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.

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In the last couple of posts, we’ve talked about getting back our permission to tinker with our images of God. Today, we start tinkering.

One of the great hymns of our tradition has the line “God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity.” That line reflects a body of orthodox thought from our tradition.  In talking about the ways one might experience God we began using the term “Trinity” as early as 325 AD, after the Council of Nicea.  ”Three Persons, one Substance,” that’s the way we said it then.

Once we began to talk about God as “Three Persons,” the idea of God as “Person” began to be the normative image in our minds. When this happened, the temptation in popular Christian spirituality has been to reduce God to being person-like. And thinking of God this way, well that’s the word we used last time; “anthropomorphism” (projecting onto the Unknowable, Incomprehensible, Ineffable God, mere human-like characteristics).

Once the “Person” image of God became orthodox thought, our imagination of God was channeled into a narrow focus.  If God is a Person, he must have a mind like we do, feelings like we do, intent and purpose like we do. God has friends and preferences the way we have.  And once this view of God started steamrolling along through history, we began to protect our position by rejecting other images of God.

I googled what people imagine God to be like, and I ran into this quote…
Our God is an individual that is living and has definite characteristics. God is a Person. He is not an influence or unseen force or power like electricity

So there it is…
The appropriate and required thinking about God:  He is a person…
The disallowed thinking about God:  anything else.

Well, this negates the view our tradition has highlighted for centuries.  All we really have when we talk about God are metaphors.  What cannot be said about God is always more than what can be said.  However, our tendency is to try to name and define the Ineffable, to standardize our spiritual experience, and say “this and this alone, is a proper image of God.”

Well, that’s just silly.

Doing that, we take that which beyond us, and put it into a silly little box of our own making.  As we’ve seen, our tradition tells us we have no business doing that.

Now, this is not to say that the Person image of God is not helpful.  Indeed it can be, and has been for millions of people.  For me!  But it is to say that God-as-Person is only a metaphor, nothing more.  And for many people, it is a limiting metaphor.  It silences a deeper way we can experience the Divine.

So, as has been our Judeo-Christian tradition, let’s try on some new metaphors, new images.

One of the saints of the Catholic and Anglican churches was Julian of Norwich.  She lived in the 14th and 15th centuries.  When she was 30 years old, she suffered a severe illness and believed she was on her deathbed.  There, she had series of visions of Christ.  She got better, and lived until her 70’s, becoming a contemplative, a mystic, an anchoress in a small cell attached to the church of Norwich England.

Immediately after she recovered, she wrote down her visions, calling them Sixteen Revelations of Love. She rewrote the visions again twenty years later with commentary born of her years of spiritual experience.

One of the main themes of Julian’s life was to tinker with people’s prevailing views of God.  As could be expected, the Roman Church pushed for a standardized view of God, insisting that everybody in the empire conform.  Julian, on the other hand, insisted that God cannot be know, and that an appreciation of Mystery was central to our experience of God.

God is our Mother, she said, as truly as God is our Father.  We come from the Womb of the Eternal.  We are not simply made by God;  we are made of God

Not allowing God to be reduced to a Person, to human mental constructs, Julian began to think of God as energy, just as our internet author above, insisted we cannot think.

We encounter the energy of God at our true depths, she said.  God is the ground of life.  It is in the very essence of our being we look for God.

God is in everything, she writes.  God is nature’s substance. She talks about “smelling” God, “swallowing God in the waters and juices of the earth,” “feeling God in the human body, and the body of all creation.” (REFERENCE)

Consequently, for Julian, God is not a presence that is separate from humanity, No, God is the energizing force that makes us humanity. God is the presence of Love at the heart of creation, and the presence of Love at the center of human beings.  God is at the heart of all matter in the universe.

Consequently, the deeper we move into the human soul, the closer we come to Divine. The nearer we are to our true selves, the more we sing the song of Divine love.

Well, this is a very different image from the standard image of God as Person.  Consequently, Dame Julian’s experience of the spiritual journey was a very different experience.  Seeing God in and around everything changed her spirituality. Seeing God within us rather than a Person outside us… this changed her spiritual journey completely.

So, let’s imagine a couple of images of God that may facilitate a healthier Christian spirituality.

Imagine God as a river.  This river runs through everything; through our lives, through our families, through our jobs, through our days. It is always there, it is always flowing. We can jump in and flow with the river, or we can remain on the bank and not.

