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Penumbral Theology:
God as a Field of Love
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​"Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension. The simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity of complete experi­ence. Also this character of our experience suggests that consciousness is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base."

​AN Whitehead, Process and Reality

The word penumbral comes from astronomy, naming the outer part of a shadow cast by a celestial body — as in the shadow of the moon. In common parlance, however, penumbral can also mean something large, shadowy, indistinct, and difficult to pin down. Whitehead’s point is that the totality of our experience has a penumbral side, and that our consciousness is but a flickering light within the larger darkness — a darkness filled with intensities of which we are only dimly aware, yet which shape our lives in profound ways.

Imagine gazing at the moon on an autumn night. Our “experience” is the whole of it — the small, bright moon and the vast penumbra that surrounds it. But the moon comes and goes, while the darker side of experience, with its many layered intensities, always remains.

These intensities are manifold, including:
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• Memories – surfacing and fading, shaping the way we inhabit the present.
• Aspirations and longings – subtle desires, hopes, and yearnings for meaning or transformation.
• Fantasies and dreams – imagined worlds and symbolic images that move freely through waking life and sleep.
• Emotions and moods – the quiet currents of joy, grief, anxiety, or calm that rise and fall beneath conscious thought.
• Bodily sensations – the rhythms of breath, the beat of the heart, the hum of being alive.
• Intuitions and gut feelings – wordless knowings that guide thought and action without explanation.
• Relational fields – the subtle sense of connection to others, to nature, and to the wider, more-than-human world.
• Archetypes and deep patterns – universal forms and psychic figures — the Hero, the Mother, the Trickster, the Sage — that shape imagination, behavior, and the stories through which we make meaning.

These various intensities are, to use Whitehead’s term, “felt” or “prehended,” often unconsciously, influencing us even when we are only dimly aware of them — or not aware of them at all.

Another of the intensities is a field of Love. It can also be called God. We can feel God’s presence penumbrally — not sharply or with full clarity, but subtly, quietly, as something that stirs within and around us. Here are just a few of the ways we experience it:
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• As a call toward beauty — the sudden stillness before a sunrise, the aching wonder of music, or the symmetry of a blooming flower.
• As an inward nudge toward compassion — the urge to help a stranger, forgive a friend, or listen more deeply.
• As a spacious sense of being held — an unspoken trust that we are part of something vast and loving, even in moments of fear or isolation.
• As a quiet invitation to novelty — the intuition that life could unfold in more creative, loving, and just directions, both personally and collectively.
• As peace — a moment of calm that arises unexpectedly, even in the midst of chaos or uncertainty.
• As a call toward curiosity and wisdom — the subtle stirring that urges us to seek understanding, to ask deeper questions, and to grow in insight and discernment.
• As a call to serve others and help heal a broken world — the deep awareness that love is not only a feeling but an active force, summoning us toward acts of generosity, justice, and repair in our communities and beyond.

It is good to know the field of Love. To be in touch with it. And yet we may be tempted to pin down this field, to define it in a certain way, to make it something we feel we have mastered — something clear, fixed, and subject to the control of conscious attention. But this is a mistake. The field of Love, like the penumbral depths of experience in which it moves, resists reduction. It is not an object to be captured or possessed; it is a living, relational presence that ebbs and flows, inviting our participation but never our domination.

If we wish, we can speak of this Field in personal terms, We can say to the Field "I love you" or "I am sorry" or "Please be with me" or "Thank you." We can pray to the Field and trust in the Field. In so doing we are being honest to our experience. We experience God as a Thou not an It. There is nothing wrong with this. The Field is more like a thou and an it. Jesus felt the Field in just this way. He addressed the Field as Abba. We can do the same if this makes sense to us. The Field is generous.

​Central Tenets of a
​ Penumbral Theology

God is known dimly, not clearly.

We do not experience God in sharp, conscious clarity, but rather in the penumbral depths of intuition, feeling, and atmosphere — subtle, elusive, and often beyond words.

Conscious grasp is not the measure of reality.

The absence of conscious clarity does not mean absence of God; the divine presence is often hidden in the vague, the ordinary, and the unspoken dimensions of our lives.

The will-to-clarity can mask the will-to-power.

The desire to experience God consciously and clearly can sometimes be a subtle form of control — an ego-driven attempt to possess, define, or domesticate what is ultimately unpossessable.

Faith is trust within the flickering.

Faith is less about certainty than about a trustful attentiveness to the quiet, dim promptings that arise in the background of experience. It is the courage to rest in vagueness, to accept that not everything of God is — or needs to be — brought into sharp focus.

Discernment is essential.

Because the penumbral region includes both constructive and destructive impulses, discernment — both personal and communal — is necessary to distinguish healing intuitions from those rooted in fear, compulsion, or ego.

Feeling is knowing.

In the penumbral, knowledge often takes the form of felt resonance rather than rational clarity. To “know” God is to sense, however dimly, a presence that exceeds our conscious comprehension.

The ordinary is sacred.

The penumbral is not reserved for extraordinary or mystical experiences. Everyday life — a walk in the woods, a shared meal, the quiet hum of a familiar place — is filled with flickers of divine presence. The sacred often hides in the ordinary, asking only for quiet attentiveness.

Silence is a teacher.

Moments of silence — not as emptiness but as a fertile spaciousness — allow the penumbral to speak. In stillness, we discover subtle movements of grace, the gentle invitations of the Soul of the universe, and the quiet harmonies that underlie experience.

Love grounds everything.
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Beneath all penumbral experience, whether vague or vivid, there is a field of love that holds and sustains the becoming of all things. Love is the deep grammar of the universe, felt more than seen, and it infuses the penumbral with a quiet assurance: that even when clarity fails, we are known, held, and invited into creative becoming.