“God”
Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
- Jesus, in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.
The word God is a funny-sounding German word. I don’t always like it. My grandfather could say it in a way that sounded truly awesome. He’d stretch out the o, as if there was a macron over the top (Gōd). It sounded like the seas were rolling. He meant it. He knew God as the great, thunderous horizon of his life.
Most Westerners think of God as the Old Man in the Sky. Think Zeus, Jove, or God the Father. Even if we reject this image as false, or want to amend it as partial, or don’t believe in a guiding transcendent reality, it’s still deeply, unconsciously ingrained.
The word “God” is so freighted. In a sense, we know too much about God. Karl Rahner, perhaps the greatest Roman Catholic theologian of modern times, often preferred the term “Mystery”.
Christianity believes certain things about reality, life. None of these require us to use the word “God”. If we have to speak, we might try out Rahner’s “Mystery” for a change. Other words I like, in which I can hear the seas rolling, include:
Eternal Spirit, Boundless Love, the Presence, Light, Eternal Beloved, Father and Mother of us all.
(Please add your favourite alternatives in the comments below!)
Everyone is probably a fundamentalist in some way or other. Mine is this: God is close at hand. We can experience God directly. It’s easy to say but often harder to realize. That’s my simple criterion for all spiritual practice: does this take me closer to experiencing the Presence? If not, I might want to think of chucking it out.
It’s amazing how often I/Christians/human beings would rather talk about God than turn to the Presence.
I sit down to meditate. I suddenly think: “God”, that’s a good idea for a blog post! I spend the next ten minutes thinking about the new blog post.
It’s as if someone we’ve always longed to meet is finally at our table, gazing at us directly, patiently waiting. What’s more, they’re strangely familiar, yet we can’t bring ourselves to look at them. Perhaps we believe, as Jacob once did, that such meetings aren’t wise or humanly possible. We’re so nervous, disbelieving, numb, or overwhelmed, that we turn away to something banal instead, or turn to our thoughts about.