Or, imagine God as a musical rhythm. The music is always playing, always around us, always there. It’s downbeat is made up of the attributes we consider Divine; love, peace, kindness, goodness, grace, mercy, forgiveness, oneness, connectedness, courage, wisdom, justice, respect, dignity, etc.

Whatever goes on in our days, we can either dance with this music, or we can dance to another tune, another downbeat, another rhythm.

And like Julian’s image of God, these images of God will produce a very different spirituality.

When we imagine God as a person, a guy who has friends, for example, we wonder if we are God’s friend (and try really hard to be so, or give up in despair that we can’t be).

When we imagine God as a guy with preferences, we wonder if he prefers us.

When we imagine God as a guy with a plan, a will, and then something bad happens in our lives, we wonder if we misbehaved, or if we missed God’s plan, God’s will.  Persons have plans, and if someone crosses their plans, it makes them unhappy.  Maybe God is unhappy with me.

If God is a Person, every time something bad happens, (a holocaust, genocide, divorce, a financial setback), we ask ourselves, “why did God the Person, do this to me?” When a tsunami happens, and God is a Person, I’m asking why a good God would cause all this torment and anguish.

However, if we imagine God as a river, or a rhythm, then whether circumstances are painful or pleasant, we can either be in the river, be dancing with the music…  or not.

When a tsumami, or unemployment strikes, our spirituality is to always be asking where the Divine music is playing. We can always be seeking to dance with the Divine, in good times and bad, when we are abased and when we abound.  Our spirituality is to listen for the Divine rhythm, and be moved by it in all the circumstances of life.  Ours is to ask where the music of goodness and life and love are playing and go there.

This, I suggest, is a healthier form of spirituality. And it begins at the beginning — with how we imagine, and how we pursue God.

Finally, wherever images of God are being tinkered with, wherever people are truly seeking the essence of the Divine, Love is what they find.

We’ll finish this section on rethinking God next week by looking at the implications of the ancient wisdom; God is Love.

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Last week, we looked at one of the cornerstones of our religious tradition; The Incomprehensibility of God. We cannot, we said, pin down a precise definition of God, because our human faculties aren’t expansive enough to embrace the Ultimate Reality from which we come.

As a result of this doctrine, historically our religious tradition has afforded us a broad permission to tinker with the images of God we use.  When one ceases to be helpful, we let it die, and shift to another.  However, over the last several generations, the acceptable thoughts about Ultimate Things has gotten narrower and narrower.

To satisfy our modernist or Enlightenment sensibilities, we’ve unconsciously tried to squeeze the Mystery out of our religion.  We’ve tried to make it more comprehensible, more static, more understandable, more precise. In the process, I believe, we’ve begun to suffocate ourselves under layers and layers of required belief and dogma stacked on our images of the Divine.

In this blog-project we’re rethinking how to tell the Christian Story, and are beginning by rethinking our images of God.  A good starting place is the doctrine of God’s Incomprehensibility.  We do not now, nor will we ever fully comprehend the nature of God.  All we have to help us think about God are metaphors, pointers, and similes.

Important for our consideration, is a big word; “anthropomorphism.”

it comes from two Greek words anthropos (humanity), and morphous (having a shape or form). In a religious context, it often means our tendency to project onto God, our human characteristics.  ”I get angry, so God must get angry.”  ”I have internal drives and internal needs.  God probably has the same.”  ”I treat people according to how they treat me.  I bet God does the same.”

In my late teens, Jethro Tull had a popular album, Aqualung. On the cover of the album, was a picture of an ancient manuscript with the following words…

In the beginning, Man created God
In the image of Man created he him
And Man gave unto God a multitude of names,
That he might be Lord of all the earth…
When it was suited to Man

As a young, fervent, Christian teen, I took great offense to this idea (thinking, I’m sure, that this is why our leaders told us not to listen to rock and roll).  But as the years have progressed, as I went to seminary, and studied the images of God that have come into vogue, then passed out of usage, I had to acknowledge that Aqualung was right.  In the beginning, Man created God in his own image.

That is not to say that this is a particularly wise, prudent, or helpful thing to do.  No, it is simply to say that we do, do it.  It is something our spiritual ancestors have done. It is something we do today.

