Over the last few weeks, as I have been busy refurbishing my new house, I have had a great deal of time for solitude and reflection. In the midst of the wee hours while scraping and painting, I thought about my many encounters with people who were in various states of crises or distress in their lives, everything from medical emergencies to the dark night of the soul some many traverse. I was also reminded of an acronym I encountered while taking a counseling class last spring at our local Lutheran seminary up on North Main Street. The acronym is W.I.G.I.A.T. or "Where Is God In All This?" In my experiences this and similar questions are often on the lips of those who are in places of struggle in their lives.It is a normal human experience for us to at least occasionally feel alone or bereft or cut off from our Source. In our current age, in our Western society this is even more common than perhaps in other times, but the experience it self is much the same over time. The Psalmists of the Hebrew scriptures write in Psalm number seventy-seven, "I cry a loud to God, aloud to God, that he may hear me. In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted." And in Psalm 102 it is written, "Hear my prayer, O Lord; let my cry come to thee! Do not hide thy face from me in the day of distress! Incline thy ear to me; answer me speedily in the day when I call!"
Most of you know that I do not quote the Bible very often. But I find this anguish, the need for connection to be too uniersal to ignore.
Part of my role as a minister is to help people to explore these types of issues and to engage with them for myself as well. Part of what I have found to be interesting about this work is that there are so many different ways for each of us to connect with and to articulate what our experiences of the Holy, the Ultimate, or Goddess/God is. On the maps of our lives and beliefs, the Holy is located in very many different places and experienced as often differing types of terrain.
When doing spiritual direction work with people in existential or spiritual crises, the question of "where is God, or the Holy?" becomes paramount. The loss of one's feeling of connection to the Universe as we understand it is debilitating and frightening. To reconnect with our sense of relationship with the All, the Holy is a reassuring, healing, and liberating home coming.
There are many ways to experience and to locate God, the Goddess, the Holy, the Ultimate. Our more conservative brethren would tell us that they know for a certainty what the right and only way is, each group of course with their own specific take. I choose to preserve my agnosticism. For me that while have faith, I cannot make absolute claims of certainty of things I cannot prove or even possibly know as a finite being. For me it seems to be the honest position. I do not ultimately know what it is that I encounter, but I cannot deny it either. Therefore I try to make sense of it as best I can. We cannot understand or capture that which we call God, but point towards it, like a finger pointing towards the moon.
It is said that theology is our attempt to make sense of our experiences of the world and the ineffable. It is the experiences of our lives passed through the fires of thought and reflection. Theology attempts to explain our encounters with God, but they are within the reference of our personal and historical frames. Our experiences and everything that we are shape and mold our understanding of who and what and even where God is.
A couple had two little boys, ages 8 and 10, who were excessively mischievous. They were always getting into trouble and their parents knew that, if any mischief occurred in their town, their sons were probably involved. The boys' mother heard that a clergyman in town had been successful in disciplining children, so she asked if he would speak with her boys. The clergyman agreed, but asked to see them individually. So the mother sent her 8-year-old first, in the morning, with the older boy set to see the clergyman in the afternoon.
The clergyman, a huge man with a booming voice, sat the younger boy down and asked him sternly, "Where is God!?" The boy's mouth dropped open, but he made no response, sitting there with his mouth hanging open, wide-eyed. So the clergyman repeated the question in an even sterner tone, "Where is God!!?" Again the boy made no attempt to answer. So the clergyman raised his voice even more and shook his finger in the boy's face and bellowed, "WHERE IS GOD?" The boy screamed and bolted from the room, running directly home and diving into his closet, slamming the door behind him. When his older brother found him in the closet, he asked, "What happened?" The younger brother, gasping for breath, replied, "We are in BIG trouble this time, dude. God is missing - and they think WE did it."
What we think of as God is a reflection, a consideration of what we have experienced. Experiences of that which is transpersonal, beyond us are ultimately indefinable in their totality. Of the different constructs or definitions of God or the God experience, we often learn more about the people who make them or the times in which they originate than we do about God. Yet we also learn about our communality and differences of experience.
