The Mystery of God

“Tell me,” said the atheist, “is there really a God?”

Said the Master, “If you want me to be perfectly honest with you, I will not answer.”

Later the disciples demanded to know why the Master had not answered the question, “Is there a God?”

“Because his question is unanswerable,” said the Master.

“So you are an atheist?”

“Certainly not. The atheist makes the mistake of denying that of which nothing may be said.”

After pausing to let that sink in, he added, “and the theist makes the mistake of affirming it.”

(Awakening, Conversations with the Master, by Anthony DeMello, nos. 26- 7)

“We gather in worship to contemplate the mystery of God,” says the website of All Souls UU in New York. Why? Why should we contemplate the mystery of God? I would venture to guess that 30% of you sitting here this morning consider yourselves to be atheists. Maybe it’s greater. Maybe it’s 50 or even 60 percent. If you described the God in which you do not believe, probably I would say, “I don’t believe in that God either.”

My colleague Tony Larsen says we must talk about God with our children, because not talking about God is like thinking that if we never talk about sex, our children will never discover it. God is out there, on the airwaves and in the digits, and we need to tell our children what we think about God, rather than leaving them at the mercy of our neighbors and televangelists. So, that’s one reason: for the children.

But what about ourselves? Why does the God concept not go away? Is it because, as Sartre said, “There is a God-shaped hole in each of us?” Or is there something that contemplating the mystery of God does for us. I could quote to you from numerous books, but perhaps it would be more helpful if I just tell you about my own experience.

Like many of you, I wandered through the stages of child-like belief and then agnosticism and then convinced atheism, and back into what I can only call some form of mysticism. If you asked me to draw a picture of God, I would draw a picture of the Universe. But even that would feel incomplete. It is impossible to draw all the dark matter and dark energy of the universe. It is impossible to draw what was there or happened before the great inflation, (aka Big Bang). So far as we know the universe is infinite, and it was surprising this week to hear that the galaxies are moving away from each other at a faster rate than previously thought.

Teilhard De Chardin, a Jesuit with a scientific mind, blessed matter because in “overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards of measurement [it] reveal[s] to us the dimensions of God.” The dimensions of God. What an impossible concept. God is usually thought to be infinite, “who was and art and evermore shall be”, as we sang a few minutes ago. I doubt that we will ever know all the “dimensions of God.” We can only imagine and speculate and share our own experience.

Today I’ll share with you some of the ideas about God which intrigue me most. I’m not asking you to “believe.” I’m simply inviting you to contemplate the mystery, or maybe I should say mysteries. There are many mysteries about God. It is a mystery that some people are haunted by the “god” questions and others are indifferent. Some scientists now think it’s because some of us have the “god gene” and some of us do not.

One of the ideas about God which intrigues me most comes from Sally McFague. She tells us the physical universe is God’s body, and just as we are more than our bodies, so God is more than the physical universe. God is more 2

like a process – the dance of energy becoming matter and matter becoming energy. This is similar to Gordon Kaufman’s idea that God is the totality of all the creativity in the universe.

Soon these ideas grow almost too large to wrap our minds around them. Can your mind reach to the infinity of the universe?

When we ask if people “believe” in God, I think we may be asking the wrong question. A better question might be “how do you experience God?” Or perhaps you never have. Or perhaps you have had an experience which some would label an experience of God and others would simply call “a peak experience,” or a “unitive experience.” Usually we are profoundly affected by such experiences. But just because we have had such an experience once, it does not mean it will ever come again. Doris Grumbach wrote of that in her book An Absence of Presence.

In the back of our hymnal is a reading by Thomas Wolfe in which he says, “All things belonging to the earth will never change.. . Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.” I fear, Thomas that you are wrong. How can we believe the earth will endure forever? We do not know how it will end, but if the galaxies continue to fly apart, when the sun burns out, earth will not endure. And we may use our nuclear technology to blow it and ourselves up long before that happens. Or, perhaps, as the ancient Hindus believed, there are great contractions which then result in great inflations once again.

So, who needs God, why do we need to contemplate the mystery of God? And some of you are probably saying at this point, “I don’t.” It’s true, we can be good without god. We can find a set of principles and make them the center of our lives. In large part, this is what Unitarian Universalism attempts. And yet, there remain those nagging questions when we have competing values. Why does this principle prevail over that one?

