What’s your problem with god?

I CAN only imagine reality as a kind of a sphere: a bowl of existence we inhabit for a time. We’re bridled by horizons. To me, “god” is a handy word that lets us contemplate and talk about the mystery that lies beyond as well as within the boundaries.

Without that word, I find it hard to talk about what “meaning” might “mean” — and, while that’s not a biological imperative, it is a by-product of consciousness that can have some big implications for how much we make of our lives.

Our experience of “god-ness” is limited to recognizing reflections of the more-than-obvious and immediate in the place we live, and those reflections are everywhere, playing with our every emotion, imagining and thought. And we can in-dwell all this experience as expectations of “god-ness”. We can helpfully think of our being, too, as a manifestation of “god-ness”, simply because existence is inseparable from stuff we can not possibly know directly. So we each, separately, can be deeply changed as living impressions of “god-ness” are formed by our search for experiential coherence.

The “god” we dare to name and think we know is necessarily shaped by our shifting discernment and experience. If we’re careless and undiscerning, we can ignore the experiences of god-ness that are everywhere available to us, and deny those we can’t avoid. Within the search for coherence, they seem too chaotic and uncontrollable. Denied, they engender fear, egocentrism and greed; denial excites loneliness, nihilism, cravings for identity, addictions, sadness and boredom. It gets easy to feel existentially doomed (or damned).

With discernment, we can learn to sense “truths”, but we certainly don’t have minds capable of understanding them. Experienced truths are not intellectual challenges. They’re be-ing challenges. The greatest teachers have always struggled for words. And their followers, forgetting what the question was, have too often missed the point and turned them into tools or weapons of control. Take them a question and you get slapped with a demand to just “believe”.

But NO amount of religion or raw scripture, on its own, gives us “knowledge” of god. The sacred scriptures of every faith are not about information: they are about transformation. It’s transformation that makes them “sacred”.

God-knowledge can only ever be partial, personal and experiential. Each of us inhabits a unique consciousness with its own particular horizons. And, without personal experience to communicate with, religion is just words echoing in an empty room: the words of our culture, faith or denomination — religious practice becomes little more than play-acting or indoctrination. This is happening when we’re told to “believe” this or that about “god”, or where the language and/or premises of religious liturgy are rooted in assertion. Trust, not assurance, is the foundation of faith. The poetics of love are its servant. Logic stumbles.

Ideally, Christian worship serves me as a sort of spiritual dry run for the week ahead. Good guidance and companionship help us to grow in discernment, and serve us well. But solitude is also necessary. As is deep reflection. Silence helps us deal with the inner clamor that ongoing experience quickly generates. We need time without inputs to re-establish the coherence that sustains our trust.

So Islamic coherence recognizes the unity and singularity of the mystery of “god” and is a “true faith”; Judaism’s coherence recognizes how wholly we’re in the hands of the mystery, and is a “true faith”; Christianity finds coherence in the mystery experienced as love, and is a “true” faith; Buddhism sees the need to pass through the curtain of “ego”, and is a “true faith”, native American spiritualties see the whole of creation as interrelated beings — equally necessary kin —and, so, are also “true”. Hinduism sees the mystery’s myriad faces and the dynamic balances between creation and destruction, and so is “true”. Daoism emphasizes the quest for harmony with the mystery, while Sikhism teaches the need to live “truth”, so there are “truths” here too. And, so it goes.

Meanwhile, the mystery continues to perplex us all… passive and remote but immediate and interventionist, granting us sensations of freedom but circumscribing the outcomes of our every thought and action; blessing us with goodness we fail to understand while frustrating our “reasonable” hopes; letting us to get things horribly wrong but being present as a strange consolation in extremity.

On the one hand, evolution is “true” as a tool towards understanding the unity and deep entanglement of life on Earth. “Creation” is also true, because, without forces that are too vast for us to understand (or at least to coherently talk about), nothing exists. The mystery lures us into dreams of permanence and security… but places us in a dynamic universe in which everything changes all the time, at it’s own rate and in its own way, but with a puzzling kind of choreographic synchronicity. Any notion of static existence is a self-refuting idea. But we can’t help experiencing some attributes of existence — meaning, for example — as enduring values.

But who are we to “know”? Surely every “known” is a hypothesis? Isn’t everything we say about “god” falsified as it leaves our lips? Don’t we base our concepts about “god” on endless fallacies? How could the question, “what is truth?” — asked out of Pilate’s legalistic intellect — possibly be answered?

Isn’t it more about “trust”… not because it pleases “god” to be trusted but because it gives us the hope of “pleasing god”? It’s for our own peace of mind that we think we act decently… that “god” will be pleased. But who knows all of the consequences of our actions? How far do they reach? How are others affected? And, if they are affected, how does that experience radiate from them? Can a smile unleash a catastrophe? Can a smile shape a saint? … or can it do both, at the same time?

All of our words and actions are participatory, interactive, and malleable. They can be silenced, re-construed or amplified in ways that are beyond our control… we need “hope” as well as “trust”.

The mystery grants us both, but only when we let ourselves be ridden with the viruses of vulnerability, open-ness, curiosity and passion. Of course: we must not judge and cannot be judged. Of course: forgiveness is an absolute necessity. Of course: the “kingdom” is both of this world and beyond it, but also within us. And of course: love is the only way we can give our own life meaning and value. “What is love?,” Pilate might have asked, and been answered by the same silence.

Love is the best we have, given our nature, culture and capacities… to give, or receive. How are we empowered to love? By immersing ourselves in it… hoping, trusting. We have to know love to become love. It has everything to do with the mystery… and nothing to do with the mystery.

I have come to understand beauty as “god’s language of love”: beauty, inspiring gratitude, raises our will to express love. It has the power to affect us morally as well as aesthetically.

I have come to understand beauty as “god’s language of love”…