Unitarian social ethicist and theologian James Luther Adams claimed that "people are incurably religious." Adams felt that "there is a certain perverseness in human nature which causes people to be religious in spite of themselves. When we do not give our highest loyalty to God, we end by surrendering our life to the service of an idol. We are so incurably religious that we abhor the vacuum of religious experience - the empty altar. Or to change the figure, if we unseat the Most High from the throne, then we inevitably set up a substitute." (Liberal Christianity, "War of the Gods,") Adams later writes that "religious faith is a response to that which is held to be ultimately reliable." (Liberal Christianity, "Neither Mere Morality Nor Mere God," p. 306) Or, to put it more succinctly, we have an appetite for the certainty of the sacred. At some point most people have this yearning and it is our role. as a liberal religious community to be around when they come looking for a place to fill it. According to black liberation theologian James Cone,* people are searching for Ultimate meaning. "The more things change, the more people are looking for meaning."
What of those who say they don't have these yearnings or experiences? Noted Jesus scholar and Christian, Marcus Borg* muses that they may have, "A tin ear for the sacred." But he also feels that it is more likely that they are having the experiences but lack the language to unpack or articulate them.
What do we mean by the "God we don't believe in?" Marcus Borg himself does not believe in a God of supernatural theism. For him "God is all around and within us." He holds a version of panentheism which he feels is described by the Christian scriptures of Acts 17:28. A God "in which we live and move and have our being." God as life giving and sustaining.
In talking about God, Borg feels it is important in our modern world to ask people to, "Tell me about the God you don't believe in." He points out that there are really two basic types of atheism. The first is what he calls, "absolute atheism." Absolute atheism rejects any or all concepts of God or the sacred. This is what most people think they are practicing when they call themselves atheists, but this is often not the case.
Borg offers a more nuanced category of disbelief he calls "relative atheism." Relative atheism is being an atheist relative to a particular idea or concept of God. We are all relative atheists to some degree. There are lots of concepts of god which we don't ascribe to. Borg holds that much of the atheism we encounter in contemporary Western culture is actually a relative atheism in which it is the god of traditional supernatural theism that is rejected, basically because it just doesn't make sense to people. Those rejecting the god of supernatural theism often are unaware of other ways of understanding the sacred or God.
In my experience with UUs who call themselves atheists, this definition of relative atheism seems to fit best. This may explain the presence of so many atheists and humanists in our faith community who also hold deep feelings about transcendent and even mystical experiences.
For Borg, language is limited. For him the problem is not with "he" and "she" gender based language but with most third person language. Third person language implies the object is not present. It would be more appropriate to use second person "you" language to address the on- going presence of the Holy in our lives.
Borg also feels that theological statements about what people believe matters, but that such doctrines are second order language, more removed from the originating experiences. He offers that it is metaphor, stories and narrative, which are first order language, which come much closer to expressing the original impulse or experience. In doing spiritual direction work I have found that while beliefs are important, connecting with original experiences were more helpful.
Like liberal Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong,* I don't know who Goddess/God is, but only what my experience of Goddess/God is. I can't use my personal experiences to make or place claims of belief on others.
We all need tolerance and therefore we need to offer it to others as well. In choosing a Samaritan as the protagonist in his parable, Jesus knew exactly what he was doing. By picking someone who belonged to a group whose beliefs were at great odds with the orthodox temple Judaism of the times, he was able to hold up the difference between right beliefs and right actions. Theologian Matthew Arnold described God as "the power not ourselves working for righteousness." (Liberal Christianity, "Neither Mere Morality Nor Mere God," p. 305)
UU minister and writer Alice Blair Wesley offers that, "No human experience can be `proved.' Its interpretation, though can be tested for consistency with our experience and with that of others. With rational rigor, we can then say, it is reasonable to believe that there is and objective pole to subjective experience of the holy, the divine life of our life." ("Unitarian Universalist Views of God," p. 7)
Alice Blair Wesley also holds that there are at least four types of concrete experiences in which it is helpful and fitting to use God language. In doing so we are able to look at the types of experiences and the location of the Holy in out lives. The first type of experience is one of awe. Our Principles and Purposes describes it is as the "Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life."
