Concepts of God
Several weeks ago, our eleven o'clock service was visited by members of a study group
from a neighboring church. They were studying other religions and had been charged
with experiencing worship in a Jewish or Catholic Congregation, in an Islamic Congregation and in a Unitarian Universalist Congregation. They sat through our service quietly,
attentively, and unobtrusively taking notes. Following the service, and a quick
visit to the coffee hour, they reassembled here in the sanctuary for a brief question and answer session with Beverly and me. The questions they asked indicated that
they had quickly picked up on our historic concern for freedom, reason and tolerance
in religion. They had observed the lack of customary symbols here in the church,
but they had also noticed the symbols which are uniquely ours--the chalice on the pulpit,
the chalice which is lit, the chalices we wear, the Transylvanian cloths and hymn
book covers, the stoles we wear and were eager to know something about them and what
they meant to us.
This gave us a chance to explain something of our history, our roots and the tradition
we represent. We talked together for a while, and then came the inevitable question.
"What about God? We didn't hear much about God in this service. Do you believe
in God?"
Such a simple question! So difficult to answer! I began with that old chestnut about
how Unitarian Universalists believe in one god at most. I explained that in a free
faith such as ours individuals were expected to address that question for themselves, and then live with integrity in light of the answer they discovered, that some of
us are convinced theists, some of us are agnostics, and some of us are convinced
atheists, and that each of these positions is honored as a valid religious alternative.
They nodded, and then asked, "Yes, but what about you? Do you believe in God?"
Suddenly my mind flashed back over the years to a Unitarian Universalist ministers
study group I had attended when I was very new in this profession. What had begun
as a congenial conversation had somehow degenerated into a discussion of theology.
At one point, one of my older colleagues turned to me and said, "You, my friend, are a god-driven
man who cannot find god!" I never knew quite what he meant by that comment, but
somewhere, deep inside me it rang true. My life has been spent in search of that
which, by some definitions might be called God, and yet, as my young visitors had noticed,
God is not a word that springs easily to my lips.
They deserved an answer, and I struggled to give them one. I explained that the word
God is problematic for me precisely because it is a term which is seldom defined,
but which virtually everyone believes is self-explanatory. God is a concept without
content and therefore it is often used to allow people to think they know more than they
know, understand more than they understand, share more than they share. In my experience,
I said to them, God has too often been used as a vehicle to close off the powerful and important questions: Why do the innocent suffer; why does justice not prevail;
why is the world so often awash in blood? It is all part of God's vast and incomprehensible
plan. By invoking the word God, we close off and cauterize the bleeding, painful questions. In my experience, God is the answer to nothing; God is the deepest
of all the unanswered questions. And rather than be misunderstood, I prefer not
to use the word. For me, the religious stance is not one of assurance, but a willingness to stand naked before the persistent and unanswered questions.
They listened attentively, but I am not at all certain they understood what I was
trying to say. It seemed to me that a few of them were on the verge of asking, "Yes,
but do you believe in God?" Instead, they turned the conversation in other directions.
* * * *
Since religion by definition in the general culture presupposes God, people are always
curious about alternative traditions. Robert Fulghum, a contemporary Unitarian
Universalist minister, in his book, UH-OH, tells of one of his encounters with the
question.
"Do you believe in God, Mr. Fulghum?" (The journalist .... has shifted scale suddenly
from the details of dailiness to the definition of the Divine.)
"No, but I do believe in Howard."
"Howard? You believe in Howard?"
"It all has to do with my mother's maiden name."
"Your mother's maiden name..."
"Was Howard. She came from a big Memphis clan that was pretty close and was referred
to as the Howard Family. As a small child, I thought of myself as a member of the
Howard Family because it was often an item of conversation as in "The Howard Family
is getting together,' and "The Howard Family thinks people should write letters to their
grandmother." The matriarch, my grandmother, was referred to as Mother Howard."
"And you thought...she...was...God?"
"No, no, I just wanted you to first know how it was that Howard was a name that was
important to me from early on in my life. What happened was that I got packed off
to Sunday School at around age four and the first thing I learned was the Lord's
Prayer, which begins "Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed by Thy name." And what I
heard was "Our Father, which art in heaven, HOWARD be Thy name." And since little
kids tend to mutter prayers anyhow, nobody realized what I was saying was Howard.
And believing I was a member of His family--the Howards. Since I was told that my grandfather
had died and gone to heaven, God and my grandfather got all mixed up in my mind as
one and the same. Which meant that I had a pretty comfy notion about God. When
I knelt beside my bed each night and prayed, "Our Father, which art in heaven, Howard
be thy name," I thought about my grandfather and what a big shot he was because,
of course, the prayer ends with "For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory
forever and ever, Amen." I went to bed feeling pretty well connected to the universe for a
long, long time. It was a Howard Family Enterprise."
