Over the past month we have all been wrapped
up in a drama which, as Galen suggested last week, changes like the weather.
Most of us have had an unhealthy amount of fun repeating jokes about the
President while guessing at facts. I, for one, am so tired of this, that
this morning I am going to try to change our palate by exploring the biggest
subject I know, one far more vast and important than Presidential peccadilloes.
I'm not talking about Social Security, or even Iraq, but God, a subject
so complicated, so overwhelming in its magnitude, that none of us really
has the faintest idea what it is all about. At least this should encourage
a modicum of humility, which, in religious terms, is much more redemptive
than rushing to judgment about the private life of another human being.
When someone tells me that she doesn't believe in God, I always ask her
to tell me a little about the God she doesn't believe in. I probably don't
believe in Him either. It's easy to torch a straw God. I did the same throughout
my youth. Even after entering the ministry, I believed in love, I believed
in believers, I even believed in belief, but I didn't believe in God. That
was because my god -- the one I didn't believe in -- was far too small.
Today, not only do I believe in God, I only believe in God. Everything else
is too small. If you don't believe in God, it's not that you believe in
nothing. The plain truth is, you believe in almost anything: happiness,
fame, health, knowledge, most dangerously yourself, each a chimera, chancy
and undependable. Only an ultimate reality far beyond the compass of our
own existence can give our limited, fragile and often broken lives a meaning
they would never otherwise even come close to approximating. God doesn't
exist because we need God. We exist because the Universe is so amazing that
only something like the idea of God can come close to beginning to explain
it.
I, of course, am a religious liberal. I approach the world with an open
heart, open hand, and open mind. This said, I am not unself-critical. Ever
since the Reformation, we religious liberals have been conducting a theological
search-and-destroy mission, its purpose being to strip away the trappings
of religion, the mystagogy and priestcraft, in an attempt to restore to
faith its intellectual and ethical integrity. In some ways it is a little
like trying to find the seed of an onion by peeling away its layers. Eventually,
nothing is left but our tears.
I am no fan of mystagogy and priestcraft, but neither am I at all convinced
that by dint of sheer rationality we can come even close to understanding
the mystery of being alive and having to die. Life is a miracle that can't
be explained without explaining it away. Our most profound encounters lead
inexorably from the rational to the transrational realm. Yet myth, parable,
and paradox--our only tools for enlightenment here--are the very tools we
religious liberals have seen fit to lock away. That they are blunted through
misuse by biblical literalists takes nothing from their original edge. They
can be polished and put to new use.
Many leading scientists are far ahead of us in this regard. Some of the
most recent discoveries in mathematics and particle physics make no apparent
sense, at least not according to known canons of rationality. In probing
the mysteries of the universe and the mind, researchers on the cutting edge
of knowledge find themselves moving freely between the rational and transrational
realms. As physicist Alan Lightman writes, "Of all people today, I
think scientists have the deepest faith in the unseen world. The greater
the scientist, the deeper his faith." Even allowing for hyperbole,
where does that leave the poor camp-followers who believe in science but
don't know a thing about it? Sadly, having traded in God for truth, they
are left with neither.
Much religion today continues to be irrational. Claims of scriptural inerrancy,
virgin birth, and creation science with the scriptures and not the cosmos
as primary evidence, are indeed irrational. But an equally serious charge
may be leveled at liberal religion, especially in its most radical (which
is to say reactionary) form. In our principled flight from irrationality,
we have almost wholly lost sight of the transrational realm, where reason
is not rejected but rather transcended. This is the realm of myth and parable,
poetry and paradox, symbol and salvation. Wholeness cannot be achieved until
the two realms--the realms of sign and symbol, of fact and fancy--are explored
as one.
So when the irrationalist says that "there are miracles because the
Bible tells me so," and the rationalist replies that "there are
no such things as miracles," both are wrong. All life is a miracle.
