“God”--That Weasel Word

William James called “experience” a “weasel word.”  The same can be said of the word “God”:  It means something different to every individual. Even when we think we’re talking about roughly the same  reality when we converse about God, we’re probably still light years away from one another’s experience and understanding of God.  Does that mean we should stop talking about God? Or stop using the word “God”?

A cultural and global moratorium on the word “God” might give us the time and silence we need to find our way forward at this moment in history.  Since that’s unlikely, maybe we should each observe an individual moratorium on speaking the word “God.”  For a limited amount of we would refrain from using the word and meditate, as honestly as we can bear to, on the following questions: 

• What do you mean when you say “God”?
• What do you think most people around you mean when they say “God”?
• What do you hope when you use the word “God”?
• What do you fear when you use the word “God”?
• What word or phrase would you substitute for the word “God.”

We Are Anxious, We Are Afraid, We Want to Fall Back Asleep

It amazes me how many ways we find to run away from ourselves.  The temptations are endless.

What is temptation? Anything that keeps you from becoming who you are, who you were meant to be.  Anything. 

Some temptations confront us with a clear and urgent choice like the one Moshe put before the fledgling nation:  Choose you this day life or death, the difficult freedom of the way of the Teaching or the easy way of the scattered and lost. Emanuel Levinas, in his essay “The Temptation of Temptation” (Nine Talmudic Readings sets before us another like choice like this:  Place ontology, the science of being, first, or ethics, the responsibility to the Other that confronts you, first.  The temptation of temptations is to choose knowledge, for knowledge sets you at the center of the universe.  If your choose obligation, you acknowledge that you stand always already in relation to an Other than has a prior claim on you. That is the way to life.

Some temptations come with the full force of drama, complete with warning lights and sirens and axes falling.  That woman or man who promises to be a better match for us than our current partner.  That urge to hurt the person we love.   The need to push another lower to raise ourselves higher. 

But it is the countless, tiny little temptations we face every day without realizing it that worry me today.  All the distractions of “normal” life that we allow to crowd our lives and dull our attention. We want to pay attention, be present to the Presence, and what do we do?  We watch TV, we exercise harder, we call our friends, we drink wine or beer or smoke, we surf the Web, we frenetically try to keep up and stay in touch on Facebook and Twitter, we read literature meant for consumption, we clean our houses, manage our family’s lives, search out great meals and other pleasures, shop, find new hobbies to “pass the time,” consult the stars and psychics, follow the lives of the gods and demigods we call “celebrities.”  None of these is bad in itself.  But when we do them unconsciously, repeatedly, they keep us from going deeper.  It’s easy to stay on the surface.  Nothing is required of us. 

We know how alive we feel when we wake up from this stupor and are really present, even for a moment, to another person or the natural world or ourselves.  Yet we keep going back to sleep.  We keep sipping that sleeping draught so we will not be fully present. St. Paul said it well:  “The good that we would we do not; and the evil that we would not, that we do.”

Why, when we know gives us life and what numbs us, do we keep choosing what numbs us?  Why do we keep enslaving ourselves to empty habits that drain the blood from our lives?  Why do we keep running away from ourselves?  Why do we keep hiding?  Why are we so frightened of becoming who we are?  So afraid to be free?   So afraid to be found?

Do We Need God?

Do we need God?  This is a question.  It is not a rhetorical opening to an argument for or against the existence and necessity of God. 

Do we need God?  Let’s bracket for a moment the questions of who this “we” is, what “need” means, what “God” means, “need God for what?” and “who wants to know?”

Countless observers of human beings--from all disciplines and traditions--have concluded that part of what it means to be human is to stand in relationship to something greater than ourselves, a reality that goes beyond the corporeal world or the world that appears to us, a reality that is eternal or infinite that we nevertheless sense or participate in. Whether they speak of humankind as homo religiosus, piety as the feeling of the Infinite acting upon you in your finitude (Schleierrmacher)  the sacred dimension (Mircea Eliade), the idea of the holy (Rudolph Otto)  the alone with the alone (Emily Dickinson), the eternal in man (Max Scheler), the religious experience (William James), the Ultimate Concern (Paul Tillich), or the face of the Other (Levinas), they point to the pervasiveness of this experience. A sweep over the millenia of human history confirms this: human beings in every age, in every culture have developed and continue to develop  rituals, texts, and spaces that nurture this relationship.  And today,  even many of those who have stopped believing in God continue to think about God or the Eternal.  Recently, Jacob Needleman put it this way:  “To think about God is to the human soul what breathing is to the human body.” (What Is God?, 3)

