Today I ask, “What gives meaning and purpose to your life?”

When I reflect on this question, I surrender my tendency to believe that I can know God the way I can solve a problem in mathematics. I acknowledge that God is a mystery I can only grasp intuitively and ponder in my imagination—an oceanic experience beyond conscious thought that resides in deep interiority.

Yes, each of us and all that exists is enveloped in the divine presence. That presence is something we cannot see, feel, hear, or touch, yet it is fully present in everything we can.

As I reflect on the question of God, I remember the barn in our backyard and the chickens that lived there. Sometimes when I collected eggs for our mother’s table, I would feel a little chick pecking inside the egg shell. It was as if that chick had exhausted the available nourishment and felt motivated to discover new resources for its journey. Time to be born into a new world!

Or think of a tiny fly riding for its whole short life on the back of an elephant. Suddenly that fly overcomes its inertia and flies off the elephant. When it looks back, it sees the elephant for the first time with a fresh perspective—much like the early astronauts who looked back and saw the earth as a blue-green bulb, hanging like a Christmas ornament in the deep dark cosmos.

As we continue our journey, we realize that mystery is God’s other name. As we simultaneously explore our own deep interiority and the vast cosmos, an experience the living God is available to us in a mysterious burst of awe and wonder. It is only as wee come rest in the unknown yet felt sense of the sacred that we dare to discover meaning and purpose in our lives.