Entangled Amipotence:
A Photograph by Thomas Oord
Photograph by Thomas Oord, shared in Facebook on April 4, 2025
For me, this photograph by Thomas Oord evokes a profound sense of worldly entanglement—in the best and most beautiful sense of the word. It captures the interwoven textures of life as they are: complex, layered, and inseparable. Yet within and through this intricate web, there shines an amipotent light—a light that is gentle, persuasive, never coercive. It moves through the entanglement, not overpowering it, but illuminating it from within. And still, this light is more than what it touches. It hints at a radiance beyond the image, a sacred presence that is both immanent and transcendent: with us in the tangle, and beyond us in mystery. The mystery at issue is not a puzzle to be solved but a presence to be felt, like the light in the photo. A presence that is also an absence, in that there is always more to it than meets the eye. We feel the absence, the fact of disembodiment, as well as the presence. The presence is the love-power of which a kindred theologian, Lina Langby, speaks. She writes:
“The Holy Spirit manifests what amipotence tries to convey: the loving and active nature of God’s power. God’s power is love-power. And the Holy Spirit is God’s love-power actively at work in Creation. We need the Spirit, but God as the Holy Spirit also needs us.”
How does the Holy Spirit need us? In Whitehead's philosophy "entanglement" is articulated in a core idea in Process and Reality. It is the idea that the things of this world - the atoms and molecules, the hills and rivers, the trees and stars, and also we ourselves - are immanent within one another even as they transcend one another.
We are "present in" others, positively and negatively, as they feel our influence consciously and unconsciously, directly and indirectly. Someone can be a thousand miles away, and still be present in us, and we to them. Closer to us than the glasses we might be wearing, There are different kinds of closeness: geometrical closeness and love closeness.
Whitehead says the same of the amipotent Spirit, of God, who is actually not so far away. As close to us as our own breathing, or still closer, albeit in love not geometry. Whitehead says that God is immanent within the world even as God transcends the world, and that world is immanent within God even as the world transcends God.
In the photograph we can easily see how the light is immanent within the world, but it is less easy (at least for me) to see how the world is immanent within the light.
But the idea of how the world is "immanent within" God makes sense if I consider how my own children, Jason and Matthew, and my grandchildren, and my daughters in law, and (well, where do I stop?) are immanent within me. I might be able to exist without them, but they are very much who I am and what I am. I am a composite individual. They are entangled in my own existence, and I am grateful for that. I would not have it otherwise.
It is not surprising, at least to me, that Jesus addresses God as Abba. I wonder if the amipotence of which Oord speaks is not itself Abba-like. And Amma-like is fine, too, In the amipotence of Oord speaks in his many writings, we are entangled in God in just this loving and parental way, God could not be amipotent love were the universe not entangled in God's very life.
I realize that human parents have bodies and the amipotent Spirit does not. God is Light, says the Bible. But does not this Light contain something of the spirit of a loving parent, who will never give up on the children so loved. Is this not Abba? And doesn't the light needs the trees in order to shine in its radiance? Could there be any light at all, were there not something to see it, to be nourished by it, to be warmed by it, to be immanent within it, as children and friends are to those who love them? Isn't this what Thomas Oord is saying in his theology - that God, too, is relational?
- Jay McDaniel