Jim
Dant, an interesting and ecumenical blogger, says this about his experience of
God in the Church: “The moment someone
starts explaining God to me, I start to run.”
I think many of us can identify with his feelings. Why is it, though, that so many people feel
compelled to come up with some sort of explanation of who (or what) God is or
even isn’t? Why can’t God just be
God? I think that our Jewish friends got
it right, when they refused to write the word for God—“Yahweh” is a word that
in its truest sense cannot be spoken. We
will have none of that, so “Yahweh” it is.
The older I get, and sometimes it feels as if I am aging at the speed of
light, the easier it is for me to say, “Enough, already”—enough distraction
from what it means to live in God and explore mystery from a sense of awe,
wonder, reverence and respect.
At the risk or contradicting myself, I am going to use the word
“God”. We really have no way around
it. I could use a hand signal—something
like this…--but all of you would know that I was referring to what you and I
think of when we think of God. So many
times we hear people say, “God is A mystery” or “God is THE mystery”. God is neither. God is Mystery itself. This is not taking the easy way out, far from
it, in fact. We know plenty about God—we
know that God is the source of all life, in all life, and is the unknowable
power behind all life. But,
unfortunately, that has not historically been enough for the Christian
Church. When we speak of church, we
often talk about worship, education or spiritual formation and service or
mission. Our work, and I am speaking
historically here, has focused on gaining a certain amount of unanimity in
these areas—more or less depending on your church tradition. Homogeneity has mostly been sought; and,
folks who didn’t quite fit the mold were encouraged to conform in order to
belong. Church was where you went for
answers; and, for the most part, churches complied by attempting to answer some
very difficult questions.
Churches were considered ‘successful’ by the numbers of new folks
attending, being baptized, or participating in missions. Results, often known as ‘fruits of ours and
God’s labors, were treasured, tracked and talked about. When we begin to mature as a church and see
God as Mystery (capital M), we can begin to move beyond a results-oriented
ministry. Now, let me be the first to
say, “This is hard. Hard, hard, hard,
hard!” You get my point. It is hard because we are used to having numbers
on which we can count to prove our success.
If we have lots of folks on the path with us, we can assume that we are
on the right path. Yes? Well, maybe not. God as Mystery requires the church to think
in terms other than numbers and results.
What you can count becomes less important than what you can feel. We do not have to pretend that we have all
the answers. God, as Mystery so far
beyond what we can truly understand simply inspires us to share in the
experiencing of Mystery rather than the explaining of God. Worship takes on new meaning and focuses on
reverence, awe, silence. Education or
spiritual formation invites people to explore the Mystery, though never
promises easy answers, and service, both inside and outside of the church,
begins to lead us into the sharing of the Mystery which includes such things as
inclusivity, justice, and compassion.
This leads us to a very important question: how does one describe a church community that
has walked away from easy answers and has begun to explore God as Mystery? I believe that, first and foremost, it is a
courageous community. It is courageous
in its willingness to break the mold or the shop of easy answers and it is
courageous in its support of the members of the community as each, in his or
her own way, explores Mystery and finds one’s own experience of God. It is also a church that can tolerate,
embrace, and even celebrate difference.
If God is Mystery, then your experience and mine will not be necessarily
the same. In fact, God as Mystery, implies that knowing each other’s experience
is not a prerequisite for sharng the awe and wonder, also known as worship,
together. This church, then, places its
emphasis on inviting all into the circle of wonder and working together to eradicate the
injustice that keeps others from knowing the Mystery of God. For people, when they are consumed with mere
survival, have no way to experience the Mystery of God. Finally, it is a church whose priorities
insure that all will be cared for and counted as equal in and out of the
community. Justice grows naturally from
such a priority, as does care for the earth, and love for neighbor.
God as Mystery enables us to live and move and have our being in God’s
very Being. If we cease our frustrated
tries to define, delineate, and elaborate on the exact nature of God, we are
free to simply adore. Awe becomes the
predominant feeling in worship and silence takes us directly to the heart of
God. Rather than alienating us from God,
God as Mystery invites us directly into that Mystery. This is the only way to understand the
sayings of Jesus when he speaks of himself and the One who sent him as being
one. We know that Jesus was a child of
God; and, by watching him, by paying attention to the way he lived his earthly
life, we know of the union of Child with God and God with Child. That same union is ours when we accept that we, too, are Mystery. We can describe how the human body works, or
why the trees grow, or how the rain makes its ways back into the clouds. But try as we might, we can never describe
the power behind all these processes which taken together mean life. We miss the boat when we fail to understand
that our cells are one with the cells of the green tree frog and that the
delicate balance we call life depends on our knowing just that.
We err dangerously when we believe that we are looking at the
world or even the universe from the outside in.
The rain forests and the distant stars are not over there or out there
somewhere. They are one with our very
thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
Believing that humans are set-apart, different from other creatures and
creation, has led us directly to a precipice from which many fear there is no
return. This is not only a social,
economic, or scientific problem. It is
fundamentally a spiritual problem that we view ourselves as separate from the
Mystery. St. Augustine, yes, that St Augustine,
is believed to have said, “God is a
circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. Now,
if you are like me, you will have to think on that for a moment. Let’s think together. If God is a circle whose center is
everywhere, than, at any given time, you are at the center of the universe as
well. This is not the egotistical
childish belief that all of life rotates around us; it is, rather, the
recognition that our relationship in and to God changes the way we interact
with the rest of, well, everything. If,
as St. Augustine says, the circumference of the circle is nowhere, then there
is no place where the circle is not.
Just think about it for a moment.
It means that we can use every preposition that we know to describe
being in, with, through, between, among the Mystery. God is not in us like a blueberry is in a
muffin; God is in us like water in rain.
If
we were to become a church who worshipped a God without fences, this God of
Mystery, it would change the way we do everything individually and
communally. It would change the way we
view conflict because we would see the destruction inherent in conflict between
two or many who are all equally in the Mystery.
It would give us a sense of charity for those whose experience is
different from ours knowing that the descriptions may vary, but the Mystery is
bigger than all our descriptions. Fundamentally,
it would change the way we experience what we now call “the presence of
God”. It would allow us to sing all
kinds of songs, hear the sacred in all kinds of readings, experience the holy
in the lives of all kinds of people. It
would allow us to stop striving both individually and as a community. If I no longer have to seek something other
than what I already experience within my spirit, I can relax into the Mystery
and allow the Mystery to relax into me.
It’s about openness, openness to God, and to each other. May the fences around God continue to fall as
we explore more and more of God’s living energy and power in each of us. Do not be afraid, the God of Universal
Mystery and Love is inviting us to look around and see that we are already within. Amen and amen and namaste.
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