God has received quite a working over these past few weeks. September 11 was God's punishment of America said Jerry Falwell; "God Bless America" is sung during every 7th inning stretch in baseball games; "How could God allow this to happen?" ask others. What must "God" think of all this sudden attention?
At Thursday night's Building Your Own Theology class we drew pictures of God - four pictures actually: one of the God or Ultimate reality in our childhood; one in our youth, one in our pre-Unitarian Universalist adulthood and one in the present. This exercise was an attempt to encourage people - at least initially - to get out of their left lobe analytic, reasoning and intellectual mode and into their right lobe imaginative, emotional and experiential mode.
I introduced the exercise by telling the story of the little girl who was busily drawing a picture that she claimed was of God. When her mother pointed out that nobody knows what God looks like, the girl said, "They will when I'm finished."[1] No one in our class exuded such confidence, however, so we still don't know.
My own artistry depicted a bearded old man in the sky speaking to a believing little boy walking in some hills. I was a pious Universalist who believed in and repeated the Universalist mantra that God is love. It was this God who called me to the ministry at 14. The God of my adolescence had more to do with Nature, and I tried to draw sun and moon and stars, though this God and I had many conversations about what I was to do with my life - sometimes blinding flashes on the road to Macedon where I was a teen-age preacher.
Then came my third picture - college and theological school where I became a doubter, and even a seminary atheist who rejected all traditional accounts of deity. My humanism envisioned a world that didn't need God; human effort was all that was required. My easy God was gone. By this time I was also becoming intrigued with the relationship between science and religion, and so my picture was of the solar system - with a particular focus on the third planet from the sun.
I remember meeting Harlow Shapley, the Harvard astronomer whom I heard lecture at St. Lawrence University. When asked to define God in ten words, he said, "All Nature is God and all God is Nature." His questioner responded, "That's only 9 words." To which Shapley quickly said, "Amen." I was beginning to find that scientists contributed more to my understanding of Ultimate Reality than theologians.
Science fascinates me - not laboratory research or scientific tomes - but the philosophy of science - science has been for me one important signal of divinity - an important avenue to religious experience.
Out of this understanding came a current rendering of my conception of Ultimate Reality - the fourth picture of God. I drew several symbols all encompassed in a spiral which suggests that perhaps there was no beginning and no end to Creation, that such concepts simply reveal the limits of human thought. One symbol I drew was of infinity, to indicate that God is too large a concept for me to grasp.
Here I am in good company. Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of our 19th century Unitarian ancestors, was talking with a seminary professor one day. After a stream of Emersonian conversation, the professor began to wonder whether the sage of Concord held any religious convictions whatever, and put the question squarely: "Mr. Emerson, do you believe in God?" "Really," Emerson replied, "it is beyond my comprehension."[2] My easy God was gone.
Directly below the infinity symbol I drew a bursting ball to represent the original molecule in the Big Bang of Creation - now the favored theory of scientists. Lately scientists have been having some quite amazing thoughts about the beginning of things. Recent studies bolster the Big Bang theory which contends the earth is 14 or 15 billion years old (a billion here and a billion there - pretty soon you're talking real time).
Astronomers talk of telltale reverberations from outer space - "the music of creation." The cosmos began, they say, as a split second explosion the reverberations of which are still with us. They further claim that only 5% of the content of the universe is ordinary matter - galaxies, people, computers, cats and so on. The rest is "dark matter" and an even more enigmatic "dark energy" that causes galaxies to rush apart from one another at an accelerating rate, with unknown consequences for the cosmic future.