In fact, I believe it is something we would do well to resist. In our ancient scripture texts, we see people anthropomorphizing God all the time.  We see them experience some really bad thing, and conclude that God had gotten angry at them and punished them.  “Boy, we were really bad, weren’t we? And boy, God really smacked us down for that one, didn’t he?”

However, those same texts tell us at other times, that God can’t possibly be reduced to mere human projections. God is beyond our human mind to conjure from our own senses of motivations, actions, or reactions.

I alluded last week, to our Hebrew heritage not to speak the name of God.  By removing the vowels from the word for God, our ancestors were teaching us not to fall prey to the belief that we could comprehend the Divine.  The same holds for the prohibition in the 10 Commandments to speak the name of God vainly (not merely a  cuss-word), or to try and depict God in a drawing, painting, or sculpture.  ”Don’t reduce God,” we were being taught, “to something that will fit into your limited mental or emotional consciousness.”

Now…
This is not to say that images of God in our minds are not helpful.  Indeed, they have been very helpful for people throughout history.  We just have to hold them with an open hand.

I was listening to an interview on the podcast Speaking of Faith recently, when theological historian Jaroslav Pelikan spoke of Thomas Aquinas.  Aquinas, one one of the most influential thinkers in the Christian tradition wrote a massive tome on the nature of God (I think it was Summa Theologica). At the end of it, he said something along these lines…

“We write these words about God, because we cannot remain silent.”

In other words, “I’ve just written this exhaustive volume about the nature of God, but remember, nobody can capture God with words…     However, neither can I remain silent.”

So…
What are we to do? If God is incomprehensible, but yet, the deepest drive within us is to experience the Ineffable, Undefinable, Ultimate Reality that is the Divine, what are we to do?

One thing we can do, is to adapt our images of the Divine as we travel the spiritual journey.  The angry God who reflected the minister of our youth…  The distant God, so like our own fathers…  The hard-driving God, like the teacher or coach who focused exclusively on our performance…  We let these images go as they cease being helpful.

When we begin to outgrow our anthropomorphic images of God, what do we do?

Let me suggest two things…

First, our contemplative ancestors taught us to live in the tension of an Unknown and Unknowable God. Theirs was the wisdom that God’s primary language is silence, and we can find a vibrant expression of our faith as we soak in the silences of meditation and contemplation.  We’ve spoken at great length on this subject on Sunday lessons, (click HERE to listen). We’ve found in the attic of our tradition, the word “apophatic,” to describe a spirituality that is beyond words and mental constructs.  We’ve discovered ancient practices that awaken us to the Divine beyond our mind’s abilities to describe, or our heart’s abilities to feel.

But second, there is another rich vein in our tradition described by another ancient word, “kataphatic.”  It is the spirituality of the Divine that can be experienced.  The Incomprehensibility of God is not our only doctrine.  We have another, called the Immanence of God. It tells us, that in an imperfect and incomplete way, we can experience the Divine with our minds and our hearts.

For this aspect of our spirituality, we often must rely on images to help us.  In fact, many of us have found great soul-awakening following the very images that later came to trouble us so.  But since these images do come to trouble us later, we need the permission to rethink them along the way.  The doctrine of God’s Incomprehensibility give us this permission. The doctrine of Gods’ Immanence validates the experiences of God we have in our thoughts and feelings.

Together, they conjure an image of God not unlike the wind.  We cannot contain the wind, cannot capture,  pin down, or control it (God’s Incomprehensibility), but we can sense when it blows us (God’s Immanence).

Each Wednesday when we finish meditating, we pray this prayer, “Lord, may we sense the wind of God blowing through our lives, and may we be carried by it.”

Next time, we’ll think about some images of God that may better help us experience the Immanence of God;  images that may help us become more loving people, more kind, patient, gracious, and peaceful.  Images that may help us live lives that are worthy of the Divine w/in us

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As we are working toward a better telling of the Christian Story, let’s start at the beginning, and rethink our understanding of God.  In this section, we’ll ask ourselves what comes to our minds when we use the word “God.”

Before we begin, however, some background thinking…

When I was in seminary, I bought a Systematic Theology book at a garage sale (just in case).  Part I of the book is called The Doctrine of God.  Under that section, there is a sub-section titled “God is Immutable” (meaning God never changes).  ”God is perfect,” the book says, “and since change is always change for the better or for the worse, God has no need of change.”

