Manning wrote in Ruthless Trust (2000):
…We can no more catch a hurricane in a shrimp net or Niagara Falls in a coffee cup then we can grasp the infinity of God’s reality. A one-sided focus on his Otherness reduces the Holy One to a cosmic observer, a distant outsider disengaged from the yaw and pitch of human struggle.
Immanence is not the opposite of transcendence but its correlative, immanence and transcendence are two sides of the same coin, two facets of the same divine reality. Transcendence means that God cannot be confined to the world, that he is never this rather than that, here rather than there. Immanence, on the other hand, means that God is wholly involved with us, “that he is living in all that is as its innermost mystery,” that he is here in his mysterious nearness…Disregard of God’s immanence deprives us of any sense of intimate belonging, while inattention to his transcendence robs God of his godliness” (p. 82).
In the swirl of the attributes of God, my contemplative mind gets lost in the transcendence of a Holy God who is so intimately passionate for His creation that it is often very uncomfortable. Uncomfortable in the sense that He does whatever it takes to capture the heart of His Bride. He stoops low. Lower than I would if I were Him…but I suppose that is one of the characteristics of His transcendence. The lavish wastefulness of His perfect love – a love that (I suppose) is lavish due to His otherness, and wasteful due to the nature of His other[ness]-love. His transcendence becoming immanent in the object of His affection by the pure recklessness of its selflessness. Philippians 2.
Reference:
Manning, B. (2000). Ruthless Trust: the ragamuffin’s path to God. NY: HarperCollins