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Omnisubjectivity:

Feeling God's Friendship
in the Here-and-Now
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God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.

- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
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Thesis: To feel known and loved by God is to feel God's presence, not only as a call forward or a lure toward creative transformation, but as "a fellow sufferer who understands." It is to feel God's accepting and receptive love in the here-and-now. To feel God as a Companion who shares in our first-person experience. In this experience, the power of God is not a power over the world, it is God's friendship.

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In Omnisubjectivity: An Essay on God and Subjectivity, Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski describes God as knowing the inner lives of creatures from the inside—not by observation or inference, but by direct participation in what it is like to be another subject. Her aim is to move beyond external, third-person models of divine knowledge toward an immediacy of shared experience.

This invites reflection on the experience of feeling loved and known by God: the sense of being deeply listened to by a living presence who not only knows but shares in our experience from within. This presence can be understood as a field of divine subjectivity—a “who,” not a “what”—whom we may address as God, Amida, Adonai, or Allah. What matters is not simply that we address God, but that we feel heard. In Whitehead’s words, we are known by a “fellow sufferer who understands.”

At times, this becomes an inner sense that our feelings are not ours alone, but are also felt—just as we feel them—within a larger life. They are held with care, tenderness, and attention by a presence that is with us and in us, even as more than us.
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In process thought, this receptive dimension of God is called the consequent nature of God. It refers to the way God takes the experiences of the world into the divine life as they occur. This is not a matter of detached awareness, but of participation. God feels the feelings of creatures as they are felt by those creatures—sharing in their subjective immediacy.

In this sense, divine knowing is a form of divine feeling. God’s knowing of our experience is an inward receptivity: a participation in our joys and sorrows as we live them. And this participation can itself be felt. We may experience ourselves as genuinely known and loved because our experience is, in some real sense, present within the life of God.
Yet our experience is not absorbed into God or diminished. It remains our own. The consequent nature of God is not a fusion that erases individuality, but a reception that preserves it. Our feelings become ingredients in the divine life without losing their integrity as ours.

At this point, an important question arises: if God feels our feelings as we feel them, does this mean that God is somehow contaminated by our hatred, fear, or cruelty? In process thought, the answer is no—but with an important qualification. God is not contaminated in the sense of becoming hateful or morally corrupted. Yet God is not untouched, either. God is affected. In the consequent nature of God, even our most painful and destructive feelings are received and felt from within. Nothing is excluded from the divine experience.

However, what God feels is not simply our hatred as hatred. It is our hatred as felt, but held within a larger life that includes compassion, understanding, and a desire for healing. God receives our hatred without endorsing it and without being reduced to it. In this sense, God is wounded by the world, but not defined by its wounds.

At the same time, God is not only a companion who receives our lives; God is also a lure toward what is not yet. Even as God feels our feelings as we feel them—without distance—God also offers possibilities for how each moment might unfold. This is what process thinkers call the initial aim or the divine lure: a gentle, non-coercive invitation toward healing, beauty, truth, and deeper forms of becoming.

These two dimensions of God belong together. In the consequent nature, God is a pure companion—receiving us exactly as we are, sharing in our experience without requiring us to be different. In the lure, God is a quiet guide—inviting us, from within the very situation we are in, toward what might be better, more whole, more loving.

Importantly, the lure does not come from outside our experience, as if imposed upon us. It arises within it. The same divine presence that feels our feelings from within also offers, from within, possibilities for how we might respond. Thus, we are never simply left where we are, even as we are fully accepted where we are.

Whitehead’s notion of “causal efficacy” helps clarify this. To be affected is not to stand apart from others, but to be constituted by relations. God’s life includes a continual, moment-by-moment reception of the world. The experiences of creatures are not external to God; they are taken into the divine life as they occur, felt from within.
This is the metaphysical grounding for the experience of feeling loved and known by God: that our inner lives are not only known, but inwardly felt—received within a living presence that understands because it participates in what we feel.
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This awareness is not achieved once and for all; it can be noticed and cultivated. It may arise in stillness, prayer, music, conversation, or simple attentiveness to our own feelings. In such moments, we may sense—however faintly—that we are not alone within our experience. Our joys and sorrows are felt, received, and held within a deeper life. And from this awareness, a quiet strength can emerge: the courage to live and respond with tenderness, sustained by a love that understands from within.