"You're not putting me on, are you?"
"Not at all. All human images of the ultimate ground of being are metaphors, and
as metaphors go, this is a pretty homey one. And I thought it for so long that even
when I passed through all those growing-up stages of skepticism, disbelief, revision
and confusion--somewhere in my mind I still believed in Howard. Because at the heart
of that childhood image there is no alienation. I belonged
to the whole big scheme of things. I lived and worked and had my being in the family
store."
--p.p. 133-135, UH-OH
As we mention occasionally around here, we Unitarian Universalists are
Unitarian Universalists especially because we have differed with the generally accepted
definitions of religion and the assumed and generally respectable concepts of God.
Some of our forbears paid dearly for their alternative beliefs.
Back in the last century, a Universalist minister got into big trouble with the law
in Massachusetts over the definition of God. Found guilty by both lower and supreme
courts, he actually served a 60-day sentence on a blasphemy charge, after which he
went west to Iowa to found an intentional community. His "criminal" concept of God was
contained in this short statement:
A PHILOSOPHICAL CREED
I believe in the existence of a universe of suns and planets, among which there is
one sun belonging to our planetary system; and that other suns, being more remote,
are called stars; but that they are indeed suns to other planetary systems. I believe
that the whole universe is NATURE, and that the word NATURE embraces the whole universe,
and that God and Nature, so far as we can attach any rational idea to either, are
perfectly synonymous terms. Hence I am not an Atheist, but a Pantheist; that is,
instead of believing there is no God, I believe that in the abstract, all is God; and that
all power that is, is in God, and that there is no power except that which proceeds
from God. I believe that there can be no will or intelligence where there is no
sense; and no sense where there are no organs of sense; and hence sense, will, and intelligence,
is the effect, and not the cause, of organization. I believe in all that logically
results from these premises, whether good, bad, or indifferent. Hence, I believe that God is all in all; and that it is in God we live, move, and have our being;
and that the whole duty of man consists in living as long as he can and in promoting
as much happiness as he can while he lives.
Written at Hebron NH, May 28, 1833
By ABNER KNEELAND
What seems to me to be the problem in a conversation about God is that we speak generic
and all the while we are thinking in the specific
; and so we end up talking past each other in service to tribal deities and personal
saviors and such. Robert Fulghum had an interesting experience which offers some
clarity here.
On a long flight from Melbourne to Athens, an Australian carpenter, an Indian college
professor in hydrology, and I had a memorable late-night theological discussion.
The three of us were seated in one row, and the subject of God came up because our
meals were accompanied by a little card on which was printed a short prayer of thanksgiving.
...Later on, the Indian professor and I stood in the forward alcove of the 747, ...
comparing the route map with what we could see out the porthole in the door.
Across Australia, Indonesia, to Singapore, across Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, and into Athens. Much of what we crossed was ocean.
Theology again. The Indian professor of hydrology ... noted that we had just left
a country where people worshiped the sun-- on the beach with most all of their clothes
removed. And we were flying over countries whose people believed it was the will
of Allah that women should be completely covered, even on beaches. The name of God varied
from country to country; the holy book was not the same; the rituals and dogmas and
routes to heaven were not the same. And so certain were the followers of different
religions of their rectitude, they would gladly war with one another--kill each other--
to have their beliefs and metaphors prevail. Yet in this same plane, flying peacefully
along, are these same people.
Clearly this troubled the professor--grieved him. He shook his head and asked why
this must be so.
The professor pointed out the Indian Ocean beneath us at the moment.
He spoke of water, his specialty. "Water is everywhere and in all living things--we
cannot be separated from water. No water, no life. Period. Water comes in many forms--liquid,
vapor, ice, snow, fog, rain, hail. But no matter the form, it's still water.
"Human beings give this stuff many names in many languages, in all its forms. It's
crazy to argue over what its true name is. Call it what you will, there is no difference
to the water. It is what it is.
"Human beings drink water from many vessels--cups, glasses, jugs, skins, their own
hands, whatever. To argue about which container is proper for the water is crazy.
The container doesn't change the water.
"Some like it hot, some like it cold, some like it iced, some fizzy, some with stuff
mixed in it--alcohol, coffee, whatever. No matter. It does not change the nature
of the water.
"Never mind the name or the cup or the mix. These are not important.
"What we have in common is thirst. Thirst!
"Thirst for the water of Life!"
As it is with water, so is it with God.
"I don't know much about God," said the professor of hydrology. "All I know is water.
And that we are momentary waves in some great everlasting ocean, and the waves and
the water are one."
He poured us each a paper cup full of water and we drank
pp. 137-139, UH-OH
A while back I thought the semantic problem might be cleared up by looking to a non-religious,
neutral source. I got out the Encyclopedia Britannica and looked up the Macropedia
article entitled "theism." I found this:
all limited or finite things, though fully real in their own right are dependent in
some way upon, while yet distinct from, one supreme being, of which one may speak
in personal terms.
