Leaning into Withness
A Whiteheadian Reflection on
a Sermon by Jonathan J. Foster
see also:
Flourishing: An Open and Relational Pneumatology
Listening to a Sermon with an Open and Relational Heart
"So, with all the uncertain yet certain faith I have, I want to say that God’s affection for you runs deep and you will never be forsaken. Additionally, I think that as you lean into this reality, it will catalyze incarnation in you, which just might open others up to the reality that God is with them, too. In this way, deep withness is the hope of the world. As we close, I invite you to pause, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and realize the deep withness inside of you—surrounding you. In the presence of that love, consider one way in which you might lean even more into its depth."
Jonathan J. Foster, The Deep Withness, in Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God: Sermons, Essays, and Worship Elements from the Perspective of Open, Relational, and Process Theology. SacraSage Press,
*
Who can't love a sermon with the title The Deep Withness? First delivered by Jonathan Foster in Lenexa, Kansas, in 2019, it is reprinted in Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God, an anthology with 67 contributors and 73 contributions from clergy and lay authors around the world, and well worth purchasing. Click here if interested. Even the title of Jonathan Foster's sermon is, for me, itself a sermon, and a short one at that: only two words. Live with "deep" for a while, and then turn to "withness," and then put them together. Let them wash over you for a moment, or a day, or a decade.
There is more to life than the withness of God. There is tragedy, debilitating pain, missed potential, horrible violence, and terrible cruelty. Foster knows this. See his book indigo: the color of grief. He is an lower-case theologian who doesn't pretend to fully understand upper-case realities. No need to pretend the withness is all-powerful. It is a spirit of creative transformation at work in the world what is with us all the time, even when we don't know it.
*
I appreciate how, at the end of his sermon, Foster invites congregants to take a deep breath and recognize the deep withness within themselves. The withness is like the wind. It can be felt but not enclosed in a box or grabbed with the hands. He doesn't say this, but I will, it is God's Spirit.
The Spirit is not all-powerful. It is more than us but also needs us. We help it become embodied. Foster puts it this way:
"The deep withness is constantly and forever being birthed into the world, what the theologians from long ago called incarnation. But incarnation isn’t just what happened in the stable on that first Christmas; incarnation occurs all the time, moment by moment—God loving the world by becoming the world, us loving God by becoming God."
How, then, might we feel the withness so that we might help it become more fully incarnate? Perhaps one way is by centering down, taking a deep breath, a listening from a quieter place in the heart: a still small voice. So often we think of icons as visual images on church walls. Maybe breathing, too, can be an icon and, interestingly, a portable icon because it comes with us wherever we go.
*
In reading Foster’s sermon and his use of the word “withness,” I am reminded of the first time I encountered the word withness. It was from the philosopher AN Whitehead who, in his book Process and Reality, speaks of the withness o our bodies and their importance in human life. In Whitehead's words:
"It is this withness that makes the body the starting point for our knowledge of the circumambient world."
Whitehead’s point is that wherever we go, we bring our bodies with us. Or, to say the same thing, our bodies come with us wherever we go. Our bodies do not accompany us as objects to be seen in a mirror or as images subjected to scrutinized for their health or beauty. Whitehead is talking about the lived body: the body as our own subjectivity, physically felt, moment by moment, as we stand, walk, sit, lie down, and move. Breathing is one of the most intimate ways the lived body is present to us. By our breathing we ourselves are inwardly animated, moment by moment. In this sense our breathing is part of what "causes" us to be. Whitehead calls bodily influence "experience in the mode of causal efficacy."
Understood in this way, the lived body is always with us, and it helps us get our bearings in relation to the world around us—the circumambient world. It animates us and orients us. Whitehead writes: "A traveler, who has lost his way, should not ask, 'Where am I?' What he really wants to know is, 'Where are the other places?' He has his own body, but he has lost them."
*
As the body is for Whitehead, so divine love is for Foster. Divine love is not merely an object among objects in the spatial and temporal field, nor is it just an idea in the mind. It is a nourishing and intimate source of life and beauty, as close to us as our own breathing, and maybe even closer. The Qur'an says that God is closer to us than our jugular veins. I think Foster would like this idea.
*
Might we orient our lives around God's breathing? Might we say: I don't know where I am all the time, but my guide is the Breathing.
