Experiencing God

“Do you believe in God?”

I get this question a lot, usually at the exact worst moment: parties, family dinners, that awkward silence after someone learns I left the Mormon church. My answer never satisfies anyone: define “God” first.

That’s not me being difficult. It’s genuinely the only honest response I can give, because everyone who asks that question has a different image in mind. And the image matters.

Adam Miller frames it well in Transformations of Faith. Most theological talk about God centers on God as a person—fingers, toes, eyes, nose. But when it comes to actually experiencing God? That’s not what it feels like. Not for him. Not for me, either.

I call myself an agnostic mystic, which sounds like a contradiction but isn’t. It’s more like being a mechanic who believes in ghosts: I’ve spent too much time under the hood of the psyche to pretend there’s nothing strange going on in there. My life has been marked by synchronicities and moments that feel like something beyond coincidence—things I’d be dishonest to deny. But when you ask me to pin down what I think God is, I can’t hand you a neat answer. I’m not sure anyone can.

From a Jungian perspective, the divine shows up through archetypes—patterns that live in the collective unconscious and shape how every culture in human history has imagined the sacred. God isn’t one fixed thing. God is what a given person or culture needs the divine to be. Which is either terrifying or freeing, depending on what you do with it. Neil Gaiman captured this through his character Jesus in American Gods, describing what it means to be a god: you become a meme, constantly recreated in everyone’s mind, a thousand aspects of what people need you to be.

Here’s where I’ve landed, at least for now: the Gods are real in the dramas they enter. The Bible is a story, and Jesus is the God and savior of that story. If you experience something in your life that you attribute to God—in a dream, a vision, a moment of shattering clarity—then God is real in your drama. Does that mean God exists the same way in someone else’s story? Not necessarily. And even if the divine shows up in another person’s life, it might look completely different.

The Gods exist as you exist: in the stories of your life and others.

For some people, especially in traditions where God’s physicality is doctrine, this will feel insufficient. I get that. But for those of us who experience the divine as something more abstract—found in moments of awe, in the depths of the psyche during honest introspection, in the felt sense that something larger is at work—it doesn’t need a body to be real.

God isn’t a being to be seen. God is a presence to be felt.

What have you experienced that you can’t explain but can’t honestly deny?