"God as Metaphor, Not as Fact"
Ambrose Bierce once defined impiety as “your irreverence toward my deity.”
“Talk” about God can get you into trouble because it’s so personal and important, while being somewhat fuzzy and emotional. At the same time, the Bible has become an insufficient guide into God territory.
“If,” as Voltaire said long ago, “…if God created us in ‘His’ own image, we have more than reciprocated.”
More and more people today find it hard to answer the question: “Do you believe in God?” Often, instead, we may ask: “What do you mean by that question?”
For some it has helped to turn east to get a clearer view of the west. Nyogen Senzaki, author of Buddhism and Zen, was asked, “Do Buddhists Believe in God?” His answer: “If the word God refers to a ‘poetical expression’ of universal law, then the answer is ‘yes.’ But, if the term refers to a personal existence (apart from universal law), then the answer is ‘no.’ A god not in the world is a false god, and a world not in God is unreal. Buddhists left anthropomorphic ideas behind 25 centuries ago.”
Westerners who are not Buddhists cannot seem to relax about the God thing. We can be “for” God or against obfuscations in the name of the Almighty, but much use of the term jerks us around.
Columnist Calvin Trillin has observed that when it comes to politics, God suffers from what he calls “deity overload” – “God ‘may’ be all-powerful and ‘all-knowing,’ but is not all-patient – for God has a full plate and may look with disfavor upon the claims, demands, prayers, and assertions [by politicians] who imply that God is on their side.”
God cannot be claimed or captured like the flag!
“Religion,” said philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “is something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts.” A paradox.
God is not stuff. God is not even doing stuff. We have no idea what God is, because God or Godness or God-ess, or better yet, perhaps, Godding, a verb, transcends ideas. Hence, we try to get at it by way of metaphor, which teaches us some things God is not.
God is not some “thing” known – in the same sense that a fact or a rock can be “known.” Because God transcends facts and rocks. Thus, God is not a known fact! God is not even “God,” of course, because God transcends “words,” even the word “God.”
The great early 14th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said that the ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God – leaving your notion of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions.
Twentieth century theologian, Paul Tillich, said much the same thing, that the god of theism is not “God.” Leave that one behind. “God” is the god who appears when the god of theism has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt – the god who then appears at the very boundary of your existence and experience as the courage to be.
What is God not?
God is not what philosopher Hegel called a “gaseous vertebrate.”
Mythologist Joseph Campbell said the trouble with God in the Bible was, he “forgot he was a metaphor and tried to be somebody" (or words to that effect).
In the Gnostic texts, when God said, “I am God,” a voice was heard to say, “Oh, no, you’re not, you are mistaken Sama-el (which means ‘Blind God’) because you are blind to the infinite light of which the Mediterranean Yahweh, Jehovah, or scriptural God-idea is only a local historical manifestation.”
“And this,” said Campbell, “is known as the blasphemy of Jehovah – that he thought he was God.”
Sometimes it helps to stand outside of western culture to get a clearer look inside, a different feel for things and reality. I remember hearing about the Zen philosopher, D. T. Suzuki, standing, rubbing his sides with his hands and musing:
God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature … Very funny religion.
Today – because religion is so little respected – not so little needed, mind you; it’s needed more than ever – but so little ‘respected’ – we have to be careful how we talk about God. We have to care about that. It is worth caring about while it must not be neglected.
Indeed the word “religion,” from religare, or binding, in its original sense, means to pay heed – to consider – to take care.
Religare (religion) is the opposite of negligere, which is to neglect – thus, to be religious is to pay caring attention.
Religiousness in the oldest Latin literature conveys a sense of conscientiousness of scruples. One does something religiously, meaning scrupulously, caringly. And it was just that sense of conscience and caring that would not allow some of us to go on representing ourselves as members of churches or denominations where we could no longer affirm the central beliefs and tenets of that particular faith.
One is more religious to deny a God (that has been turned from metaphor into “fact”) than one is to continue to affirm that in which one does not believe.
Nevertheless …
“Nevertheless” – I say it is my faith that indeed, it is self-evident rationally and experimentally to me that God is. God is! God is what?
To say God is, is to say being itself is or existence itself is. Big deal! Sounds silly! But the ancient metaphor runs the same way. God is asked on the mountain what his name is by Moses, “Who are you anyway?”
And God’s answer: “I am, --- I am becoming what I am becoming.” or “I am that I am.” God is or the being of being (it should be obvious) is.
We experience that ‘ISness’ in one of two ways.
We experience it as having “form” – in which case we think: over here is my mind, and over there/out there/surrounding there or somewhere is the mind of God.
The goal of mystics, on the other hand, including naturalistic Unitarian Universalist mystics, is to unite with God.
The separation of my mind over here and a mind minding my mind out there is overcome or merged. We are one.