Many other observers, acknowledging the pervasiveness of the human concern with God or the Infinite, argue that this failure to cast off believing in or thinking about God by no means proves that God or something like it is essential to human life.  Rather, it proves that most people are still caught in primitive, unenlightened, irrational ways of interpreting reality.  Common religion and God may be, but they are by no means inevitable, essential, or necessary to human life. Quite the contrary, they are distracting at best and destructive at worst.  We don’t need God; we need rationality, we need morality, we need humanism. Read the news for “God-inspired” genocide, terror, torture, abuse. Case closed.

I tend toward the first position.  As long as there are human beings we are going to wrestle with, puzzle over, rail against,  and argue about that reality we cannot fully grasp or control that nevertheless impinges upon our existence or intrudes itself into our lives or awakens us to something beyond the limits of our ordinary minds. Some of us will experience this as “sacred,“ others may call it  the ultimate ideals they live by.  I came of intellectual age in a time when scholars were speaking of the religious dimension of all experience, or the root of faith in all human beings, that which they place their ultimate trust in and give their ultimate loyalty to, whether they identify that center of all value as empiricism, secularism, family, nation, a religious tradition, or the One.  To me the question of faith and God is simply this:  How does one ultimately orient and ground one’s life?  Whatever the answer—and it is a difficult question to answer honestly for even the most self-aware—that is one’s god. 

And yet, I would not argue with a person who claims to be or boasts of being areligious or indifferent to faith and God.  Should I insist that they are religious even though they do not realize it?  Should I prove to them that in the absence of faith in the One that they really worship money? success? That their body or their partner is their idol?  How would that serve?  I am no apologist for the one true faith, however I or anyone else may define it.  Perhaps their denial of faith as they understand it and of God as they have understood that concept is what clears the way for them to experience the depths of the Infinite in the limits of their finitude, whatever they may call it, however they may interpret it.  Maybe my way of asking the question or the language I am using has closed an opening for them.  And why have I made their inner life my goal, when the work on my own remains unfinished?  The question is to me, not them: Who are you?  Where have you been?  Where are you going?  Are you on the way to becoming truly human?  

The power of persuasion lies not in words or arguments, but in the felt experience of the One among us.

To Be Free, Tether Yourself?

In the early 1970s, when I was at L’Abri in Huemoz, Switzerland, living in an Evangelical community that followed the monastic pattern of work, study, and prayer, I met two young men from Malaysia.  A group of us were sitting on the floor of a chalet perched high in the Alps, the sun streaming in. We were sharing our journeys--from agnosticism or atheism or existentialism to faith, from Hinduism or Islam or secularism or Satanism to Christianity.  The two recently arrived Malaysians both taught me something that afternoon that was essential to my life.  The first teaching I thought I understood,and I put it into practice immediately; the second haunted me for years.

When your mouth is burning from hot peppers, taught the first man, you time the fire by placing something sweet on your tongue. I’ve been doing this ever since.  It occurs to me now that there is a deeper, mystical meaning to his teaching as well—something to pursue another day.

The second man, born a Hindu, told the story of how he became a Christian.  He was floating free in the sky, he said, like a kite.  He was blown here and there at random, at times spiraling out of control, at times tangled in wires, at times crashing to earth.   Then he found Christ.  Now he could soar freely, soar higher, fly faster and farther, because he was tethered to this rock. 

When I heard this I was twenty and a hippie to boot, more interested in rebelling against all limits and chasing the illusion of absolute freedom than listening to any talk about being tethered.  The word tether called up images of playing tether ball on our three-room Christian school playground. It was bad enough being a player, playing against bullies who sent the ball flying so that it knocked with full force on your head and landed you in the gravel with a headache and bleeding knees.   Now I was supposed to be that ball, bandied about by anyone’s whim, being spun around endlessly in circles of absurdity?  Somehow the beauty and truth of this young man’s image pierced my heart.  Whether he meant Jesus the Christ or the cosmic Christ  of the logos open to all I did not know. But I heard the truth of his words: that we crazy creatures, we highly unstable combinations of earth and spirit, need to be tied to that which is ultimate to live in true freedom.

