RethinkingOurStory

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This being  the last post in this section on Rethinking God, let me take a moment to recap…

This year, we’re rethinking how we tell the Christian story.  We’re doing it in seven sections. We began our look at God by looking at the ancient doctrine of the “Ineffability of God” (also known as the “Incomprehensibility” or “Transcendence of God”).

In essence this doctrine says that the Ultimate Reality from which we come is not something we can fully capture with our mental or emotional faculties.  As human beings, we are not expansive enough to capture the Source from which all things come, the God from whom all is made. Ultimate Reality is beyond our ability to define with any precision or understand with any certainty.

Consequently, all we have are metaphors to talk about God, metaphors that say to us; “That which cannot be talked about… well, let’s talk about it kind of like this…”

But metaphors, being what they are, when pushed too far inevitably break down.  I was once talking about this to a 12 year old girl.  I told her, “Sweetie, you are a precious flower.”  Then I asked her, “is that true?”She said “Yes. I’m lovely, I’m beautiful, I’m wonderful, just like a precious flower.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m so glad you see yourself that way.”  ”But now,” I continued, “If you get sick and your mom takes you to the doctor and says, ‘Doctor, help my precious flower,’ and if the doctor says to the nurse, “Nurse, get me the fertilizer and the bug spray. We have a precious flower here that is quite ill…’   Well now, is it true that you’re a precious flower?”

All metaphors, even the most cherished and ancient God-metaphors in our tradition,eventually break down.

Last week, we talked about re-imagining one of our most ancient metaphors about God. We quoted a term used as far back as the Council of Nicea (AD 325). By writing out their agreed-upon orthodoxy, they reinforced the image of God as a Person and set it in stone for those coming later.  “God is Three Persons, one substance,” that’s the way they said it.

In the Bible, the idea of the “person-ness” of God is one of the most common and primal images of the Divine. But even that metaphor, we said last week, breaks down if we press it too far. And when it does it has very troubling consequences, particularly when we try to talk about the painful, evil parts of the human experience. When our image of God is “The-Guy-Up-There-Running-Things,” we have to question how a good God could allow such evil and pain as exists on the earth.

So here’s our predicament…
God can’t be understood, or talked about with any certainty at all, but the deepest yearning of the human soul is for the Divine.  The deep within us calls to the deep we call “God,” and consequently, we are compelled to talk about God — that which cannot be talked about.

So…  What to do?  What to do?

There is one stream of spirituality within our tradition that has grappled with this predicament very well. It is the contemplative tradition.  In my spiritual community, we’ve familiarized ourselves with an uncommon word that describes this form of spirituality; “apophatic.” It means “beyond words”  or by implication, “beyond mental constructs.”

The spiritual practices of this tradition, have for centuries focused on experiencing the Divine, but not pinning It down with precise understanding. Contemplative practices focus on being present to the Divine without limiting our presence by trying to understand or articulate it.

And so meditation is a practice beyond thoughts, beyond words. The ancient contemplative practices we studied last year (click HERE for a list of readings), the Jesus prayer, hesychastic prayer, welcoming prayer, Centering Prayer, contemplation, and lectio divina, all these practices are not predicated on saying “God is like this,” or “God will do that.”

No, these practices encourage our ceaseless yearning for the Ultimate, for the deep from which we come, but they invite us to that pursuit in a way that is beyond study, comprehension, or analysis.  The contemplative tradition invites us to experience the Inner Quiet without ultimately trying to direct or maneuver the Divine.

When we focus on simply being present to the Ultimate Divine Reality, something happens to us. Those of us in this tradition find our thoughts, feelings, and assumptions about God morphing over time.  People of steadfast contemplative practice begin to frame God less as the Person-God, and more as a context of Love.

Whatever God is, its nature, her nature, his nature (we struggle for language, don’t we?) God’s essence embodies Love.  Throughout the scriptures, that theme is repeated, throughout the writings of the contemplatives, this theme is repeated.  God is love, God is love, God is love.

And this ultimate reality extends wherever we are, wherever we go.  The nature of Ultimate Reality is shot through with Love, for me, for you, for trees and rocks, for sinners and saints alike, for Christians and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, Americans and Iraqis.

The sense of overarching Love that awaits those on the contemplative path exists for everything, for everyone.  It is the testimony of those of contemplative practice, that the Nature of Ultimate Reality, the Nature of the Divine, is Love.

And when this experience of Divine Love seeps into us,we begin to change. As we quiet ourselves to be present in the Incomprehensible God, when the expansiveness of Divine Love captures us, we do not remain in the narrow focus of “me-and-mine,” “how-I-feel,” or “what-I-want.” Contemplatives in the Judeo-Christian tradition inevitably become focused on social justice, invariably begin to care for the earth and its inhabitants.

One of Martin Luther King’s favorite passages to speak from was Amos 5.  He read it in the poetic King James language, but listen to it in the gritty language of the street (paraphrased from The Message).

Personifying God, Amos speaks on behalf of the Divine…
Quit with the burnt offerings already.  Quit with the grain offerings. Quit with all the things you do to satisfy religious requirements.  You bring all the right stuff to me, you meet all the right requirements…
But go away!
Stop bringing me these things.
I have no regard for them

Don’t’ sing me any more of your noisy songs.  Don’t play me any more of your pretty tunes.
Instead, go out and let justice run down like waters.
Go out, and let righteousness flow like a mighty stream

This is what Love does.  This is what happens to those whose perspective becomes enveloped in Love.

At times in our tradition, we’ve really gotten this.  Ours is a heritage rich with people who have gone out and pursued justice and rightness and goodness.  Ours is a heritage rich with people who have sensed the Divine impulse to care for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned.

But ours is also a tradition at times singularly focused upon self, and what I can do to get God working for me. Our focus has often been on keeping the world’s hatred and evil from threatening me, making God an ally to keep me safe, and getting God to keep my world sane.  Our focus has often been to learn how to direct the Divine through my prayers, through my good behaviors, and to get the Person-God working on my side.

Also at times, ours has also been a tradition of immobilizing fear.  We worry that we may have earned the wrath or rejection of the Mighty Person-God.  We fear we will be severely punished for our failures.  We fear being rejected for our sinful tendencies, cringing in the face of the Divine Person’s negative perception of us.

In this section on “Rethinking God,” I’ve been suggesting that the most inspiring and uplifting dimensions of our faith tradition, and the most toxic and ignoble dimensions of our faith tradition, begin with the images we use to frame God. The metaphors we use to talk about that which is Ultimate, can motivate us to the highest heights, or lead us to cringe in the darkest corners.

So, we conclude this section, having suggested some different metaphors for God that may serve us better than the ones we inherited.  You’ve been invited to explore the contemplative tradition as a way of pursuing God beyond understanding and feeling.  But primarily, I’ve suggested that in our tradition, we have permission to tinker with our understanding of the Ultimate that is God.

Jesus gave us a simple litmus test for measuring the worth of any construct we embrace. What kind of fruit does it bear?  If your image of God is bearing bad fruit, in our tradition, you have permission to trade that image in for a better one.