Then there is no separate “me” and God – what is experienced as “oneness" is inclusive mystery. The Gnostics would have said, “I look at you and I see God. God is there in you. God is here. In you. In us. You are Godness.”
You are “the "ISness.” We don’t have to die to get to do that, to know God. God is in us, with us, already.
Campbell said it this way: mankind’s one great story is “…that we have come forth from the one ground of being as manifestations in the field of time. The field of time is a kind of shadow play over a timeless ground.”
Now, this is not a new idea. The Hindus, in the 9th century B.C. said, “Tat Tvam Asi" – THOU ART THAT. You are the ultimate energy … you are mind … you are God incarnate. You, like a squirrel, jumping and playing, are the divine energy of the universe at play … and so is the squirrel, and all is one … at play, at thought, at all!
Now, maybe it’s hard to get into this, but give it a try. Religion is caring. To try to get at a Buddha-nature of things ... which, to Gnostics, would also be the Christ-nature of things ... which is, as well, the Hindu nature … which is the “God nature” of things … ask yourself questions like:
“Why did this thing … say, this animal, this squirrel, come into existence?”
“Why did God choose to act itself out or become or why did God want to be a monkey, a magnolia or me or you?”
Blows your mind if you play that game, but that’s what “theologizing" is all about. It should blow your mind! Give it a try!
Why did God get a bang out of exploding out of its infinitely small size (still infinite)?
Why did God BIG BANG (from the size of a virus) to all there is … the whole universe! Stars, galaxies, pulsars, and people, too?
Ask it another way. In human experience, when does God appear? The Buddhists say, “When you are ready. When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear.”
I’ll buy that. The teacher was already there, but we have to find that out.
I believe the religious impulse … indeed, the religious imperative … comes with birth into consciousness.
It is built-in. It is genetic, somatic, psychosomatic, just as the capacity for making, learning, and using words and other symbols is built-in.
Wonder … mystery … awe … human beings are capable of experiencing these things … built in!
We have, or we are, the structures for becoming aware of and relating to in some way a transpersonal universal power, unknowable as THE ULTIMATE TRUTH is unknowable, but experienceable all the same.
And some call this reality, which we clothe in metaphor but experience intuitively, “God.”
I repeat: God is not God’s name … but we in English-speaking countries have not yet found a better word that will carry what we mean of devotion and nurture of that which ultimately sustains us, than the “God” word, I don't think.
With or without it, I believe human beings cannot “NOT DO” religion. No more than we cannot NOT relate, NOT talk, NOT create art.
And if, in doing religion, we do not sense (or intuit) that which is truly greater than we (of which we are a part), we will then DO religion by making idols of power, money, material possessions, nations, dialectical materialism, philosophical militarism, football – or something.
Our religion in those cases will be wrong-minded, will seem greater but be less … certainly not genuinely transcendent and not “holy.”
Now, to summarize, thus far: God transcends everything written and said about God, including the name God itself, including what I am saying today. Paradoxically, the transcendent CAN BE KNOWN … because it is BUILT-IN.
Now, let me try to pull this out of the abstractions and bring it closer.
I think that the absence of religious experience in our culture is literally driving people nuts and driving people to drugs, because we human beings NEED religious experience.
Meanwhile, “too many” organized religions are spending their time not on bad things so much, but on things that do not do the first job of religion, which is the task of evoking mystical experience! The first job of most churches is to stay busy being busy … giving people organization, ethics, social awareness, and fellowship … all necessary … necessary for belonging, as I was saying earlier, but NOT things that usually strike deeply into the soul … NOT things that ordinarily inspire the religious “experience” that undergirds the reason for doing those things in the first place.
People need religious “EXPERIENCE” – the power of faith made palpable – but they don’t get it. They don’t get it at all, or they substitute institutional busy-ness for it, or they settle for a phony emotionalism and call it religion.
I am convinced that “we” should be about getting at religious experience, and I hope church services – and sermons, and other events, your surroundings too – may sometimes trigger or lead to such experience.
The metaphor in CHRISTIANITY would be to say we should be about our Father’s business. It's misunderstood as workaholism in good works, but what it really means is to become one with the Father – the Mother: the Eternal Thou.
When I was a child, God was very close, I felt. All I had to do was observe my mother at prayer, and God was there. All I had to do was pray myself. All I had to do was go to the family church.
All I had to do was hear the hymns and sing them. All I had to do was kneel by the bed at night and ask God to bless Mama and Daddy and my brothers, and relatives, and friends, and the dog – naming their names in that order (in this nightly ritual), of course. Don’t leave anyone out, or one must start all over again.
But God was close.
