I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky.
I believe that what people call God is something in all of us.
I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha
and all the rest said was right.
It's just that the translations have gone wrong.
- John Lennon
It's been a week since Easter and I've been in a reflective mood: the days that have followed the holiest one of the Christian year have been challenging for me, to put it mildly. So I've been trying to get in a more spiritual frame of mind and to regain my equilibrium by accessing and drawing on the depth of my faith. I sit quietly and wait for that inner voice, the one that is my own and seems to stream from my very depths, the one in which I feel the touch of God and am moved to ponder His Infinite Mystery. And merely in this reflection and contemplation I begin to heal and steel myself for what is to come (while, hopefully, leaving the past behind except for the wisdom with which it's gifted me).
Yet as I listen to my inner voice, I come to know two things clearly: First, too often of late, in it I hear anguish, a hurting more for the world than for myself, but a hurting nonetheless. And, second, I know that it is my voice, not God's, and this helps me: while I feel His Grace and Touch as I heal, I realize the thoughts are my own, my truth, not His Truth, limited as they are by my human perspective.
God doesn't talk to me directly, and that's good: I had too much religious schooling when I was young, so the prospect of speaking directly to God is still a frightening one ... and, in my adulthood, I've come to be wary of those who claim to be a human - meaning finite and flawed - vessel for the Infinite. And yet I feel His/Her/Its Presence regularly. Not that He/She/It isn't always there, but just that I'm more aware at some times more than others.
And that's the point: God is, however we limited, flawed and finite humans perceive this in any given moment and choose to describe this Ultimate Reality. To me, among other things, this means that all human conceptions of God are as limited, flawed and finite as we are. We can't know God as He/She/It is, we can only sense the Divine and try to craft a description in limited, human terms.
For example, though I started this piece using the traditional male pronoun to refer to God - capitalized, as I was taught, of course - He is not a male ... and we only describe God this way because men have been the most dominant gender of our species for millennia and thus have decided to refer to and conceptualize God in this (limited) image and language. He is not human, so He has no gender. As much as it's more familiar to refer to God as Father, He isn't: God is the Source of our (human) life, to be sure, but He isn't a he, and our Father image is a reflection of our projection of something familiar onto God rather than His/Her/Its revelation of a particular gender. It seems to me that choosing to see God in such limiting terms creates all sorts of problems, including the tendency to project and fetishize.
If you disagree with this last hypothesis, ask yourself the following question: Why is it that the most popular and ubiquitous picture of Jesus portrays Him as a straight-dirty-blond-haired Caucasian (in Warner Sallman's classic 1940 painting)? Would all of us - especially (American) Caucasians (particularly of the fundamentalist/conservative stripe) - continue to pray to Him if He were portrayed more realistically, as the swarthy, light brown-skinned Palestinian Jew with curly dark hair that He likely was? I seriously doubt this. It seems likely to me that the key to the popularity of the picture in the last 85 years is that it reflects an American ideal more than a 2000-year old historical reality. And if you don't believe me, just ask Megyn Kelly of Fox News....
So, if God's not a he, what is He/She/It?
Great question! And here's where modern theology comes in and, for many, doesn't help that much. Many question the viability of Theism, the concept of the personal (and most often anthropomorphic) God who acts in human history. There are many suggestions as to more accurate depictions.
For example, one of the many such 'new' conceptions was offered in the late 1940s and early 1950s by theologian Paul Tillich (in his classic compendium of sermons The Shaking of the Foundations, among others), when he suggested that God be thought of as the Ground of Being, or even as Being itself. For many this doesn't work as a meaningful God conception because, among other reasons, it seems impersonal and distant. Well, of course it does: it's a complete contrast to the external, theistic God that we've all been taught for most (if not all) of our lives. It's intangible and intellectual, not emotional and tangible like we project the theistic God to be. And yet just because we may believe the latter/what we've been taught doesn't make it true.
And that's another point on which I'm becoming clearer: just because we as fellow believers or citizens or whatever classifications believe something doesn't make it true. We want it to be true, and many may feel that they need it to be true (especially for control and/or security reasons), but, again, this doesn't make it true.
Just like 'believing' (or, in reality, claiming) that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. It isn't. That's not my opinion, that's fact, verified by a legion of biblical scholars (who, conceptually, are God's children). For starters, on its face we know that it's not inerrant: there are hundreds of internal disagreements and/or contradictions, including the two different birth stories in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke or even the two different creation stories in the first two chapters of the very first book of the Bible, Genesis, to name a few. And the lack of thematic continuity in literally hundreds of places throughout the Good Book attests to its having been edited and enhanced many, many times in antiquity by all too human hands. So the fact that many who choose to describe themselves as Christians claim that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God doesn't make it so. And the fact that this can be disproven but is believed anyway is one of the reasons that blind faith is questioned so vehemently (and appropriately) today.
I could list other 'new' conceptions of God like those of Bonhoeffer and Bultmann, et. al., but by now I think that I've established the point that there is no one true way to see - and/or experience - God. The fact that there are literally hundreds of human religions proves this. And lest some 'true believer' of whatever sect claim that his/hers is the only true religion, let's just ask for the proof. There is none, beyond belief ... and, as we know, just because we believe something doesn't make it so.
And yet one of the most virulent expressions of human religion today is the deplorable and immoral level killing that is perpetrated in God's name. Here's another thing on which I've become clear in recent years: if you kill, hurt or in any way diminish another's humanity in the name of God, you're doing God wrong. God is not tribal, but universal ... meaning that God is not a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, or an adherent of any of the other myriad belief systems and sects that we humans have created to express our awareness of the Ultimate Reality. A popular FaceBook meme captures this nicely:
God was not a Buddhist.
Jesus was not a Christian.
Muhammed was not a Muslim.
They were teachers who taught Love.
Love was their Religion.
Now we can debate how much each of them taught and practiced Love, but, again, this is a human debate and has nothing to do with who or what God is even though each of them is considered to offer a pathway to Him/Her/It. Slyly, the meme establishes a great point: each of these sages saw and/or described the Ultimate Reality differently and yet we acknowledge the depth and meaning of their insights into the Divine by choosing to use them as the portals to a more spiritual life ... even though they didn't and don't agree on the 'right' path thereto, unless you believe that they were aligned in that they each espoused Love. But this digression is itself an artifice to reinforce the larger point that irrespective of what each of us chooses to believe - be that the tenets of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Baha'i, etc. - God is ... and the choice of path is ours alone however we feel about another's path or others' paths.
In other words, just because we believe a certain way doesn't make it so and God is, whatever we believe.
Which brings me back to the anguish that I too often feel as I reflect on the abuse of religion in our world. Simply put, we get God wrong way too much and to our collective detriment. That we kill in the name of the Source of Life is proof both that we don't get God and that we are too flawed to comprehend fully the Infinite and Ultimate Reality. That we are too often religiocentrists - believing that our view of God is the 'right,' true and the only one - just reinforces the point. What kind of Divine would favor a few of His/Her/Its children over others? Not one worthy of our devotion and belief, for sure....
And, in my humble view, only in the acknowledgment of the limitations of our humanity, especially our inability to know God fully, will we find our salvation. Only when we accept that the one thing that we have in common is that we are indeed all Children of God - however we choose to see Him/Her/It - can we begin to honor God by emulating Him/Her/It. As far as I can tell, this means that we treat each other in life-affirming ways, which, now that I think about it, means in a loving way. Hey, maybe FaceBook is right: God is Love after all....
The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple
of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence
before every human being and see God in him -
that moment I am free from bondage,
everything that binds vanishes,
and I am free.
- Swami Vivekananda
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