And when they cite conflicting authorities to prove the existence or nonexistence
of God, their exercises are in vain, God is not God's name. God is our
name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each--the
life force, the ground of being, being itself. So defined, God is beyond
knowing or naming; in our accustomed ways of seeing, both too close and
too far away for us to see.
The danger of excluding the transrational realm from our field of contemplation
is that by sophisticating our minds against mystery each irrational strawman
we kill may leave a vacuum for more insidious self-delusion. We may begin
to presume that we understand, even control, powers so beyond our control
and understanding as to be in fact unimaginable. We then lose our sense
of humility and awe, taking the creation for granted, rather than receiving
it, with fear and trembling, as an undeserved, unfathomable gift. Whenever
knowledge supplants mystery, our imagination and sense of wonder are just
as likely to die as are the gods we pride ourselves for having killed. Dismissing
the supernatural, we may end up also missing the super in the natural.
If explorations of the transrational realm will never yield trophies we
can bring home and tack on our walls, we do return from such journeys blessed
with new eyes to glimpse the divine amidst the ordinary, and new ears to
hear the still, small voice. Then sight becomes miracle and hearing too.
No further proofs are necessary, save one, when having heard and having
seen, we translate our very lives into evidences of God.
My own definition of religion is a simple one. Religion is our human response
to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are not the animal
with tools or the animal with advanced language, but the religious animal:
We know that we are going to die, and therefore question what life means.
Throughout the history of human thought, in many different ways this question
has inspired seekers both to invent and to discover God.
Think about our ancestors, the searchers who came before us. Begin with
cavedwellers, hunters and gatherers, for whom the greatest imaginable powers
are forces of nature. "God" is in fire, lightening, thunder, perhaps
even in the game they hunted to give them sustenance. When agriculture replaces
hunting and gathering, these Gods become the Goddess. Power now lies in
reaping and sowing, in the turning of the seasons. Fecundity determines
survival, and "God" becomes "Goddess," procreation creation,
birth life.
Later, with the city state, power comes wrapped in the robes of authority.
God is now Lord or King, protector and enforcer, leader and judge. A breakthrough
in this view of the divine nature comes with the Hebrews, who believe that
their God and King is the only God and King. Less an imperialistic than
an ethical development, this leads them to attribute their failures not
to another stronger God but to their own shortcomings. With Jesus, God becomes
father, daddy ("Abba"), a far more intimate authority figure.
The biography of God continues throughout the Enlightenment, when -- with
the ability to make a watch -- the Deists' "God" turns out to
be a watchmaker. He creates the world, sets it ticking, and then moves on
to his next creation. Modern science continues this pattern, suggesting
metaphors for God that arise from new discoveries. As with the Gaia hypothesis,
when Mother Earth reprises the Goddess in a new way. Even as each organism
is a colony of cells and organs that each are marked with the same DNA,
might everything that lives be said to create a larger organism marked with
the DNA of God? The holograph too suggests a model where the whole is contained
in each of the parts.
The story of the invention of God is the story of how we take our own knowledge
of power and artistry and cast it large upon a cosmic screen. There is nothing
blasphemous about this. We are not God's creator; our inventions -- both
social and scientific -- simply suggest to us the possible nature of the
creator.
As for the discovery of God, first we search for evidence for the divine
within ordinary things and in daily encounters. The surest way to find God
is to decode our own experience. We all suffer. We all are broken; we are
sinners. We all struggle to forgive. We seek faith, hope, love and justice.
At our best, we recognize our own tears in one another's eyes, and rise
together in answer to a higher law. This is where God, as one philosopher
said, is in the details. Illumination shines from heart to heart. The divine
is divined within the ordinary. Drawing from shared experience, we discover
God through parable. "The realm of God is like a woman who . . .,"
or "the realm of God is like a mustard seed." Blake's "world
in a grain of sand" or "Heaven in a wildflower" come to mind.