God could also be kind of scary. I mean, I sometimes said bad words, or thought “bad thoughts.” I covered my head with my pillow in bed when, from another room or on the phone, my father – the Great Santini – said “God damn it.” And I was afraid God heard everything and knew everything I thought, and, early on, I was afraid: “God will punish you for that!”
But, mostly, God was close, in a safe, warming way, and God was good. And we thanked Him (He was Him then) because we could. We knew how. We were sure. How? Our parents taught us how. Our church did, too.
Today, of course, I no longer believe that God is like an enormous heavenly cloud way up there and everywhere at once, a masculine gaseous invertebrate, Grandpa Santa Daddy without a body (just with good universal vibes).
But, you know, the feeling is the same … the ways of relating to that part of the self with which I have an inner dialogue – the feeling of acceptance, the feeling of dependence, the feeling of love – is not far different from those early feelings of closeness to God.
God, then, as existential trust, still speaks the language of intuition and feeling … the language of the “heart” – which is the language of poets, of metaphor, of E. E. Cummings, having thanked God for most this amazing day, and asking God, the metaphor, how should any human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
And that sad poet, Dylan Thomas, sings in his most beautiful of poems, Fern Hill:
The Sabbath rang slowly In the Pebbles of the holy streams Time held me green and dying Tho' I sang in my chains like the sea.
A thousand poets, speaking the language of the heart, and the language of the heart calls out to God.
God doesn’t come clean and clear: God does not come into focus because God is not a fact (yet, paradoxically, is the greatest of realities, the greatest of facts).
Mathematics is not a fact either – but a language pointing to reality.
You don’t take God literally (that is idolatry). You take God seriously.
You don’t take God to be a formula, but as “poetry believed in.”
You don’t have to think of God as a person to take God personally.
We get pictures of God by picturing something else. By telling a story or repeating a parable; by reciting a poem or saying a prayer; by finding a metaphor that works and gives us a “clue” beyond the conceptualization that the Eternal One is.
Is there a god?
I think there is not a god who (or which) belches fire, speaks thunderously, demands sacrifices of blood, nor one who resides behind pearly gates and pulls people and planets about like marionettes, nor one who listens when evangelists claim to know what God is going to do next or just did!
Those symbols and idols, early and late, will not hold lava. They will not hold water either.
But I do believe there is “something” (by whatever name) of such great value that our usual symbols fall short of describing it … yet something that, if we are open to it, brings us to feel “I KNOW THOU ART” (How Great Thou Art).
Thou in whom we live and love and move and have our being: the fact behind our fictions … experienced as the center of centeredness. At the heart of religion is what used to be called the love of God. It is part of what I mean when I sign a letter, as I sometimes do, “Vamos con Dios,” meaning, let us connect with God, or be, or go with God, rather than the other way ‘round.
Or, as Martin Buber used to say it, “Our human task is to let God in … so, Vamos con Dios.”
And how to we do that? How do we show a love of the Thou and go with God?
There are so many ways: We do so through contemplation, through silence made to live; through meditation upon the vast universe – upon infinity large and infinitesimally small.
We do so when we get our minds to “sweat” and use our intellectual ability to try to understand life, human behavior or reality in any of its manifestations.
We love the “Thou” when we create beauty in art or music, writing or in relationships – when we generate social encounters that make these things possible.
And we have that great power and presence, inexplicable but real, immeasurable but felt – when we reach enlightenment to say, We and It (I and Thou) are one.
God transcends what we say. Still, we can experience the transcendent, Because it is built-in. The first job of religion Is to encourage and evoke awareness and mystical experience of the transcendent: The wonder of oneness. And that experience, taken seriously, will feel close and personal and can bring us to centeredness.
My friend and colleague, The Rev. Tom Owen-Towle, has written of one of the American Indian Chiefs who was asked the secret of his tribe’s success.
The chief answered: “We are a disorganized tribe, it’s true, but we were on pretty good terms with the Great Spirit.”
And, Tom said: “That’s it! Our life will have been worth it if we have been able to stay on pretty good terms with the highest and best we know. If our behavior has matched up with our beliefs, if we have aligned our ways with those of whatever god we have honored … and, certainly, if we have never hit anybody, including ourselves, over our versions of the elusive, mysterious presence we dare to call God.”
Now, a very short parable. Don’t take it literally … take it seriously. As existential trust, it is true.
Remember – the person who, in anguish and anger and bewilderment, prayed to God and said: “O God, I don’t understand why, in times when I needed you most, you would leave,”
And God replied: “I would never leave you during your times of trial and suffering … think … when you looked down, under you and right behind you, and saw only one set of footprints – it was then that I carried you.”
Be still – and know. Let us be still for a moment.
The most human and the truly divine are ONE.
Vamos con Dios.
jake wrote
Not sure about the Great Santini reference. Maybe I assumed too much in the typo. I'll ask Bob.
Posted on Fri, May 30, 2008