“We go looking for something godlike but ultimately idolatrous,
and we do so in all the wrong places.”
- from John Buehrens and Rebecca Parker, A House for Hope
One of the things which I had hoped to explore during my recent sabbatical is the perennial question of God, finding myself in what I would call an especially “barren” period of my life spiritually speaking, and feeling that my old conceptions of God may have gotten tired.
I have not always, but often, been aware of a benevolent “presence” in my life which has usually expressed itself as a kind of companionship along the way, and which has been useful mostly in keeping me moving along the track which I seem intended to walk. It is when I have temporarily lost this sense of presence that I have had the experience of seeming to be off that track.
Whether or not to call this presence “God” has always been a dilemma. Definitions of God are always tricky; as my late colleague Forrest Church used to warn, “God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.”
Even in the Bible itself, depictions of God abound. God is the wind that sweeps over the nothingness at the beginning of the book of Genesis.
God is the anthropomorphic being that “walks with me and talks with me” in the Garden of Eden. God is experienced in a burning bush, and in “the sheer silence,” wonderfully translated in the King James Version of the Bible as “the still small voice.” God is a cloud which follows the ancient Israelites into victorious battle. God in the Bible can be a cruel judge, and a loving and compassionate father. For Jesus, God was “Abba,” literally, “daddy.” “God is love,” according to the first letter of John in the New Testament, in a passage beloved by our Universalist forebears.
In the proverbial literature, God is personified as “Wisdom,” interestingly always a female. God is also described in the Bible as one who gathers chicks under her wing, one who gives birth, one who calms and quiets us like a child quieted at its mother’s breast, a protective she-bear, a birth-giver, a mother eagle who bears us on her wings, and a woman in labor.
There have been enough books of theology written to fill every cubic inch of this building, and beyond. Indeed, each one of us is a theologian, each in our own way struggling with the idea of God, and each drawing our own conclusions, regardless of what any official theology says. Official theologies all started out, in fact, as personal ones. As I noted in the little journal I kept during my sabbatical, “Whatever our skepticisms about ‘God,’ God remains the most significant direction of our attention.”
I decided to revisit some of the concepts of God that I had found meaningful in the past. I wanted to see if I could recover that sense of “presence” which has been so important in guiding me on my journey through life.
I believe that most people’s difficulties with the idea of God stem from bad definitions. Many of us are “looking for God in all the wrong places,” as John Buehrens and Rebecca Parker write in their recent theological book, A House for Hope. Some of us simply cannot get a particular negative image of God out of our minds long enough to consider the other possibilities. Others are stuck with definitions that simply don’t work anymore. It’s instructive to remind ourselves about all those biblical images. Even the writers of the most sacred books of Judaism and Christianity couldn’t agree on the image of God. That is because God defies being pigeonholed, even though we do our best to do so. As the Taoists are fond of reminding us, “The Tao that can be known is not the Tao.”
Most of us create God in our own image. But as my colleague Forrest reminds us, God is that which is not only present in each, but greater than all. There will never be a final definition of God, in spite of all those who claim to know better.
So I went back to some of the definitions which had worked for me in the past, and which I had carefully filed away in my “God” file, to see if any of them still worked. And I was pleasantly surprised.
I reread those words of Pablo Casals which I shared with you in the reading this morning, and I chanced upon these beloved words of John Haynes Holmes:
. . . When I say ‘God,’ it is poetry and not theology. Nothing that any of the theologians ever wrote about God has helped me much, but everything that the poets have written about flowers and birds and skies and seas and the saviors of humanity and God—whoever he or she or it may be—has at one time or another reached my soul! More and more, as I grow older, I live in the lovely thought of these seers and prophets. The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library, but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted with my tears. I never seem so near truth as when I care not what I think or believe, but only with these masters of inner vision would live forever.
I reminded myself of these inspiring words of Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician founder of what has become known as the “process” school of theology:
God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. This creative principle is everywhere, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But this creation is a continuing process, and the process is itself the actuality, since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death of the body to the estate of an irrelevancy. His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur.
Feminist theologian Carter Hayward speaks of process theology this way:
We touch this strength, our power, who we are in the world, when we are most fully in touch with one another and with the world. There is no doubt in my mind that, in so doing, we are participants in ongoing incarnation, bringing god to life in the world. For god is nothing other than the eternally creative source of our relational power, our common strength, a god whose movement is to empower, bringing us into our own together, a god whose name in history is love. . . .
These are approaches to God which I still find meaningful.