And that supreme being--God-- is
beyond mans' comprehension, perfect, and self-sustained but also peculiarly involved
in the world and its events.
In addition to being what seemed to me a very Christian statement, the "personal"
terms used through the rest of the article were always male, which right there gave
me pause. I was ready to give up completely when the author noted that some contemporal
theisms hold that God is changing-- he
grows as he
surpasses himself
. A similar theism was attributed to the "philosopher of religion," Henry Nelson
Wieman, who defined God as "the dynamic reality of creative interchange in the temporal
process."
Well, I know of Dr. Wieman-- the Unitarian
theologian. David was a student of his some thirty years ago or so. Dr. Wieman emphasized
not the personal, but God as process, creativity at work in the universe of time
and space. In his book RELIGIOUS INQUIRY, Dr. Wieman wrote:
What we call the universe at any one time is what our valuing and cognitive consciousness
can envision at that time. The universe as so conceived will be transcended and
become obsolete when our valuing consciousness is expanded by the creativity operating in human existence to expand the range of what we can know.
... the universe in which we now live, as known to the sciences, is radically different
from the universe as known to men a thousand, or even a hundred, years ago. Furthermore,
it is now changing more radically than at anytime in past history. Thus all evidence points to the conclusion that the universe as we now know it is a transitory
vision, soon to be transformed into something very different from what we can now
imagine. [p.19]
The ruling commitment of our lives must be given to the creativity operating in human
existence to expand indefinitely the valuing consciousness of the individual in community
with others. This is the only way we can be saved from tyranny, saved from blindness to changing conditions requiring a change in the order of human life, saved
from dogmatism, arrogance, narrow mindedness, and that disregard of the demands of
unique individuality in others which is the source of so much evil. [pp.21-22]
There is no escaping it, whenever we Unitarian Universalists begin to delve into the
mysteries of the sacredness of life, seeking the source of all-encompassing power
and infinite meaning or Truth, theology reverses direction, urging us toward a clearer
definition of human existence and interconnectedness and inter-responsibility, whether
our concept of God is ensconced in a sophisticated, scholarly explication of creative
process or in the metaphors of childhood.
So Robert Fulghum ended his little chapter on the question of God this way:
In my childhood I was told that God was all-powerful and lived far, far away. And
that I could not see Him until after I died. When I asked why, if God was so powerful,
there were children starving in Mexico, I was told it was the will of God and that
I should not worry about it. Instead, I should be concerned about making sure I didn't
attend the upcoming high school prom, because dancing was a sin and I should try
not to sin.
Now I am older. And I know that God is everywhere and in all things. There is nowhere
that God is not, even in me. I also know that starving comes from not having enough
food, and that is a human problem about which something can be done.
I know now that dancing comes from having much joy.
And when everyone has enough to eat, everyone will dance, especially Howard.
--p. 142, UH-OH
* * * *
My colleague, who, with time would become my friend, called me a "God driven man who
cannot find God." I still don't know what he meant. But over the decades my search
has driven me on. I still am not comfortable with the word "God." I still distrust
the human tendency to believe that once you can give a label or a name to something,
you have domesticated it and bent it to your will. The sacred, for me, is too wild
and vast and unknowable ever to be tamed or bent or labeled or named. But this I
have come to believe after the passage of all these driving years: There is in this universe
a process at work which is the source of all value and of every human good. This
process is the same force which exploded into being an entire universe out of the
void, out of a timeless point of singularity, the same force which set the stars to burning
in the vast emptiness of space, the same force which set the planets spinning around
how many stars, the same force which tamed the fire of those stars to the uses of
life and called it forth on this small planet and how many others.
The same process at work in our lives calls us to self-conscious awareness and to
responsible living in the context of an ever expanding understanding of this living
earth, and each other, and ourselves. This process is not in our control, nor has
it ever been nor will it ever be, but it is a process which has the power to transform us
as we cannot transform ourselves, to refine our vision and our understanding, to
deepen our compassion when we open ourselves to it, see ourselves as expressions
of its drive for self conscious awareness, understand ourselves as central to the process by
which meaning emerges and expands and grows.
And I have come to believe that the religious life is defined by a conscious commitment
to live in terms of that process, seeking always to enlarge the realm of understanding
and compassion and responsibility, knowing always that the sacred process is more than we can understand at any given moment and that no name or description will ever
be large enough or strong enough to capture the reality which continually incarnates
itself in the world and in every part of the world but which cannot be captured by
any words, which is comprehended if at all only in fleeting glimpses and half seen visions.
It is unlikely that I shall ever be comfortable with the word God. It makes me sound
as though I know more than I know, understand more than I understand, believe more
than I believe. But my friend is probably right; it is unlikely that I shall ever
cease the search.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word
on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
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