November 10, 2003

• So Do You Believe in God?

  
  

  I cringe inside when I hear the question.  There is no answer I can give that will correctly convey what I believe, and really most people don't want my answer anyway.  They want to know whether or not I believe in the God they either believe in or reject.  Often, I smile, say, "Yes" and let it go at that.  I'm happy to talk about various aspects of belief or non-belief, and my spiritual practices.  But more and more as I get older, I prefer not to talk about it unless I'm directly asked. 

  
  

  I've been asked. 

  
  

  You're not going to get a straight answer. 

  
  

  First, I'll tell you that I come from a fairly religious background.  I grew up in a Southern Baptist family in a small, deeply religious community.  That fundamental protestant outlook distrusts the theology of mainline churches, and even questions whether Catholics can be "saved".  I didn't question what I was taught until I reached college. 

  
  

  I had a philosophy class with a professor who tried to demonstrate to us that Christianity was foolish, but he was so far away from my frame of reference with everything he said, that I could never connect with him enough for him to move me away from my beliefs.  It was meeting people of other faiths and wisdom traditions who were happy, moral people with a deep spiritual life that caused me to start questioning. 

  
  

  I explored New Age thought, I visited with Buddhist friends, and I studied Judaism with some of kids from that background.  I cut my ties with fundamentalist Christianity.  For a long time, I was content to drift, reading, thinking, and talking about energy and light with various people I met from a variety of faith traditions.  It's hard to say how I came back to God, and I'm not really sure I did.  At least, I've never returned to God as I understood Him when I was growing up. 

  
  

  Richard Bach, Jonathon Livingston Seagull, Illusions etc, wrote that "The original sin is to limit the IS."  I'll admit, I'm a lot more in sympathy with his definition than St. Augustine's idea that the original sin was sex.  The theologian, Paul Tillich held that we should not say God exists, since this would be a limiting statement. To quote him directly, "The question of the existence of God can neither be asked nor answered.  If asked, it is a question about that which by its very nature is above existence, and therefore the answer - whether negative or affirmative - implicitly denies the nature of God.  It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it.  God is being-itself, not a 'being'."  Tillich isn't saying that the term "God" doesn't refer to any reality, but that the reality to which is refers is not merely one among others, not even the first or highest, but rather the very source and ground of all being.  He was emphasizing that the creator and the created cannot be said to exist in precisely the same sense. 

  
  

  I didn't know about Tillich when I reached a similar conclusion.  In all my searching, and let me be clear, I never stopped searching, the only thing that I came to be convinced of beyond any doubt is that I could never define God, never describe God adequately to someone else, never communicate even to myself most of the time what it was that God meant to me.  I like the word "transcendence."  But God as I have experienced God is not some vague "force" out there somewhere. 

  
  

  I'm getting a little ahead. 

  
  

  I've heard it said that "Man was created in the image of God and we've returned the favor."  That was what I most struggled with.  Letting go of every preconception of who God must be in order to be open to the God that IS.  That's hard.  A lot harder than it's going to sound to you from reading this blog, and many of you may question whether I've been successful.  That's okay.  I don't claim to be perfect in any aspect and I'm pretty sure I haven't perfectly succeeded in this endeavor. 

  
  

  My understanding of God begins with my ability to sense and to comprehend wonder.  Power tempts me to exploit it for gain.  Beauty I tend to take for granted.  But when I encounter something beyond power, beyond beauty which inspires in my soul awe, reverence, and wonder ... I begin to open to God.  God as I experience God terrifies me.  There is no fuzzy warm sense that God is just an extension of the idea of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.  Nor is there the notion that God is some angry person waiting to smash me for my sin.  God in my experience is so far beyond that the words don't apply.  Another word comes to mind now, infinite.  How do I explain that I have touched something infinite when every word at my disposal refers to something finite, contained, measurable, and understood?  God is simply - unspeakable. 

  
  

  I have met God.  I have met God in ways that don't make a bit of sense to me.  I've met God in so many different ways that it's tempting to think that God just likes to mess with my head.  Or that God is trying to make me laugh.  Certainly, I laugh sometimes, sometimes I cry, sometimes I am brought to my knees or utterly flattened.  How can I describe that so that you would not assume that I'm a mad person?  Especially, how could I hope that you would credit me with sanity, when frequently I can't credit it to myself! 

  
  

  I'm not sure where to even start except to describe what the touch of God has done to me.  It hasn't made me perfect, or religious, or especially enlightened.  The touch of God makes me more aware of being my self and of the need for compassion, mercy, and grace.  The touch of God doesn't make me feel evil or bring any particular awareness of what are no doubt a multitude of sins.  You know, I've met a lot of people who seem gifted at finding sin in me and everyone else, but I've never had an encounter with God in which it didn't seem that all those things were burned to insignificant ash.  The touch of God makes me alive. 

  
  

  In the end, the answer to the question is that I don't know whether I can honestly say I believe in God, because I don't know how to distill God into a yes or no propostion.  All I can say, is that God believes in me. 

  
  

   

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