Some scientists say that 1% of the static picked up on a TV antenna is an echo of the Big Bang, an awesome thought as you tune in the football game between the San Diego Chargers and the Buffalo Bills today.[3]
In the beginning, matter mattered. Some physicists believe the universe survived the Big Bang because of a violation of nature's laws - a fundamental breakdown in the symmetry of matter and anti-matter. With symmetry, matter (a positive charge) and anti-matter (a negative charge) should have wiped matter out. But matter won out in this asymmetry. One science writer said that, "Physicists love symmetry because it is a sign that all is right with the universe, or at least with their explanation of it. . . . It's an intriguing notion that we exist because of a flaw in the universal mirror."[4]
Beside the awesomeness and mystery of the Big Bang, the beautiful but primitive myth of the biblical creation pales. And so, are we to think that Creation is really a kind of Sacred Chaos rather than the careful plan of a conscious cosmic designer? I think so. But that question - among many others - prompted me to place a large question mark at the top of my drawing of God circa 2001. That is the agnostic in me. Who am I to know the secret of such mysteries in which we live and move and have our beings? My easy God was gone.
At the bottom of my rendering of this Ultimate Reality - God - I drew a few people living on a great ball. These are tiny stick figures, almost invisible beneath the vast and impersonal sketches above. I was moved to make that part of my picture by a legendary conversation between an astronomer and a theologian. The astronomer said, "Astronomically speaking, we are negligible," to which the theologian replied, "Astronomically speaking, we are the astronomers."
Where does this leave me with regard to God? What is the nature of my "conversations with God"? Some author is making a mint by purporting to convey the gist of his personal dialogue with the Creator. I envy him in more ways than one. There are so many in our midst who not only claim to speak with God regularly, but presume to know exactly what God is. I am reminded of Otto von Bismarck who said that "he believed firmly and deeply in a God who had the remarkable faculty of always agreeing with him."
However, I am taken with what has been called "humility theology." I am not so quick to think that the Creator of the Cosmos speaks directly to me, that I know God's will. I recall reading about the man speaking to Abraham Lincoln about the Civil War. "We trust, sir, that God is on our side." Lincoln replied: "It is more important to know that we are on God's side." He might have added, "If we can be sure we know what God's side is."
I'm somewhat more taken with the Jewish tradition and its human/divine encounters. The story is told of Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev that once on Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the year when all sins are confessed, the tailor, one of the most devout members of the community, was absent. Concerned, the rabbi left the synagogue and went to the tailor's home. To his surprise he found the tailor looking at a piece of paper before him on the table.
"What's the matter?" asked Levi Yitzhak.
"Oh, everything's fine," replied the tailor. "As I was getting ready to attend the service I made a list with two columns. At the top of one I wrote my name and at the top of the other I wrote, 'God of all the Universe.' Then, one by one, I began to list my sins. 'Cheated Goldman out of a pair of trousers.'
And in God's column I noted God's omission: 'Little girl died of diphtheria.' Then the next sin, 'Lost my temper with my children,' and in God's column, 'I heard there was a famine in another country."' And so it went. The tailor showed the rabbi the completed list. "And for every sin I had committed during the past year, God had done one too. So I said to God, 'Look, we each have the same number of sins. If you let me off, I'll let You off!'
But the story doesn't end there. When the rabbi looked at the paper his face grew red and he scolded his friend: "You fool! You had Him and you let Him go!"
If I were to be in direct conversation with God I would surely ask him the question posed by Job in the Hebrew scriptures and in the millennia since: why do good people so often suffer and evil people so often prosper? I would not accuse God of allowing the evil of September 11, chastising deity for not intervening. I have long since dropped the notion that God is a Cosmic Lifeguard who intervenes in human affairs.
My understanding of God - or Ultimate Reality - is what Albert Camus called the "benign indifference of the universe." This is a blessed place to be - we are lucky to be alive in such a world - but that world has no particular or personal obligation to us.
As we read in the Bible, "The rain falls on the just and on the unjust." Nature is no respecter of persons.
My ministerial colleague Max Coots has penned an old satirical version of the doxology which critiques the view that attributes all power to God and illustrates the point:
"Praise God from whom all cyclones flow,
Praise Him when rivers overflow...