Now, as doctrines go, this seems a fine one to me.  Whatever the Divine is, it says, it embodies all that is Good, all that is True, all that is Life, all that is Love.  Since the Divine is doing just fine at being the essence of all these virtues, it doesn’t need to get any better at them, and it’s not getting any worse at them.  So, OK, I buy the doctrine.  God doesn’t need to change.  We can think of God as Immutable, Unchanging.

However, I’ve seen this doctrine go bad when it bleeds over into how we think about our concept of God. We can easily begin to believe that what we believe about God needs never change.

It is one thing to say that whatever the Divine is, it has no need to change.  It is something altogether different to be so convinced of our own concept of God — what we learned in our doctrine books, what we learned in Bible class, what we learned about God at our parent’s knee — that we believe that view of God need never change.

The fact is that in our tradition, our view of God has been in continuous flux.  The human idea of God has meant many, very different things over the 4000 years since Abraham.  There has been such dramatic difference in the concept of God from generation to generation, that one would be meaningless to the other.  There is no unchanging, objective, meaning for the word “God.”  It is fluid throughout history, always shifting, always changing, some of these competing concepts being very much at odds with one another.

Those who compiled the Hebrew scriptures drew from four main sources in their work.  These sources were called J, E, D, and P, for Jehovah, Elohim, Deuteronomic, and Priestly.  Each of these sources had a very different understanding of God.  Sometimes, as in the Creation account, these sources aren’t integrated at all, but simply loaded in side-by-side.  Genesis 1 tells the creation story as a poem from the P view of God, while Genesis 2-3 tells the same story from the J perspective.

Our Judeo-Christian tradition has been very pragmatic about these different views of God through the years.  It has been more important that our view of God be helpful than that it be consistent.  Whenever our spiritual ancestors found a particular concept of God to be unhelpful, they simply abandoned it and replaced with another, more helpful one.  This has made the concept of God quite flexible over the years. If it had not been, it would never have survived.  This flexibility in our tradition has helped the concept of God not only survive over the years, but thrive as one of humanity’s best ideas.

Like us, throughout history, men and women have experienced that which is beyond themselves. When they did, they used the word “God” to describe their experience, and they formulated specific images to help them think about God.

Our ancestors were at their best through the years, when they acknowledged that their current concept of God was provisional at best.

In the Hebrew tradition, we were not even allowed to speak the word for God.  It was stripped of vowels so it could not be pronounced.  ”Don’t be deceived,” our ancestors were telling us, “into believing we know what the ‘God’ concept is all about.”  ”Don’t think we can contain the concept of God.  No, it is simply too big for us.”

With a few Renaissance exceptions, our Christian tradition has generally heeded the Hebrew injunction not to create pictures or statues of God (graven images).  In the wisdom of the ages, we were again being warned not to hold the concept of God with too much certainty, but to leave it in the realm of the Unknowable Unknown.

So…
When you and I formulate an idea in our heads that says “God is kind of like this,” there is one thing we know about our formulation.  It is wrong.

Even those images of God we cherish…  are wrong.

God is our Father.  Inadequate.
God is our Bridegroom/Lover.  Incomplete.
God is the feminine wisdom Sophia, as articulated in Proverbs. Again, insufficient.

These can be helpful formulations from time to time, but they do not depict the Divine with any kind of comprehensiveness or accuracy.

And from time to time, our views of God stop fitting.  Like a constrictive or scratchy old coat, they begin to bother us.  The patriarchal overtones of a masculine God becomes ill-fitting.  The overtones of condemnation of the Judge-God image doesn’t make sense any more.

We have a strong tradition, when this happens, of discarding our old and scratchy views of God, and formulating new ones.  We cannot be too married to our concepts of God.  Again, they are provisional and temporary, helpful for a season, even life-altering and transformative at times.  However, as their usefulness fades, we need to formulate new understandings of the Infinite Divine.

In our tradition, we’ve always had permission to speculate and create new, more helpful images of God, but somehow in conservative Christian circles, we’ve lost that permission.

I believe our society is in a time of upheaval not seen since the Enlightenment.  If ever there was a time we needed permission to reframe our images of God, this is one.

In the weeks ahead, as we’re “Rethinking God,” we’ll work to get back that permission, and suggest some new ways of framing God in our minds.

Next time.