How Human Our God?
August 2003
There wasn’t much to say. It had been six months since his daughter
had died and I found I was the better minister by saying less and listening
more. It was a cool night not too
unlike what we are starting to feel now as the earth turns once more a shoulder
to the distant sun. He stared up at the
night sky, “Do you think there is a God
out there?” he asked me. I started to
formulate my answer. I said
nothing. “I don’t think there is,
John. I used to think so but not
now. I think God is a drug.” There was anger welling up in his voice and
tears streaming down his face. I put my
hand on his shoulder.
That was a very long time
ago. For me, as for him, my faith in a
greater power was shattered. I would
realize later that faith was actually expanded but then it was shattered. Faith, whether it is in God, life or the
ones we love, needs to be shattered in order to be reformed into something
stronger from time to time.
Where could I go after the
death of a child? Where do any of us
go, where do you go my dear people, when someone you love is gone? When life deals you a blow beyond words? How many of you have rejected a God that
would cause so much pain and allow so much hurt to drip from the branches of
our lives? Along with the flea on the
back of the dog, I too turned to the other flea and said “You know I am really
beginning to wonder is there is a dog.”
And I went on wondering for a long, long time.
After more deaths than I
can remember, more grief than I could imagine, after more joy and more
laughter, more weddings and more babies I have come to the conclusion that God
does exist but not in the way I was taught so many years ago. I have come to believe that God is not an
either/or proposition but rather that God simply is. El shadia esom el. “I am who I am” pronounced Yeweah to
Moses. El being that incredible Hebrew
word that defies the English translation as a mere “is”. God is, for me, just is. Or better put, like the more preverbal
opposite, God happens. How God happens
is the stuff of faith and it is as original and unique to you as your DNA. How we see God is what makes God human to
us. So for me the question has shifted
from “Is there a God?” to a rather selfish “What’s God got to do with me?” It’s a big question.
When people ask me do
Unitarian Universalists believe in God, my rejoinder is almost always “which
one?” For, you see, all humanity has
been creating God in our own image for thousands of years. Ultimately, the Being of God doesn’t change
but our perception, even our need for that Being, changes all the time. I have travelled from a Bad God, to a Good
God, to no God at all and back to a grand Presence that gives us life and moves
us toward something much larger than we can see. I live, like most of us, between some sort of vague theism and an
enchanted agnosticism.
The existence of
suffering, such as every one of us in this room has felt will never square with
the old fashioned way of looking at God.
How do we square the existence of suffering and evil in the world with
an all knowing and all powerful God?
God does not exist outside of human contrivance.
When we realize that God is as much a part of us as we are of it,
than we realize that suffering, while meaningless to us here on earth, does
require our human response. As Carl
Jung put it “We are the hands of God.”
There is a deeper sense to God than just what we need.
I got into a rather
heated debate with an astrophysicist not long ago about what happens to the
universe after it is done expanding and fizzles to nothing. I contend it is part and parcel of an even
larger reality that is God. He contends
it is just nothing ex nihilio, “But
what is nothing?” I asked. Words failed
him and they fail any of us, which is why so many mystics just stop using words
to describe the greater experience of God.
“The way that can be shown is not the way” said Lao-Tsu the founder of
Taoism. And so, in one way, God is a
drug; it helps us cope with the unexplainable pain of life. God as a drug, how very human. Fundamentalism, whether it is Christian,
Muslim or Jewish thrives on the very real psychological need to “get God.” The “God Fix” as the Espicopal Priest Leo
Booth puts it is not all bad. More
often than not it replaces other drugs such as alcohol or cocaine. But is that God?
It can be a God. But it’s not the only form of God. Like
Nietzsche, I believe “God is dead” but only that God which doesn’t serve
us. What is so often misunderstood
about that quote is that God is only dead outside of our experience. Technology
and science could just as easily be construed as the greater saving power in
our lives. When Nietzsche proclaimed
God was dead what he was really saying was that an all powerful God no longer
matters in a world capable of such evil.
(story of Nietzsche on the fence).
But the world has always
been full of suffering. Long before the
horrors of ethnic cleansing. Human
beings have had the potential to commit genocide, torture and hurt. God is dead if you are looking for a God to
change the weather or human behavior.
What if God wasn’t the
master of our lives? This would make
God very human indeed. Like the God is
dead proposition, I think this one is right as well. When Rabbi Harold Kushner lost his only son to a terrible
disease, he too rejected God. Until he
realized that perhaps his vision was too anthropomorphic. Like Kushner I have come to realize that
divinity is expressed not in what God is going to do “for us” but what we are
going to do to be a part of God. The
God I have come to accept is not a master chess player but a spinner of
existence and possibility. I do not
believe in a personal God in a way that brings me a Mercedes Benz or brings children
back from the dead. But I do believe in
the power of God in what we as people can do to cope and grow through our
suffering. I believe in a God, which is a co-creator with us in life. Much
later in life I would be able to understand that the only answer to the
question “why do we suffer?” is silence.
We are not meant to know that but we are meant to comfort, heal and
listen to each other as we do suffer.
But whether God is dead,
or a drug or too large to be involved in our personal lives, I do believe that
God lives by virtue of our believing it is so.
