"God." Easily one of the most divisive, loaded, explosive, powerful, beautiful, and confusing words uttered by humans. As a Christian, I use the word "God" a lot. But what does it mean for me?
I imagine that what the word "God" has come to mean for me is different than what it does for many, religious and non-religious alike, and so I’m hoping to clarify where I stand and also gain some deeper self-understanding. I possess some apparent contradictions when it comes to God. I'm a Christian. I love and try to follow Jesus. I attend and serve in church gatherings. I read scripture, pray and meditate every day (well… almost every day). I have had glimpses and tastes of Divine Love that jerked me clean out of my hang ups and myopic egoism into another way of seeing, where everything seemed to be shining, alight with bliss, love, wholeness and beauty, and where I realized that there was never anything I had to do or attain, but only to wake up to what already is. There have been numerous occasions where I've been moved almost to tears by an inexpressible and inexhaustible tenderness and mercy radiating from ordinary, everyday things – a candle, a flower - transfiguring and sanctifying them. My heroes are mystics and contemplatives. Everything is spiritual.
But on the other hand, I have no idea what God is. I am not attached to any particular conception of God other than this – God is Love. That’s all I know. And so when I hear people attacking or dismissing “god,” I take no offense. I don’t feel threatened, nor do I have any desire to debate because I don’t believe in God. I only know God. God is not an object of belief “somewhere out there” that guarantees I'm right and gives me a sense of mastery and certainty in an uncertain world. The God I love is known only thru participation and cannot be rationally apprehended. I have no conceptual god to defend. Whether or not there is a God “out there” is not relevant to me. Faith has come to be not about covering over life’s inherent difficulties with easy answers but instead having the courage to face them and live authentically in the midst of them. (I am drawing heavily on Peter Rollins here).
Of course I have ideas about God, but they are subject to change and I don't "believe" them. They are sketches and maps of the territory at best, never to be confused with the territory itself.
Of course I have ideas about God, but they are subject to change and I don't "believe" them. They are sketches and maps of the territory at best, never to be confused with the territory itself.
It used to matter to me tremendously whether or not “God exists”. I expended ungodly amounts of time and energy researching arguments from both sides, wrestling and debating with myself whether God as the "big other" exists. It occurs to me now that this was time I could have spent actually doing what Jesus taught us to do - loving and serving the poor and downtrodden in my midst and being an agent of grace, forgiveness and reconciliation in a world that needs good news. No doubt, I would have found God there. God is not found in arguments or abstractions. God is found in Love. God is Love.
Through grace in its various guises, my journey has brought me to a place of freedom from needing to know just what God is. I have owned my doubt, not as something to be tolerated because, "well, after all, I'm only human," but rather as something that is central to my faith. It is not something that is marginalized and ignored when possible, but instead embraced and given a seat of honor at the table. “To believe is human; to doubt, divine.” –Pete Rollins
I'm not too concerned with "what God is" because I know. Not objective, test-tube knowledge, but knowledge as of an intimate. (“Adam knew Eve”) Structured and defined beliefs are necessary at one point, but eventually you need to take the training wheels off.
How can someone know God if they don’t “believe in God”?
Christianity is an incarnational faith. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (The Gospel of John). The Mystery of God, that which is invisible, was revealed in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Christianity, then, is a materialistic religion. It's about blood, sweat, skin, tears, flowers, wine, sex, earth, dance, music, art, gardens, food, air, love, fire, ice, grass, wheat, pouring your life into someone else, empowering the oppressed, freeing the captives. For me, faith is about here and now, not there or later. Heaven and earth are not separate. Heaven is a present reality.
Two quotes that say more in a few words than I have in many:
“God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought.”
-Joseph Campbell
“And so, when the mind admits that God is too great for our knowledge, love replies: "I know him.”
-Thomas Merton
While beginning to write this, I went into more detail about my thoughts about God - what I think God is, what I think God isn't. But it all felt so distasteful, and worse, blasphemous. Not blasphemous in the sense that I feared a fire breathing, thunderbolt- throwing deity riding on the clouds would smite me. No, it felt blasphemous in the way you might feel if you were asked to describe your lover only in terms of their physical traits and you found yourself attempting to capture their irreducible, transcendent essence in a reductionist description of eye color, hair color, race, height, weight, etc. This is how I feel talking about God as an object for investigation or debate. It’s like trying to grasp light in your hand.
What I do believe is this: God cannot be embraced except in the embrace of the world, in all of its brokenness and beauty. The Divine cannot be affirmed except in the affirmation of life in all of its joy and anguish, serenity and despair. God is not an object that we know by holding to a particular belief system, existing somewhere outside of the world of space and time and then occasionally stepping in to push this button, pull that string, heal this person, give that person a parking space, etc. The entire Universe is alight with God and contained within God, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear (as Jesus was so fond of saying). There’s a Jewish Midrash that says there are burning bushes everywhere.
Now, to close with another gem from Merton:
(Don’t worry; I don’t think I'm a contemplative)
“In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is;
this is a great gain,
because “God is not a what,”
not a “thing.”
There is “no such thing” as God
because God is neither a “what” or a “thing”
but a pure “Who,”
the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs
into awareness.”
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