip my morning coffee, I try to taste the soil where the beans grew, the hands that harvested them, the sun that fed them—all of it humming with the same voltage that once electrified that pet store parking lot. The steam becomes incense. The mug, a chalice. “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do,” Paul urges, “do it all for the glory of God”. The glory is not only in the doing, but in the seeing: recognizing the thread that stitches the latte to the lightning bolt.

St. Therese of Lisieux, the “Little Flower” who found sainthood in scraps of kindness, called this the Little Way. “Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice,” she wrote, “here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.” Her cloister was not a convent, but the unremarkable—a cough stifled to avoid waking a sister, a stale crust of bread eaten without complaint. In her hands, the mundane became a mosaic of the infinite.

The world will call this madness. It will insist that God belongs in His quadrant: Sundays, sermons, stained glass. But the parking lot’s revelation left me no such luxury.

The Algorithm of Absence

Where are You?

The silence hisses back.

This is the martyrdom of the modern mystic: to have touched the code and now endure the compile errors. To have tasted the feast and now only behold crumbs. The atomized world smirks, vindicated. See? it whispers. We told you. Sacred and secular. Always.

Meister Eckhart, who dared to call God “the ground of the soul,” put it bluntly: “If the only prayer you say is ‘thank you,’ that is enough.” Even when “thank you” tastes like sand.

So you practice the liturgy of the inert.

You grip the steering wheel—leather, always leather—and whisper:“In You, I live.”

You sip the coffee—bitter, always bitter—and mutter: “In You, I move.”

You open the spreadsheet—dull, always dull—and type: “In You, I have my being.”

The mystics call this “the fidelity of small things.” St. Therese, coughing her lungs out in a Carmelite cloister, insisted that “everything is grace”—even doubt, even dust. Job, that ancient patron of the baffled, scraped his boils and howled at God’s silence—only to be answered by a whirlwind of questions. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?”. Not an answer, but an avalanche. Not a solution, but a storm.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe,” Jesus tells Thomas. But He might as well have been speaking to you, here, now, in the cubicle or the checkout line. To believe when the world is inert is to write code for a compiler you cannot see. To trust that the output—somewhere, someday—will be a light that needs no proof.

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