I use the phrase "God's breathing" with hesitation, not because I fear that it demeans God but because it suggests a separation between God, as the subject of a sentence, and breathing as a predicate. This is a separation Whitehead opposed. He did not think that entities of any sort, including God, first exist and then have predicates attached to them. He worried that the subject-predicate form of grammar obstructs a recognition that subjects are their predicates and do not pre-exist there relations. This means that God is God's breathing, God's love. The breathing, the love, is God.
Divine love is not a trait or property possessed by a separate agent named “God” who may or may not exercise it. God is divine love. God is the deep withness. Foster puts it this way:
"I want you to know upfront that I’m committed to the idea that God is love. I don’t know anything for certain, but by faith, I suspect this is true. It’s a remarkable claim, really, and means more than just God doing nice things. Put it this way: That God is love is a deeper statement than God is loving. Loving suggests something God may do (or the shadow side of this idea, something God may not do), but love suggests what simply is. And what simply is (as if any of this is simple) is that love is with us. Where else would love be? If God is love and love is with us, this would mean that God is not a separate being, an entirely different entity that chooses from time to time to move into our world to do something loving, because, well, God is already here. Love is here. It’s something I call a deep withness."
*
Part of the wisdom of Foster’s sermon is its application of the notion of divine withness to different aspects of human life: physical, emotional, mental, and sexual. And part of it is its simple invitation that we lean into the withness. We may not lean with our elbows, but we lean with our attention and intentions and actions. We give ourselves to the withness.
What might it mean, then, for us to lean into the withness? What might we lean into? Open and relational theologians tell us that whatever else God is, God is about flourishing. There is a sense in which God is in the flourishing: see Flourishing: An Open and Relational Pneumatology. But Foster's metaphor invites more than a recognition of flourishing as a place where God is found. He invites us to lean into flourishing, to lean into withness. Here are ten forms of leaning.
*
The value of understanding God as 'The Deep Withness' lies in its accessibility to those who conceive of God as a 'who' and to those who see God as a 'what.' This concept is particularly beneficial because it shifts metaphors of God from height to depth, and from distance to intimacy, without sacrificing a notion of transcendence. 'The Deep Withness' is transcendent, not in the sense of being a deity located three miles off the planet, but in being more than we can fully understand or imagine, yet closer to us than we are to ourselves.
*
Who is it that leans into the withness? We might quickly say: "Well, we do." But who are we? We might think of ourselves as subjects of a sentence to which predicates are attached, as if we would be ourselves without the predicates. But a Whiteheadian way of looking at things invites us to recognize that we, too, relational in our core; that we, too, cannot be separated from our attitudes, intentions, and actions; that we, too, are subjects in relation not subjects in isolation. These means that we, too, are with others, in ways healthy or unhealthy. Withness is not a property of God alone, but of us as well. We live in a universe of co-withness. Foster puts it this way:
Both science and faith harmonize along the idea that nothing is entirely separate; that the entire universe, from the micro to the macro, immaterial into material, and humanity into divinity, is flowing back and forth in complex waves of relationship. It’s all one song (i.e., uni-verse). Separateness is an ontological impossibility.
The songs we sing, amid and apart from our leaning, have effects on others and become part of them, just as their songs are parts of us. We are present in one another even as we are different from one another. Buddhists call it dependent co-origination. We might also call it co-withing. I add the ing because being with something else is a verb not a noun, an activity.
*
Are there things in life that communicate the withness of the universe: how things can be present in one another even as more than one another? Perhaps one of them is music. Music is, after all, what feelings sound like. The sounds of music are within the listener even as more than the listener and these sounds communicate and embody feelings: sadness, anger, tenderness, confusion, kindness, softness, surprise, love. The sounds are in us but more than us.
When I think of the deep withness of which Foster speaks, I think of the way a soft wind caresses the cheek and also the way music does the same, not embodied as a graspable object but by all means felt. The deep withness is, I believe, the song in the world. The beauty of Foster's sermon is that we are invited to sing, too. Who cannot help but love a sermon like this?