Anyone who says that "God is love" is discovering God's nature
in his or her own experience of love. This doesn't mean that God is actually
love, but it certainly suggests that love is divine.
Given how magical, magnificent, and ultimately mysterious Ultimate reality
is, we should also reflect with awe and humility on the unfathomable, unimaginable
wonder of the creator and the creation. We shall never unwrap the mystery
of God. Far from stripping our quest of meaning, this truth recalls us to
the most redemptive elements of any powerful faith: awe, humility and compassion.
What we religious liberals need to do is remythologize humanism. In no way
do I mean to suggest that humanism itself is outdated. Grounded in experience
rather than revelation, with the mind its only oracle, humanism has always
been a salutary corrective to tyranny and bondage, whether religious or
political. Fundamentalism, with its absolute truth claims, is incompatible
not only with the free exercise of reason, but also with pluralism, the
preservation of which is essential if we are to survive as neighbors on
this tiny planet. The greatest danger we face is competing ideologies, closed
systems that inspire hatred in the name of Truth or God. Neither is ours
to claim, at least not with exclusive title. We know so little and learn
so slowly. Others have to be protected from us.
My own theology is a form of Christian Universalism--Universalism modified
by Christianity, not the other way around. Universalism can be perverted
in two ways. One is to elevate one truth into a universal truth ("My
church is the one true church"); the other is to reduce distinctive
truths to a lowest common denominator ("All religion is merely a set
of variations upon the golden rule"). The Universalism I embrace does
neither. It holds that the same light shines through all our windows, but
each window is different. The windows modify the light, even as Christianity
does my Universalism, refracting it in a myriad of ways, shaping it in different
patterns, suggesting different meanings.
Fundamentalists, whatever their persuasion, claim that the light shines
through their window only. Skeptics draw the opposite conclusion. Seeing
the bewildering variety of windows and observing the folly of the worshipers,
they conclude that there is no light. But the windows are not the light.
The whole light--God, Truth--is beyond our perceiving. God is veiled. Some
people have trouble believing in a God who looks into any eyes but theirs.
Others have trouble believing in a God they cannot see. But that none of
us can look directly into God's eyes certainly doesn't mean God isn't there,
mysterious, unknowable, gazing into ours.
Though the light of God is refracted through our windows in many distinctive
ways, when the time comes for us to die, the same sun sets on each of our
horizons. This we should be able to perceive. Rather than continuing to
enlist yet another generation of terrorists for truth and God, the principle
challenge of theology today is to provide symbols and metaphors that will
bring us, in all our glorious diversity, into closer kinship with one another
as sons and daughters of life and death.
My search for God is not an intellectual, dispassionate search. It is a
search for my own heart. After twenty years of pastoral counseling and personal
failures and successes, I have discovered only one thing. We are what we
love. If we love too deeply something too small for that deep a human attachment,
we will destroy both it and us. If we only love in little ways, our love
will always be insufficient, even if the object is big, even as big as God.
Given how mysterious the subject is, inventing God is no less fruitful an
approach than discovering God. And both require humility. We really don't
have the faintest idea what we are discovering when we discover God. By
the same token, when we believe in the God we create we can easily become
dangerous, both to others and ourselves .
When I think about God I am testing my own ability to hope, love, and find
meaning. I shall fail of course, but we all fail. The key is to fail gracefully
in a quest that truly matters, to fail in such a way that others feel better
about their own failures, and to weave a web of compassion and forgiveness
where there is no spider.
Theology is a fool's game. The jester is the one who can offend the king
without losing his head. But his eyes too will eventually close. Forever.
Perhaps that is why this game is not in jest, and why the fool therefore
tries so desperately to speak the truth. Not to fool the king or himself,
but to anchor things (and himself) in honest ground.
The goal is not to have others follow in our footsteps, but to follow our
own path toward spiritual growth and enlightenment. We do this best, most
deeply and compellingly, by inventing and discovering God. Copyright
AllSouls 1998