Sensing God
Experiencing the Divine in Nature, Food, Music, and Beauty
So much of our faith is lived out in our heads. We study the Bible, sit through sermons, pray with our eyes closed. All of these are good things. There is a world around us, however, that is crammed with heaven if we have eyes to see it and ears to hear it and hands to touch it. The goodness of God is waiting for us to taste and see. The aroma of Christ surrounds us. In Sensing God, musician and theologian Joel Clarkson points us to a life of faith that is enchanted by the glory of divine craftsmanship, inviting us to practice a faith that is true, good, pure, and altogether lovely.
I'm a firm believer that we each get a unique journey with our Lord. It's incredibly easy to get caught up in our earthly lives that we forget how we can fully interact with Him using all of our senses. We can indulge in a life with Him in ways that we often don't think about. The world has shown us how dark and lonely it can be -- but it definitely does not have to be that way! Throughout the book, I felt comforted and pushed out of my earthly comfort zone to connect on a much deeper level. The inspiration, beauty, and full of gifts that you didn't know you wanted (or needed!).
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About the Author
From the soaring, cinematic sounds of his film music to his melodic, pensive piano works, Joel Clarkson is an award-winning composer who is known for the vibrant colors of sound he paints with his music. Joel's composition is often focused on film scores, and he has provided original music for numerous feature and short films in addition to orchestrating and conducting for many different genres and settings. He has also received high praise as a concert composer and orchestrator, and his creative contributions to concert music have been heard around the world to great acclaim. Joel has provided his expertise in many other artistic environments, including the audiobook world, where he has delighted listeners near and far as an engaging voice artist, and also in nonfiction publishing, where he has collaborated as a creative contributor and editor on multiple bestselling books. Joel was born in Vienna, Austria, and received his undergraduate degree from the Berklee College of Music, summa cum laude. He currently finds his home in the shadow of the beautiful Rocky Mountains in Monument, Colorado. For more information, please visit www.joelclarkson.com.
Getting Dirt Under the Fingernails of Our Faith: Learning to Allow Our Hearts to be Shaped through Our Hands
By: Joel Clarkson
Have you ever felt that your faith is all stuck in your head? Perhaps you encounter meaningful preaching or powerful worship in church on a Sunday, but as soon as you walk out the doors and back into your life, the spiritual experience doesn’t follow. It’s as if our faith and our day-to-day lives are separated by an invisible wall. We know the truth of Christianity and are firm in what we believe; and yet it so often feels like our faith is all just a mental exercise; how are we ever to figure out how to get it into our lives in a meaningful way?
A popular cultural cliché of our time is to describe our brains as computers. It seems like a simple enough answer—that our real selves are in our minds, and we only have bodies as a sort of afterthought. But the truth is more complicated; neuroscientists have shown that the brain is only able to properly function because of the way the body—and particularly our five senses embedded in our physical experience—catalyzes the information that the brain processes. In other words, the brain needs the body to help make sense of the ideas it receives and the thoughts it produces. This is because, contrary to that popular convention, we are not simple computers that process information algorithmically and spit out the answer. We don’t simply receive and produce knowledge; we make sense of it. This is perhaps our most unique capacity as humans amongst everything else in creation: We are able to understand the meaning of things and respond to them accordingly. It is for this purpose that our senses have been given us: Our minds process information, but our hearts are made to assign meaning and value to everything we encounter, and only when our senses work in partnership with our minds can our hearts draw value from the world, or consciously act within it.
This relationship between the head and the heart—and the way that our “hands” (our five senses) help connect those elements—plays out in our faith as well. The psalms are full of descriptions of God’s work in creation:
“When I look at the night sky . . . what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?” (Psalm 8:3a, 4a);
“The heavens proclaim the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1a);
“As I was woven together in the dark of the womb, you saw me before I was born” (Psalm 139:15b-16a).
And for each reference to creation in those psalms, there is an equal response, a turn of the heart toward worship:
“Lord, our Lord, your majestic name fills the earth!” (Psalm 8:9);
“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer” (Psalm 19:14);
“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life” (Psalm 139:23-24).
In each instance, the psalmist makes it clear: When we witness God at work in the glory of creation itself, through our senses, it changes our hearts and turns them toward praise. Perhaps this is why we are told to love God with our hearts, souls, minds, and strength. To have knowledge about God requires only the mind; but to love God—to let our affections be actively engendered toward adoration—we need every element of our existence working in symbiosis, head and heart and hands together. We need to get the good dirt of God’s beautiful world under the fingernails of our faith.
So how can you make a change today? How can you begin allowing your hands to teach your heart the way of God’s love? By letting the hidden grace in everything around you become an opportunity for praise. When you make a meal or sing a song; when you wash dishes or take a walk in nature; when you hug a family member or enjoy a beautiful piece of art—all of these elements and many more beyond are the building blocks of a wholehearted, holistic faith. May you be encouraged as you learn even today to recognize the glory of God in the stuff of the world, calling you into participation in His wonderful and rich life.
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