I heard, but I did not understand.  For decades my ego, my allergy to authority, my contrary temperament, and my suspicion of patriarchy and hierarchical religions kept me from understanding.  Not until my fifties, after undergoing a long series of  family traumas that crushed my spirit, did I begin to see.  Through a combination of hitbodedut, silent retreats, Sufi breathing and dhikr, and laying tefillin when I davened in the morning, I slowly awakened to the truth that we must tie ourselves tightly to the eternal to fly on earth.  My rabbi, a woman, had counseled me to try laying tefillin as a way of navigating a difficult transition in my life.  I found to my surprise that when I laid tefillin, I felt safe, calm, alive, whole--for I was bound to that which is constant.  Feeling the leather straps, the skin of another animal like me, tightened against my skin  was a liberating experience.  Their pressure against my flesh reminded me who I truly was:  I was not  a slave to anyone or anything, any circumstance or any theory.  I was a free servant freely choosing to bind myself to the One, the One Beyond Who is the One Who Dwells Among Us.  As I stood wrapped in my tallit, my head, arm, and hand wound round with darkened strips of skin containing and forming holy words of light, it seemed to me I was rooting my being, my whole being, in the only soil where it could grow.  And being so firmly planted, I could move with greater freedom, unencumbered. When I touched the root of all being and was touched by it, I was not shaken by fear, I was not compelled by desires, I was not distracted by the noise and things and frenetic activity within and around me, I did not get lost in possibilities, I did not  lose my mind in the giddiness of the spirit, I did not lose my way in meditation and forget how to return to the beautiful world we call human being.  I was present.  From this place I could live free, I could fly on earth.

  And I remembered the young man from Malaysia tethered to Christ and smiled in recognition. 

A Riot of Images for God

At the  beginning of Hayyim Bialik’s poem “Zohar” (1909),  the poet, compelled to speak that which cannot be spoken, spills forth a world’s worth of ways to point to that elusive reality:

In the midst of my childhood I have been engulfed by loneliness,
And craved all my life for silence and the hidden,
From the body of the world I craved for its light,
Something which I could not fathom murmured like wine inside    me.
I was looking for hiding places.  There I silently observed,
I was like a visionary looking into the eye of the universe.
There my friends were revealed to me, I received their secrets,
And sealed their voices in my mute heart.
My friends, how numerous they were:  any flying bird,
Any tree and its shadow, every bush in the forest,
The face of the meek moon shining into a window,
The darkness of a cellar, the creaking of a gate . . .
The sweet and awesome mixture of light with darkness
In the depth of a well,
Where the echo of my voice and my image are found,
The chiming of a clock, the tooth of a saw grinding within a log,
As if they are pronouncing the forbidden name of God . . .

(in Joseph Dan, The Heart and The Fountain:  An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experience, 252)

Faith? Belief? What’s the difference? Who owns them?

It’s common for people to distinguish between faith and belief, usually assigning the lesser of the two, belief, to one group, such as the Christians, and the greater, faith, to another group, such as the Jews. In Two Types of Faith, Martin Buber distinguishes between these two ways of relating to God without playing the game of My Religion Is Better Than Yours.  He contrasts the Hellenistic-inspired notion of faith as “mere believing,” that is, accepting the certainty of specific truths one had not previously held, with the Hebraic view of relational faith as trust, that is, depending on the “contact of my entire being with the one in whom I trust” (8). He refuses to identify faith as belief with Christians in general and faith as trust with Jews in general, arguing that both types of faith permeate both religions. He does argue, however,  that faith as belief finds its “representative actuality” in Christianity and faith as trust finds its “representative actuality” in Judaism (11-12).

Though I may quarrel with his last conclusion about “representative actualities,” my experience within and knowledge of Christianity and Judaism confirms his view that faith as belief and faith as trust run through both traditions (and more than likely through Islam as well). Faith as belief is part of both Christianity and Judaism. Christians have creeds, distillations of teachings that help people navigate the scriptures and contemporary philosophy rightly, and they recite many of them during their liturgies. So do Jews. The Sh’ma and  and Maimonides’s Thirteen Attributes of God are the most well known, but Saadia Gaon, Yehudah HaLevi, and others developed lists of beliefs to guide the faithful through the scriptures and contemporary intellectual challenges as well.  Whether formal or informal, universally or not universally accepted,  intellectual formulations of specific truths it is important to affirm or assent to--such as the unity of God and the goodness of the created world--play an essential, constructive  role in religious traditions. They complement faith as trust; they do not supplant it.  The faith that grounds and transforms the whole person must be mind and heart, truth and trust, emet v’emunah.