Jonathan J. Foster, The Deep Withness, in Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God: Sermons, Essays, and Worship Elements from the Perspective of Open, Relational, and Process Theology. SacraSage Press,
*
Who can't love a sermon with the title The Deep Withness? First delivered by Jonathan Foster in Lenexa, Kansas, in 2019, it is reprinted in Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God, an anthology with 67 contributors and 73 contributions from clergy and lay authors around the world, and well worth purchasing. Click here if interested. Even the title of Jonathan Foster's sermon is, for me, itself a sermon, and a short one at that: only two words. Live with "deep" for a while, and then turn to "withness," and then put them together. Let them wash over you for a moment, or a day, or a decade.
There is more to life than the withness of God. There is tragedy, debilitating pain, missed potential, horrible violence, and terrible cruelty. Foster knows this. See his book indigo: the color of grief. He is an lower-case theologian who doesn't pretend to fully understand upper-case realities. No need to pretend the withness is all-powerful. It is a spirit of creative transformation at work in the world what is with us all the time, even when we don't know it.
*
I appreciate how, at the end of his sermon, Foster invites congregants to take a deep breath and recognize the deep withness within themselves. The withness is like the wind. It can be felt but not enclosed in a box or grabbed with the hands. He doesn't say this, but I will, it is God's Spirit.
The Spirit is not all-powerful. It is more than us but also needs us. We help it become embodied. Foster puts it this way:
"The deep withness is constantly and forever being birthed into the world, what the theologians from long ago called incarnation. But incarnation isn’t just what happened in the stable on that first Christmas; incarnation occurs all the time, moment by moment—God loving the world by becoming the world, us loving God by becoming God."
How, then, might we feel the withness so that we might help it become more fully incarnate? Perhaps one way is by centering down, taking a deep breath, a listening from a quieter place in the heart: a still small voice. So often we think of icons as visual images on church walls. Maybe breathing, too, can be an icon and, interestingly, a portable icon because it comes with us wherever we go.
*
In reading Foster’s sermon and his use of the word “withness,” I am reminded of the first time I encountered the word withness. It was from the philosopher AN Whitehead who, in his book Process and Reality, speaks of the withness o our bodies and their importance in human life. In Whitehead's words:
"It is this withness that makes the body the starting point for our knowledge of the circumambient world."
Whitehead’s point is that wherever we go, we bring our bodies with us. Or, to say the same thing, our bodies come with us wherever we go. Our bodies do not accompany us as objects to be seen in a mirror or as images subjected to scrutinized for their health or beauty. Whitehead is talking about the lived body: the body as our own subjectivity, physically felt, moment by moment, as we stand, walk, sit, lie down, and move. Breathing is one of the most intimate ways the lived body is present to us. By our breathing we ourselves are inwardly animated, moment by moment. In this sense our breathing is part of what "causes" us to be. Whitehead calls bodily influence "experience in the mode of causal efficacy."
Understood in this way, the lived body is always with us, and it helps us get our bearings in relation to the world around us—the circumambient world. It animates us and orients us. Whitehead writes: "A traveler, who has lost his way, should not ask, 'Where am I?' What he really wants to know is, 'Where are the other places?' He has his own body, but he has lost them."
*
As the body is for Whitehead, so divine love is for Foster. Divine love is not merely an object among objects in the spatial and temporal field, nor is it just an idea in the mind. It is a nourishing and intimate source of life and beauty, as close to us as our own breathing, and maybe even closer. The Qur'an says that God is closer to us than our jugular veins. I think Foster would like this idea.
*
Might we orient our lives around God's breathing? Might we say: I don't know where I am all the time, but my guide is the Breathing.
I use the phrase "God's breathing" with hesitation, not because I fear that it demeans God but because it suggests a separation between God, as the subject of a sentence, and breathing as a predicate. This is a separation Whitehead opposed. He did not think that entities of any sort, including God, first exist and then have predicates attached to them. He worried that the subject-predicate form of grammar obstructs a recognition that subjects are their predicates and do not pre-exist there relations. This means that God is God's breathing, God's love. The breathing, the love, is God.
Divine love is not a trait or property possessed by a separate agent named “God” who may or may not exercise it. God is divine love. God is the deep withness. Foster puts it this way:
"I want you to know upfront that I’m committed to the idea that God is love. I don’t know anything for certain, but by faith, I suspect this is true. It’s a remarkable claim, really, and means more than just God doing nice things. Put it this way: That God is love is a deeper statement than God is loving. Loving suggests something God may do (or the shadow side of this idea, something God may not do), but love suggests what simply is. And what simply is (as if any of this is simple) is that love is with us. Where else would love be? If God is love and love is with us, this would mean that God is not a separate being, an entirely different entity that chooses from time to time to move into our world to do something loving, because, well, God is already here. Love is here. It’s something I call a deep withness."
