"The God You Don't Believe In, I Don't Believe In, Either"

-Reb Zalman

"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. 

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.”

Ash Wednesday

Today I wrestled with what this season of Lent means for me. I was reading some of Thomas Merton's thoughts on lent in his journals (A Year With Thomas Merton) a day or two ago. He wrote this: 

"Unless the grain of wheat, falling into the ground, dies, itself remains alone." So we cast off the flesh, not out of contempt, but in order to heal the flesh in the mercy of penance and restore it to the Spirit to which it belongs. And all creation waits in anguish for our victory and our bodies' glory.

(Feb 17, 1953)

Merton is one of my heroes, as anyone who has spent much time with me in the last couple of years would know! And I think his words here are right on. But I don't know if this is the time in my life to enter into Lent with the intention of denying the body, of aiming to part with attachments to people and things. I trust that this is eventually where I will be, but not yet (this is emphatically not the sort of self-denial that leads to withdrawal and leaving the world behind, but the type that ultimately leads to a fuller enjoyment of life, a wider embrace of the world and a deeper capacity to love). In the spirit of what I wrote in the first post, before I get into self-denial I must have a more well crafted self to deny! To me that would include a career, love, a few more tangible accomplishments under my belt, etc. What I have in mind is what Joseph Campbell called fulfilling your hero's journey. He had this to say (Italics mine):

One young lady came up to me, and she said, very seriously, "Oh, Mr. Campbell, you just don't know about the modern generation. We go directly from infancy to wisdom."

I said, "That is great. All you've missed is life."

So, I say the way to find your myth is to find your zeal, to find your support, and to know what stage of life you're in. The problems of youth are not the problems of age. Don't try to live your life too soon. By listening too much to gurus, you try to jump over the whole darn thing and back off and become wise before you've experience that in relation to which there is some point in being wise. This thing, wisdom, has to come gradually.

There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path…

What is is we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. 

-Pathways to Bliss

My prayer this morning was to work out what this Lent ought to mean for me, and to own and embrace that it's not going to mean for me what it meant for our beloved Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, no matter how much I admire him and have been nourished and shaped by his life and thought (After all, even he had his wild years; he fathered an illegitimate child by the time he was my age. Looks like I have some catching up to do... kidding). So I was encouraged when afterwards, I read this in Richard Rohr's Ash Wednesday meditation in his book for Lent (italics his):

"It seems that we need beginnings, or everything eventually devolves and declines into unnecessary and sad endings. You were made for so much more! So today you must pray for the desire to desire! Even if you do not feel it yet, ask for new and even unknown desires. For you will eventually get what you really desire!

…You are the desiring of God. God desires through you and longs for Life and Love through you and in you. Allow it, speak it, and you will find your place in the universe of things… Make your desires good and far-reaching on this Ash Wednesday of new beginnings. You could not have such desires if God had not already desired them first - in you and for you and as you!" 

-Wondrous Encounters

So this Lent it's my hope and prayer that I step more fully into myself, to open up to new things, to love, to risk, to mystery, to stepping out away from what's safe, comfortable, routine, and out into the precipice, knowing that I might fall flat on my face but embracing it all as part of the dance. (The image here is Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade, taking that leap of faith off the ledge into thin air on the way to the Grail)

I desire to die to the old self that gives too much permission to fear and laziness (all those "what if?" questions) so that when Easter rolls around, I may truly be a new creation. 

Or, maybe in other words, as Sean Witty and the First Baptist Church in Newton have been saying it lately, I desire to work out "What does love require of me?" Love of God, love of others, absolutely, but also love of myself.  I don't see any division in these three. 


What does this mean more concretely? Some of that I won't share now but one thing I've chosen to do is write a meaningful, expressive post for this blog every week. I want to be a better writer, so this is me making that happen. I'm also going to try to get a psychology internship at Harvard or another top school in the Boston area this summer to prepare for doctoral studies in psychology post-Berklee. 

"Lent is not about penance. Lent is about becoming, doing and changing whatever it is that is blocking the fullness of life in us right now."

-Sister Joan Chittister, OSB