One of my touchstone ideas of God comes from Ranier Maria Rilke, who encouraged us to think of God not as “a being,” but as “a direction,” and the

direction is “the best that we can conceive.” There’s a lot of room under that umbrella. We could ask, “the best of what?” The “best about what?”

What is the best world you can conceive? What is the best human society you can conceive? What is the best ecology you can conceive? Will that vision guide your living? Will you be devoted to it? Commit to it? Work tirelessly to bring it into being?

Emerson cautioned that we will all worship something, and that “what we are worshipping we are becoming.” Why would we worship anything? The word “worship” conjures up for me an image of a person bowing down before a statue. If we look a little deeper, however, we find the word to mean, “to attribute worth.” Worship is an answer to the question, “What is of ultimate worth to you?” And that becomes your god, the object of your devotion, the constructor of your intentions. Is Life of ultimate worth? Whose Life? Is there something worth dying for? Living for?

We know that all things pass away. Moth and rust do corrupt. Our bodies come from earth and return to it. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” But the animating spirit within us, our souls, sometimes outwit the moth and rust -- for a while. Few of us will attain enough fame to live on in the memories of others for eternity. So, in spite of our “longing for being,” we have no means of achieving it for ourselves for more than our three-score and ten years.

Thus, we are not ultimate. We are a poor symbol of ultimate reality. Unless, unless, there is something in us, of us which partakes of that larger animating spirit. Brahma, the Hindus say, is universal consciousness, and there is a portion of that universal consciousness within us (Atman). Sometimes we speak of it as the “divine seed.” God becomes human and humans become divine, as the Trinitarians likes to say.

The only way we can talk about God is through metaphor, and the metaphors we choose say a lot about how we view God. My favorites are “one light, many windows,” or the kaleidoscope, which is actually the same. And

lately, I’ve been thinking about the metaphor of the disco ball where the light bounces off of many surfaces. We know there is light in the universe; we even know how it comes to us. But the light we see is determined by the window through which we see it, or the pattern of glass in the kaleidoscope. But why is there light instead of darkness? Why any light at all?

Forrest Church says for years he divided the world into “rational and irrational,” totally missing the “trans-rational.” He writes,

By sheer rationality alone we cannot come close to comprehending the mystery of being alive and having to die. Life is a miracle that can’t be explained without explaining it away. Our most profound encounters lead inexorably from the rational to the trans-rational realm.

Many leading scientists are ahead of us in this regard. Some recent discoveries in physics and cosmology make no apparent sense according to the known canons of rationality Probing the mysteries of the universe and the mind, researchers on the cutting edge of knowledge find themselves moving freely between the rational and trans-rational realms. Where does that leave the poor camp followers, who believe in science but don’t embrace mystery? Having traded God for truth, they are left with neither. (Page 125, The Cathedral of the World.)

There is that of life and experience that cannot be accounted for rationally. Our minds are structured to find cause and effect, but that is only a structure that we impose on them. Reality is much larger. Transcending rationality, we enter the “realm of myth and parable, of poetry and paradox.” And to be healthy and whole, we need this realm as much as we need the truth and knowledge ascertained by science. Science tells us “what” and sometimes “how things came to be,” but it tell us very little about “should” or “wants” or “desires.” It can be used to create the best that we can conceive, or the worst.

I’m not asking you to “believe” in God. I’m inviting you to “contemplate the mystery of God.” Belief is giving mental assent to something that is not yet or

perhaps cannot be “proven.” Contemplation doesn’t make that leap. Contemplation waits, openly.

Time for another of DeMello’s stories.

The disciples were full of questions about God.

Said the master, “God is the Unknown and the Unknowable. Every statement about God, every answer to your questions, is a distortion of the truth.”

The disciples were bewildered. “Then why do you speak about him at all?”

“Why does the bird sing?” said the master.

De Mello explains the story this way:

The bird sings, he says,

“not because it has a statement, but because it has a song.

The words of the scholar are to be understood. The words of the master are not to be understood. They are to be listened to as one listens to the wind in the trees and the sound of the river and the song of the bird. They will awaken something within the heart that is beyond all knowledge.

(From The Song of the Bird, pages 3-4).