Let me say at the outset that I long ago abandoned what I call “the guy in the sky” theology, though I confess that I do sometimes relate to the universe as if it were personified. I do talk to God; but I understand that this is metaphor and that in actuality I am really talking to myself. But if, as Emerson suggested, I am “part and particle of God,” this is most appropriate!
I do not believe that God is a cosmic magician who directs our activities on earth. As my colleague Forrest writes in his last book, Love and Death,
God doesn’t torch houses, will entire cities to disappear under floodwaters, or sentence toddlers to drown who wander too close to the family pool. I could not worship such a God even if I believed in him. But I don’t believe in him. My God is not a puppet master pulling every string above this tiny globe as if the universe turned on how we behave here. Greater than all and yet present in each, no less mysterious than the creation itself, God is not the cause of our undoing but the cosmic ground of our being. I’ve never needed biblical miracles to confirm my faith, writes Forrest. It’s not the supernatural, but the super in the natural that I celebrate.
I do believe that each of us contains a spark of the divine, as the Platonists insisted, and I do believe that we are all connected in ways which we will probably never fully understand. I think that in those rare moments when we experience that connectedness, we are experiencing something of what is meant when we say God.
Author Alice Walker in her novel The Color Purple comes about as close as anyone to getting at this idea of God:
Tell the truth, she writes, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God. . . . God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifests itself, even if you are not looking, or don’t know what you are looking for.
One of my favorite works of theology in recent years is the late Harvard Divinity School professor Gordon Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery, where he writes,
The only possible check against the monumental deceits which human religiousity works on our gullibility—and on our desire for certainty in a terrifying world—is the constant reminding of ourselves that it is indeed mystery with which we humans ultimately have to do; and therefore we dare not claim to know the right and the true, the good and the real, but must acknowledge that in these things we always proceed in faith, as we move forward through life into the uncertain future before us.
I truly believe that most of us who have a problem with God have not allowed ourselves a wide enough definition or, simply, enough possible definitions. Where God is concerned, you can never have too many, because there will never be enough definitions to fully encompass what it is that people have meant or tried to describe when they say “God.” Perhaps philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was right when he said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” But I hope not.
I believe that there is merit in speaking of our ultimate commitments and trust. “Theology,” we are reminded, means “god talk.” I believe that by continuing to speak about what we mean when we say “God,” we may even catch an occasional glimpse of what it is that we are searching for. The Unitarian Universalist minister Raymond Baughan once wrote,
You try to say the world the way it means to you. You look at what you live and try to speak it; and the mystery turns into a search for language to tell how it is, and what the world has to say about what you mean.
We are all theologians. We step, says Wallace Stevens, “barefoot into reality.” We touch the running water and the rocks. We hurt. We laugh. We grasp and are grasped. We fall and are embraced. We find ourselves in others and others in ourselves. Broken and fragmented, we are driven toward wholeness, toward integrity, toward healing what separates and divides us from one another. Long before we hold any belief about it, we feel the presence of something sacred and meaningful. Unable to name it, we respond with metaphor, with vision, with decision; and we live as though that were the way the world is.
You theology is your commitment, wrote Baughan. In Herman Melville’s words, “it is not down in any map; true places never are.”
The problem with trying to speak about God in a twenty minute sermon, or course, is that there is simply not enough time. There is too much to say, and so this is only the beginning of a conversation that I hope you will begin to have me and with yourselves and with each other. I know that I have barely scratched the surface of this subject, but I hope that it has given you food for thought, or perhaps set you on a quest for more.
Several years ago, participants in our teenage “Up and Coming UUs” group were asked to come up with their conceptions of God. I think they are quite remarkable, and so want to share just a few in closing:
–[God] is a source of comfort and faith for all religions . . . a feeling of hope that everyone can find inside themselves.
–Some force, some energy started all this—all that came after Nothingness. I think that is most likely the case. And we all therefore have within us that energy, force, or power.
–God is a spirit. . . .
–God [is] anything which personifies Hope, Love, and Faith
–If anything, I think God is like the wind. You can’t see [God], but you feel [God’s] presence as [God] passes over the land.
–Sometimes I think the God concept is dangerous because it can (and does) often give people the idea that unseen magical forces determine their lives as opposed to personal and social responsibility.
–God is a great mystery, beyond knowing. . . .
–God is a creative spirit that dwells within each person.
–God is a power that is around us all the time.
–God [is] a spirit, a force, behind all that is. My own personal view is that we are sparks of the consciousness that is God, and that God experiences reality through us—without us, It could not experience Itself.
–God isn’t really a physical thing. It’s an essence in everything.
With young theologians like this in our midst, we need not worry for the future of our free faith, or of the world. Amen.
- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
Reading from “Music is a Miracle,” by Pablo Casals