Praise Him who tears down house and steeple,
Who sinks the ships and drowns the people."[5]
But that is rather cynical. There is a little limerick that catches up a more playful spirit about Ultimate Reality in the world. We all know the question - if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it fall, is there sound? Hence these words that put humanity in its proper place as creature, not Creator.
"A student once remarked, 'God
Must find it exceedingly odd
That this sycamore tree
Simply ceases to be
When there's no one about on the quad.'
And the reply: 'In re. what you thought to be odd,
I am always about on the quad,
So this sycamore tree
Never ceases to be.
Sincerely, Yours, faithfully, God."
My own "conversations with God," if they can be called that, are quite different. After all, how does one hold a conversation with an impersonal cosmic creativity which permeates the universe? I do not understand God to be some cosmic "intelligence" because there are too many random events, too many natural disasters, too many twists and turns in cosmic evolution and human history to think that a single intelligence planned it all. If that be the case, God would be a candidate for some serious therapy.
I full well understand the human need to be in communication with that which is larger than the self. The poetic use of God as a foil for human communication is powerful. In literature and hymnody God is a symbol that can inspire. My own use of God language is more poetry than theology. My view is like that of the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich who once wrote that "In all expressions of gratitude toward others, the object of our thanks is usually visible. . . . But there is also gratefulness that is . . . without a definite object towards which to turn. We are simply grateful. . . . And so it remains within us, a state of silent gratefulness."[6]
I am increasingly taken by the idea that in our time the theological issue is not the existence or non-existence of God - as if that could be proved or disproved. It is, rather, our capacity to experience the divinity in which we daily walk. Reading Genesis I find to be interesting - even moving - to think that early humankind had such a poetic view of Creation. Reading 21st century science leaves me awe-struck, amazed that I am alive to begin to understand the miracle of being at all. I recall one of my early church school curricula that has so powerfully shaped my view of Ultimate Reality - "how miracles abound." Miracles to me are not supernatural; they are stunningly natural.
The real miracle is not that some prescient God became lonely and went about the business of creation. The real miracle is the incredibly rich and complex and mysterious story of the Cosmos itself. The real miracle, for me, is not believing in the existence of a God to whom prayer can be said, heard and answered. The real miracle is simply being aware that every day we live is in itself a miracle - and responding to that miracle with awe, wonder, praise, appreciation, and some sense of obligation to hold up the human end of our bargain with the cosmos - of which we are, after all, a member.
To be more specific. One of life's great joys for me is driving through the Bristol Hills, which are home to me. Reared on Baptist Hill, I grew up in the local Universalist Church. My minister in those days, The Rev. Harry Wright, almost always opened services with the 121st Psalm, "I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." My father is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, which overlooks a panoramic view of the hills. I want to have some of my ashes scattered there because the place is so important to me and I want to be part of it.
The trees are turning now and each successive trip adds color to the overall palette. I love the sweep as the road curves, the dips and climbs the car makes and the unexpected scenery along the way. I often meet deer, one so tame that grazing beside the road she barely noticed me - as if to say "this is my space - I'll let you pass if you're quiet." There is something very soothing about those hills - undisturbed by the calamities of the human world. Memories are stored there. Beauty reigns the whole year long. When people ask "what sustains your spiritually in this troubling and troubled time?" my initial response is "the Bristol Hills of home" - one of my "conversations with God."
I define myself theologically as a mystical religious humanist - one who relates in gratitude to the mystery of being, one who seeks to create human value in response to that mystery, one who understands that we apprehend reality not only through our mind and senses, but also through our heart and soul. My conversations with God - if I can call them that - are for the most part wordless - experiences that probe the mystery beneath the everydayness of things.
And so I find the Unitarian poet e. e. cummings catches up for me what being a mystical religious humanist means - understanding his God-talk as poetry of the soul. And so, with e. e. cummings I can say exuberantly:
"i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)"
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