*
Part of the wisdom of Foster’s sermon is its application of the notion of divine withness to different aspects of human life: physical, emotional, mental, and sexual. And part of it is its simple invitation that we lean into the withness. We may not lean with our elbows, but we lean with our attention and intentions and actions. We give ourselves to the withness.
What might it mean, then, for us to lean into the withness? What might we lean into? Open and relational theologians tell us that whatever else God is, God is about flourishing. There is a sense in which God is in the flourishing: see Flourishing: An Open and Relational Pneumatology. But Foster's metaphor invites more than a recognition of flourishing as a place where God is found. He invites us to lean into flourishing, to lean into withness. Here are ten forms of leaning.
- Leaning into beauty: Finding the Spirit in moral beauty, natural beauty, soul beauty, artistic beauty, and tragc beauty. Letting this beauty be a scrap of light, a source of nourishment, for living in the world.
- Leaning into faith: Trusting in the availability of fresh possibilities from the Withness.
- Leaning into honesty: Being honest about our life experiences, including our vulnerabilities and shortcomings as well as virtues and gifts.
- Leaning into humor: Seeing things, including ourselves, in a playful way; being able to laugh at ourselves (and not at others).
- Leaning into life: Giving ourselves to the vitalities of life, the passions, the joys, the intensities.
- Leaning into kindness: Sharing in the joys of others (without envy) and the sufferings of others (without condescension.)
- Leaning into justice: Working toward a world that is creative, compassionate, participatory, humane to animals, and good for the earth - with no one left behind.
- Leaning into nature: Claiming or reclaiming felt connections with the more than human world: the hills, the rivers, the trees, the stars.
- Leaning into listening: Approaching life with a willingness to be touched by others, with life as our teacher.
- Leaning into prayer: Giving ourselves, from the heart, to the wideness and the Deep Withness, recognizing that it has no fixed address. Making prayers of our lives.
*
The value of understanding God as 'The Deep Withness' lies in its accessibility to those who conceive of God as a 'who' and to those who see God as a 'what.' This concept is particularly beneficial because it shifts metaphors of God from height to depth, and from distance to intimacy, without sacrificing a notion of transcendence. 'The Deep Withness' is transcendent, not in the sense of being a deity located three miles off the planet, but in being more than we can fully understand or imagine, yet closer to us than we are to ourselves.
*
Who is it that leans into the withness? We might quickly say: "Well, we do." But who are we? We might think of ourselves as subjects of a sentence to which predicates are attached, as if we would be ourselves without the predicates. But a Whiteheadian way of looking at things invites us to recognize that we, too, relational in our core; that we, too, cannot be separated from our attitudes, intentions, and actions; that we, too, are subjects in relation not subjects in isolation. These means that we, too, are with others, in ways healthy or unhealthy. Withness is not a property of God alone, but of us as well. We live in a universe of co-withness. Foster puts it this way:
Both science and faith harmonize along the idea that nothing is entirely separate; that the entire universe, from the micro to the macro, immaterial into material, and humanity into divinity, is flowing back and forth in complex waves of relationship. It’s all one song (i.e., uni-verse). Separateness is an ontological impossibility.
The songs we sing, amid and apart from our leaning, have effects on others and become part of them, just as their songs are parts of us. We are present in one another even as we are different from one another. Buddhists call it dependent co-origination. We might also call it co-withing. I add the ing because being with something else is a verb not a noun, an activity.
*
Are there things in life that communicate the withness of the universe: how things can be present in one another even as more than one another? Perhaps one of them is music. Music is, after all, what feelings sound like. The sounds of music are within the listener even as more than the listener and these sounds communicate and embody feelings: sadness, anger, tenderness, confusion, kindness, softness, surprise, love. The sounds are in us but more than us.
When I think of the deep withness of which Foster speaks, I think of the way a soft wind caresses the cheek and also the way music does the same, not embodied as a graspable object but by all means felt. The deep withness is, I believe, the song in the world. The beauty of Foster's sermon is that we are invited to sing, too. Who cannot help but love a sermon like this?