The second experience where she finds God language to be important is in the "awareness that reality does lay upon us some moral imperatives.... (U)ltimately we experience the commands of conscience to seek and speak truth, to create beauty, and to do justice with the mercy of affection as imperatives of the nature of human experience." ("Unitarian Universalist Views of God," p. 7)
The third experience where Wesley feels that God-talk is relevant is in the experience of freedom. Whether we have many or few options, those options are real in and of themselves. "We are free to respond to those impulses to be nourished in worship and strive for fulfillment of the commands of conscience." ("Unitarian Universalist Views of God," p. 8)
Fourthly, she offers that God language is useful in dealing with the experience of liberation. Wesley states that, "(A)gain and again personally and historically, we have known the redemption of inspired freedom that overcomes (oppression and finite understanding)... and enters into new creative, constructive forms of thought and social order. Notions of God's purposefulness in human history derive from the sense of direction inherent in the experience of liberation." ("Unitarian Universalist Views of God," p. 8)
UU minister emeritus Arthur Foote has written that, "God is not a proposition to prove but a reality to experience; not something to define but to know in the mind's commitment to truth, in the claims of justice, in the prevalence of beauty, and in the sanctities of love." ("Unitarian Universalist Views of God," p. 3)
I choose to use the more inclusive phrase Goddess/God which was coined by Harvard theologian Harvey Cox. For me, if I am to distill my own limited understanding of my experiences of the Holy, of Goddess/God down to a single sentence, then it is that Goddess/God is to be found in the need and the impulse for love and justice. Goddess/God is to be found in the need and the impulse for love and justice.
My original attraction to Unitarian Universalism was because it offered me a place to explore my understanding of the Holy within a tradition that lifted up social justice as a necessary response to our encounters with the Divine. In my ten years as a UU I have found this to be a common if, not universal experience among many UUs.
So where IS God, and what have we done with him/her/it? If she/he/it is present; is it the great second person YOU that pervades and surrounds us?
One of the biggest questions we can ask our selves and each other is how do we know that Goddess/God, the Holy is present in our lives? Ultimately, for me, I can give no better answer than to say that I know it because I experience it, usually when I am not looking for it. In my own theology I am a imminentist, which means that I believe that the Holy is present and manifest, imminent as everyone and everything. I have faith that we are immersed in the Holy, that the we are integral parts of a larger sacred reality. And, here's the important part, therefore, it is not possible for us to be divorced or cut off from the Holy. But we can become unaware of it and act as if we are divorced or cut off from the sacredness, the holiness of our existence. The reality we perceive is the one we react to. Religion is about that which re-connects or re-awakens us to the ultimate and holy. I believe that which seeks to deny, distort, disrupt or supersede this relationship is the source or experience of that which are traditionally called sin and evil.
A colleague recently reminded me that the Holy is found in those who minister to us and others. The healers and care givers in our lives are evidence of the presence of the Holy. I see this as a manifestation of the I-thou relationship described by Jewish theologian Martin Buber.
When we relate to each other and the world in ways that are mutual and respectful then we are in an "I-thou" relationship. The other, the "thou" is seen, honored and treated as sacred, or to use UU language, they have inherent worth and dignity as a part of the interconnected web of existence. In this type of relationship Martin Buber believed, and I agree, that the Holy is present, or perhaps we are aware of its presence in the qualities of the relationship. The "I-thou" relationship is in stark contrast to an "I-it" relationship in which we see and treat the other as an object, as a thing with no inherent worth or dignity as a part of the sacred All.
So where is the Holy, Goddess/God? It is within the prayers we say and hope we'll feel. It is in the hands that heal and in those that give life the shape of justice. It is in loneliness seeking communion. It is in the mystery within us reaching out to the mystery beyond.
O Holy, you reside in the midst of our relationships between the "I and thou." You are in the darkest night as well as the awe, and the hope and the gratitude we have for the multitudes of blessings that grace our lives. You are in the here and now. Holy, we are a part of you, and you are with us always, there to remind us that we are powerful, precious, holy and not alone. Amen.
* (All quotes and references for Marcus Borg, James
Cones, and Bishop John Shelby Spong are derived from the video series,
"Talking About God," Ecufilm)