Faith as trust (emunah in Hebrew), Buber’s second type of faith, is also at the core of both Judaism and Christianity. The dominant understanding of faith in Christianity, before and after the Protestant Reformation,  is also trust, as Augustine, Calvin, Luther, and many others confirm. To call this talk of trust, as Buber does,  the survival of or a resurgence of “genuine Judaism” within Christianity seems incorrect and unnecessary. The 20th-century Reformed theologian H. Richard Niebuhr bypasses the notion of belief altogether to define faith as “radical trust in and loyalty to the One.”  In Jesus, Buber says, “the genuine Jewish principle of” faith is manifest (12).  I agree, but I would argue that in accepting Jesus as the Messiah, Christians did not merely believe him to be God: they adopted his way of being faithful to God, his way of trust. Faith as trust cannot be claimed primarily for one community of faith over the other.

I confess my great ignorance about the Islamic tradition. Yet from my reading and experience I would venture to guess that it, too, is pervaded by faith as belief and faith as trust.  The shahada (and much of Islamic theology) represents one side, the recurring note of faith as radical trust in the One (tawwakul) the other. Recently I came across a definition of faith by al-Hujwiri, the 11th century Persian Sufi saint, that plumbs the depths of this notion of faith as radical trust, trust that penetrates to the root of one’s being, unifies all of one’s being,  and requires the slaying of all rivals for our absolute trust: “Faith is really the absorption of all human attributes in the search of God.” (Revelation of the Mystery, tr. Reynold A. Nicholson, 289) 
What al-Hujwiri means by this he shows by telling a story he heard:

[W]hen Ibrahim Khawwas was asked [by the man narrating the story] concerning the reality of faith, he replied:  “I have no answer to this question.just now, because whatever I say is a mere expression, and it behooves me to answer by my actions; but I am setting out for Mecca: do thou accompany me that thou mayest be answered.” 
The narrator continues:  “I consented.  As we journeyed through the desert, every day two loaves and two cups of water appeared. He gave one to me and took the other for himself.  One day an old man rode up to us and dismounted and conversed with Ibrahim for a while; then he left us.  I asked Ibrahim to tell me who he was. 
He replied:  “This is the answer to thy questions.”
“How so"?” I asked.
He said: “This was Khidr [the enigmatic figure in Islam said to have guided Moshe to deeper wisdom and who continues to appear to guide and instruct people with his illuminated wisdom; roughly analogous to the legend of the Prophet Eliyahu in Judaism], who begged me to let him accompany me, but I  refused, for I feared that in his company I might put confidence in him instead of in God, and then my trust in God (tawwakul) would have been vitiated.  Real faith is trust in God.” (Ibid., 289-290)

Faith as trust and loyalty belongs to no religion, no tradition.  It is the way of living from the root of one’s being with the One.

The Wheel That Revolves Us Nearer to the Center

This poem from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours, with its own wonderfully strange images of God, is reminiscent of Yehuda Amichai’s and other poets like Yona Wallach’s focus on coming and going, opening and closing when the subject is God.  Why, I wonder, do so many poets find themselves at this image of continual movement when struggling to point to this reality?  Thomas Mann gives a clue in Joseph and His Brothers, when he speaks of the God of Joseph as the “God of becoming.”  Martin Buber gives another when he translates the name of God revealed to Moshe at the burning bush,  Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, I Am that I Am, this way:  I Will Be who I Will Be. 

This is one of the challenges of relating to the One: that we are not responding to a static order or reality, one that we can finally grasp or contain; we are responding to a dynamic, living reality, one that is continuously creating, ordering, healing, limiting, opening doors and slamming them shut, disappearing from the familiar places and reappearing in strange ways and places.

All intimate relationships require us to seek the depths of constancy and faithfulness in the midst of continual change, the hub that anchors the spokes.  When we can’t find those depths, our spirits suffer.  When we do, everything we do widens from “turn to turn.”  Our relationship with the Ever Alive, as I refer to God these days,  is no different.      

You come and go.  The doors swing closed
ever more gently; almost without a shudder.
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow.  For all things
sing you:  at times
we just hear them more clearly.

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
Then all the work I put my hand to
widens from turn to turn.

(I: 45, tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, 81)