Quotes that stick with you: Mayra Rivera

Four or five years ago as I was wrapping up my studies at McAfee School of Theology, I came across Mayra Rivera’s A Touch of Transcendence. The entirety of the work deals with the theology of transcendence and how it has been used in colonizing endeavors. Therefore she sets out to unpack a post-colonial theology of God and God’s transcendence. A task that is more difficult than you may believe. 

Towards the beginning of the book she gives a short statement that encapsulates the view of God she argues for in the rest of the book.

She says God is “always beyond our grasp. But not beyond our touch.”

That stuck with me.
Never has one small quote communicated so much to me about who God is. In just nine words Rivera sums up a robust theology of God that combats so many of our negative tendencies to domesticate God or to keep God at a distance.

Too often we fall into two traps of understanding who God is. The first says that God is my buddy, my friend. God is so close that we’re on a first name basis. The problem with overemphasizing God’s closeness is that God ceases to be big enough to handle the world we live in.

The second says, God is out there, distant, removed from our lives and our existence. God is beyond us, big, incomprehensibly huge, and unknowable. The problem here, though, is that I can’t relate to God. I can’t know God. I can’t experience God.

With both of these we also risk putting God in a box to where God never surprises us, or challenges us. We believe we know all there is to know about God. God is either my best friend or a remote, inaccessible monarch.

This quote from Mayra Rivera shows us in such succinct fashion that both of these understandings of God are inadequate.

God is always beyond our grasp. God is transcendent. We will never cease to be surprised and challenged by God. God is more than us, more than our universe, and more than anything we could every imagine.

God is never beyond our touch. God is immanent. God can be touched, experienced, and known. God is closer than our very own breath. God is present in every situation, every pain and every joy. Nothing exists apart from God, but all things exist in God.

“Always beyond our grasp. But not beyond our touch.”

That’s a God I can believe in.