Beyond the Sky God: A Conversation on Finding the Ground of Being

Beyond the Sky God: A Conversation on Finding the Ground of Being

SEE: What’s Really Going On Here?

Let’s be honest about something most of us experience but rarely name: we’ve inherited a picture of God that no longer quite works. You know the one—God as the ultimate being “up there,” watching, judging, occasionally intervening. It’s dualistic thinking at its core: God over here, us over there. Heaven above, earth below. Sacred versus secular.

This split shows up everywhere in how we live. We compartmentalize our spiritual life from our “real” life. We treat prayer like making a phone call to someone far away. We experience God as distant, ourselves as separated, and the world as somehow less than holy.

Two 20th-century thinkers—Paul Tillich (a philosopher-theologian) and Thomas Merton (a Contemplative monk/theologian)—both wrestled with this problem. The understanding of the “ground of being” is found in various comparative religions and in ancient Judeo-Christian thought, especially in the early movements of Christianity. Tillich and Merton asked: What if God isn’t a being among other beings, even the highest one? What if God is more like the ground underneath everything, the depth within all that exists?

Tillich came at it philosophically. He said God is “being-itself”—the power that makes everything possible, the depth of reality we bump into when we face our deepest fears and questions. He wasn’t talking about some cosmic entity; he meant the ultimate truth that sustains us.

Merton approached it through contemplative practice. Sitting in silence, he discovered that when the chattering ego falls away, what remains isn’t emptiness—it’s God. Not God as an object “out there,” but God as the very ground of who we truly are. He called our everyday identity, all too often that person we see in the mirror each morning, the “false self”—that constructed persona we mistake for our real identity—and said our “true self” is actually hidden in God, inseparable from God’s love itself.

Current reality check: Think about your own experience. When do you feel closest to God or to what matters most? Is it when you’re thinking about God as someone separate from you? Or is it in those moments when the boundary between you and life dissolves—in nature, in love, in creativity, in art, in music, in silence?

DISCERN: What Does This Mean for How We Live?

Here’s where it gets practical. If God isn’t “up there” but is instead the ground of everything, several things shift:

The spiritual life stops being about distance and becomes about depth. Prayer isn’t about reaching out to someone far away; it’s about sinking down into the reality that’s already holding you. You’re not trying to get God’s attention—you’re waking up to the attention that’s already upon you.

Your ordinary life becomes the primary spiritual territory. Suppose God is the ground of all being. In that case, everything—your work, your relationships, your morning coffee, the tree outside your window—is already saturated with divine presence. The split between “spiritual time” and “regular life” collapses. As Merton discovered, creation itself becomes “transparent to God.”

Anxiety and meaninglessness get reframed. Tillich said our most profound anxiety comes from facing “non-being”—the threat of meaninglessness, the fear that we don’t matter. But if we’re grounded in the power of being itself, if we’re participating in the depth of reality, then we have what he called “the courage to be.” We’re accepted by the ground of being itself, which means our worth isn’t something we have to earn or prove.

The false self versus the true self. Merton helps us see that most of what we defend, promote, and worry about is a constructed identity—a mask we’ve built from others’ expectations, our fears, our need for control. Beneath that is who we truly are: beloved, held in God, already whole. The spiritual journey is less about becoming something and more about letting go of what we’re not.

But here’s the tension: Both thinkers, you might say, risk making God sound impersonal, like a philosophical concept or cosmic force. Merton was cautious here. He insisted that the ground you encounter in deep silence isn’t just abstract “being”—it’s the living God of love, the Trinity, the Universal Christ among us as the ground of being for over fifteen billion years that we know of. It’s personal and beyond all our categories of individuals. It’s intimate precisely because it’s so close we can’t see it, like trying to see your own eyes.

ACT: So What Do We Do With This?

If this resonates, here are some concrete ways to live from this understanding:

1. Practice dropping below the surface

Instead of always praying to God, try praying from the ground of being. Sit in silence. Let your thoughts settle. Don’t try to reach anywhere. Just sink into the depth that’s already present. Even five minutes a day of this kind of presence can shift your whole center of gravity.

2. Challenge the sacred-secular split in your daily routine

Pick one ordinary activity this week—washing dishes, commuting, working—and approach it as if it’s already saturated with the presence of God. Not that you need to make it holy, but that you’re waking up to the holiness already there. How does this change your experience?

3. Work with your false self

Pay attention to the voice in your head that’s always defending, promoting, worrying about your image. That’s the false self. When you notice it, you can gently ask: “Who would I be without this story?” You don’t have to destroy the ego, but you can stop identifying with it as your deepest reality.

4. Face your anxiety differently

Next time you feel the anxiety of meaninglessness or insignificance, instead of immediately trying to prove your worth, try this: “The ground of being itself holds me. My existence is not an accident. I am participating in the power that makes everything possible.” Let that be enough.

5. Look for transparency

Merton talked about seeing creation as transparent to God. Practice looking through things instead of just at them. That person in front of you in line—can you see them as a unique expression of the ground of being? That tree, that sky, that difficult situation—what if it’s all opening onto something deeper?

6. Embrace the paradox

You are both deeply personal (a beloved child of God) and part of something vast (expressions of being-itself). Both are true. Don’t flatten the mystery into either pure transcendence or pure immanence. Live in the tension.

7. Find your contemplative practice

You don’t have to become a monk, a nun, or a cleric; gosh, they suffer the same struggles as you, but you probably need some practice that takes you beyond words and concepts. Centering prayer, sitting meditation, contemplative walking, even absorbed creativity—find what helps you sink below the chattering mind into the ground.

The bottom line: We’re not trying to find God “out there.” We’re waking up to the ground we’ve been standing on all along. We’re discovering that our most authentic self isn’t the isolated ego we defend. Still, our life is hidden in the life of the Significant Other we call God, the ground of all being. And we’re learning to see the whole world—every person, every moment—as an expression of the depth we call God.

This isn’t about abandoning your faith tradition. It’s about going deeper into it, past the simplified pictures, icons, statues, and stained glass windows to the living mystery. Whether you’re Christian, spiritual-but-not-religious, Eastern or Western in thinking, or just curious, all about “what’s it “, the invitation is the same: stop reaching up and out.

Start sinking down and in. The ground is already holding you.