For the real power of the divinity is that we choose to find that
meaning in a way that speaks most directly to us. We imagine God and that is very powerful indeed. Millions have died because one idea of God
didn’t square with the other. But why
must they square?
Years ago when I asked a
group of kids what they thought God was, one girl told me that “God lives in
the mountains of New Orleans and you have to take a city bus to get
there.” I laughed so hard I thought I
would fall off my chair. I laughed not
only at the brilliant incongruence of the thought but with its similarity with
what so many traditions do say about God.
Her description is a treasure trove of metaphor. For indeed, the God of the Hebrews was known
as el Shadi, “the God of the Mountain” and in all three monotheistic
traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the God is above the inequities of
human depravity and excess. And New Orleans
at mardis gras is as excessive as it gets.
But the best part was the city bus.
Not only because no city bus would go to mountains which don’t exist to
the material world of New Orleans (Southern Louisiana is about as flat as flat
can be) but that how many of us would think of taking so common a means as a
city bus to find God in our lives. I
would hazard to guess that every single one of us arrived here in a car
today. But to get with God we are going
to have to think and act much farther out of the box than we are thinking even
now. God won’t be available for a book
signing at Barnes and Noble. And yet
God is more available than that.
The sheer beauty of this
girl’s description goes far beyond the magic of her freewheeling
metaphors. Because what it really says
is that the answer to life’s biggest questions – why we are here, why we suffer
and where are we going – comes through seeking God, or the Spirit or Truth in
our imagination. That is why every
description of God is right, save the belief there is only one right way to
belief in God. God could be a drug, God
could be technology, God could be the loving arms of a friend, God could be
dead if you needed God to take the hit for your anger at the terrible injustice
of it all. And what I have realized
since that starry night is that God can be whatever we want God to be. Our imaginations are part of that divinity;
when they help us imagine a way out of our pain and into meaning. And imagining God is perhaps the most human
attribute of all.
When I began to imagine
that God lives for me in human interaction, I found a way to make sense of
suffering. Suffering just is. It is the response to suffering that is
holy. There are lessons to be learned
in suffering, or perhaps as the Hindus say there is a debt to be repaid in suffering,
but God’s place in suffering is not in the cause, its in the solution. Mother Theresa who knew a thing or two about
suffering would hold up her hands and say “You want to see God, here, look at
these fingers, these are God.” If we
want to imagine God in the mountains of New Orleans, so much the better, if it
speaks to our reality of God as an enigma, a mystery, something larger than we
can ever know.
But just as likely is the
God who lives in a moment of silence, when two simple people sit side by side
and cry together. That too, is
God. My point is this: I believe God
exists outside of what can be proven through our five senses, because the
meaning to living, that is God is much larger than what we can attribute to the
physical world. Trying to prove the
existence of God is like trying to translate Beethoven into paragraphs. What matters is what we see in response to
life. God is in the response; what is
good, what heals, what is simply present.
And our imagination can help us see the signs of the Holy in the midst
of suffering and hurt. If only we
look. I am fond of saying that there
are no coincidences. Solutions do present
themselves if we keep and looking and listening. Not always at once and not always in the way we want them to, but
God does exist in the way that is most meaningful to us. “So tell me Reverend” asked one skeptic of
me recently, “do you believe that God
is ‘out there somewhere’ or deep within our minds.” I answered “yes”. God is
not an either/or (what a terrible limit to place on the possibilities) God is
an “and”. This and that. You and me.
Meister Eickhart, a 12th
century Benedictine monk, wrote one line which has captivated my ministry all
summer long “God is for sale at very reasonable prices”. You can take a city bus to get there because
God is in the dollar store! Seek and ye
shall find as long as you don’t put too many restrictions on what it is that
you are seeking.
Is God everything? My answer is yes. God is everything to you when you look for those markers which
give you meaning. Like these
hands. Or these ears. These are God. We have a insatiable need to define God. “All was chaos and then there was the Word”
is the beginning of Genesis. And the
word was Good. I am not saying we
cannot define God, define away, in
fact, define God right out of your picture if you want, but don’t leave the
space empty. Our problem is that we try
to universalize God when I believe God lives in richness of reality in our
human experience. My God is not your
God and yet they are all part of the same being. Whatever is good, whatever survives suffering, whatever brings
peace and hope, whatever helps us get through the night, that, my friends is
God. My point is that you have to find
that God for yourself. Find that
metaphor, that description (as we will be doing in our new class Building Your
Own Theology this week), find that which your imagination says speaks
adequately to your believe in a power greater than yourself. Maybe it’s not even a word like God, but a
human spirit. The point is to not be
afraid to name that infinite spirit and act justly in its name.
Before my friend’s
daughter died of cancer, we were at her bedside. She was drifting in and out of consciousness. At one point, she came back opened her eyes
wide and said “Daddy, its so beautiful, don’t cry”. As ever I was convinced she had glimpsed the other side, no more
pain, no more fear. Years later my friend
sent me a Christmas card reminding me of what his daughter said. “God IS a drug, John” he wrote, “it has
helped me heal. I still miss her
terribly but now I know she was part of that same God we call life. I go on remembering what truly is beautiful
and it is still good to be alive.” May
God, as human as any one of us, bless us all on this journey we are upon and
may we find hope in ways we can only imagine.
We belong to life, to each other and, ultimately, to God.