How do you know when you’ve met God? A field guide to the sacred encounter | Opinion

There’s a question that tends to show up not at the beginning of faith, but somewhere in the middle — after the recited prayers and Sunday school answers have begun to feel more like postcards from someone else’s vacation than reflections of your own experience.

The question is this: What does it actually feel like to encounter God?

Not the God of theology books, but the One you’re told is as near as your breath. The One who speaks, comforts, calls. The One you’re supposed to trust — but how can you trust someone you’re not sure you’ve ever felt? It’s the kind of question that rarely gets asked out loud, but it lives in our bodies. It flickers beneath hospital fluorescents. It rises after a funeral. It hovers in the woods when the light hits the trees just right, and something inside you stirs.

If you ask the mystics — Christian, Jewish, modern contemplatives — they’ll often respond with a story. Not an answer. A story. Something like this:

One day, after months of silence, the Trappist priest Thomas Keating felt something shift — not a vision or a voice, just presence. Like quiet filling a room. He called it “consenting to the presence and action of God within.”

Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault says we don’t encounter God by thinking harder, but by surrendering the part of us that needs to name and control. God is not an object to be observed but a presence to be yielded to. So maybe the question isn’t, “Have you encountered God?” but, “Have you noticed?”

Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor often says God’s presence doesn’t always come with goosebumps. Sometimes it’s a whisper in your peripheral vision. Or the absence of fear at the very moment you thought you’d fall apart.

A child once described it as “the quiet when no one is mad anymore.”

Even neuroscience has started to notice: in deep prayer or meditation, the part of the brain that obsesses over the self goes quiet. In that openness, many describe a sense of presence — whether or not they name it God.

You don’t need a mountain or monastery. People have met God while folding laundry. In hospice rooms. While planting tomatoes. There’s no formula. But there are patterns.

You know you’ve met God when something shifts. Maybe you speak more gently. Listen longer. Forgive someone you never thought you could. Maybe you simply come to know deep in your bones that you’re not alone.

Lost our capacity for awe

Trappist monk Thomas Merton once stood on a corner in Louisville, Kentucky, and suddenly saw everyone around him — not as strangers, but as beloved. “There’s no way of telling people that they’re all walking around shining like the sun,” he wrote. He didn’t make that moment happen. He was just available to it.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel said the tragedy isn’t that we don’t encounter God — it’s that we’ve lost our capacity for awe. We don’t look up. We fill the silence before it can say anything. And yet the sacred traditions are clear: God doesn’t require your perfection. Only your attention.

We can practice stillness — not because God is hard to find, but because we are. We can tend to the body — through breath, movement and rest. We can make time to listen to music, to stand in front of a painting, to watch children play. We can forgive slowly. Grieve honestly. Read poetry. We can walk, sing, and keep Sabbath. We can ask better questions. We can say — every once in a while — “Here I am.”

And even if you don’t feel anything in that moment, you may still be changed. As Presbyterian minister Eugene Peterson once said, spiritual growth is often like roots deepening underground. Hidden. Steady. Real.

And if you have encountered God — what then? You may not know until later. Until you find yourself more compassionate. Until something no longer fits the way it used to. Until you realize the ground you’re walking on has always been holy.

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl found God not in rescue, but in meaning. A quiet defiance against despair.

Anne Frank, in her hiding place, wrote of chestnut trees and distant laughter. “I don’t think of all the misery,” she said, “but of the beauty that still remains.”

God doesn’t always erase suffering. But God is there.

So how do you know? Maybe you don’t. Not in the moment. But something shifts. And you begin to live like the light in your next conversation, or the ache in your chest, might just be the holy, breaking through.

This story was originally published June 12, 2025 at 5:09 AM with the headline "How do you know when you’ve met God? A field guide to the sacred encounter | Opinion."