What awakens your heart? Is it the song of the bird? Or the sound of the river? Or the song of the symphony? Or the suffering of those around you? Or the sense of awe you feel when you stand upon the mountain or gaze on those pictures of galaxy upon galaxy, drifting in the vastness of space?

In the form of the Eternal, the Alpha and Omega, the World Without End, God seems rather remote and abstract. I’m not sure that God has much to do with how we live. Even if that God awakens our awe and our wonder, how does it touch our hearts. How does it affect our intentions? How does it change how we live our lives? How does it have us relate to the creation? To what came before our births and to what comes after? 6

Ultimately, all relating is personal, and it is in God’s personal form that we relate to God. That relationship may be one of chastisement as well as forgiveness, challenge as well as love, a source of fear as well as courage.

“Precious Lord, Take My Hand” was Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite hymn. It illustrates God in a personal mode. The opening hymn’s “who was and art and evermore shall be,” illustrates God’s impersonal mode. For King, “Precious Lord” was a source of courage and solace as he faced being beaten and ultimately killed for his work to bring equality and justice to people of color.

Similarly, as Forrest Church approached death because of esophageal cancer, he wrote:

God is what sustains me. I am connected umbilically, I feel, with God’s grace and power. It’s not an omnipotent God. God didn’t do this to me. God doesn’t throw babies out of third-story windows or cause tsunamis. God is that which is greater than all and yet present in each. When that which is present in you relates to that which is present in all, you are sustained. You are billowed on the ocean of divinity and made safe. There’s a great degree of safety; in being a part of, rather than being apart from, the ground of your being. (The Cathedral of the World. Page 172).

The “ground of being” was Paul Tillich’s term for God. It can seem rather abstract, distant, cold. I think Tillich was trying to devise a term which addressed the question, “Out of what does being arise?” And while Being encompasses us, it also encompasses everything which ever was, is or will be. It is both personal and universal. We are persons, and there is that of God or Ground of Being, or the Holy, or Spirit in all of us. It really doesn’t matter what you call it, except that it’s hard to have a conversation because we are always trying to define our terms so that we can pin down meaning, when just maybe what we ought to be doing is letting meaning expand.

The poet Kabir wrote:

There is a Secret One inside us; 7

The planets in all the galaxies

Pass though his hands like beads.

That is a string of beads one should look at with luminous eyes.

(as found in The Enlightened Heart, page 74)

When Forrest Church was asked if God is personal he replied, “I am a person, so I relate to the personal part of God’s amplitude. God is so much more than a person, however. Otherwise, God becomes an idol.” ( Cathedral of the World, 173)

So, yes, for me God is personal in the sense that I relate personally to God, but that is only one small facet of God. Most of God is hidden from me. And at times, at “dark-night of the soul” times, God may remain hidden from me completely. At those times, I have no choice but to wait for God’s return.

I believe in God today not because it is “rational.” It isn’t rational. There is no scientific basis for believing in God. I believe in God, I know that which I call God, because of experiences I have had

• --a vision which propelled me into ministry, and about which my catholic friend astoundingly pronounced “Oh, you saw an angel.”

• A voice which said, “I want you to take better care of yourself because I have more work for you to do.”

• A voice which said, “Do not abandon this child,” when I was at the end of my rope with my daughter and contemplating getting a room for her at the YWCA.

• A woman who died after a long period of being in a coma, the night after I spoke to her daughter about the prayer of relinquishment.

None of these experiences fit into my rational world view. But I can make sense of them, make peace with them as part of a larger mystery, if I imagine a God who is greater than all and yet present in all. Presence is the word which seems to best describe my experience of God. I experience God as a Presence. “Praising God” is simply my heart overflowing with gratitude that I live.

I’m still spiritually immature enough that I alternate between an orientation to this Presence and living on the surface of life, driven by my ego. But through practice, through commitment to trying over and over, calling myself back to that deepest place within, I achieve a greater habit of prayer – not of asking for things, but of being open to that which the Presence asks of me. Not tarrying on the mountaintop of ecstasy, but simply seeking to walk in steadfast love along the paths of everyday.

Don’t believe in God. Don’t define God. Just stay open. Contemplate the mystery.

Rev. Linda Hoddy

October 9, 2011

Saratoga Springs, New York