A letter to Michael……………..
Thank you, Michael, for identifying the TRUE gender of God as a ‘she’ ………whew! I was worried……………… actually God is not a she or a he….or both he and she…….but ultimately, not a t h i n g (or gender) at alllllllll………….god cannot be limited to any kind of thing and be the source of all things (why? Because a t h i n g is, by definition, boundaried, defined, limited…………a thing is a ‘this thing’ and not a ‘that thing’………god at least as far we usually speak about God is the source of all things……. Of everything…. and what we forget in this off-handed way of construing/constructing/(what the world calls “knowing,”) of God……….is that God cannot itself be merely any kind of t h i n g….God might best be considered ” no thing” and also thereby, God is the source of, nothing………..n o t h I n g……………in fact it is this quality as n o t h i n g that God becomes and allows God to be the source of all things, of every thing and no thing……….
when we look into the nature of things….a thing, some thing, all things, every thing, no thing (nothing) …….and consider that if the Universe is in fact, created, then it must be created, somewhere ‘down the line,’ from nothing…. or no thing…..from which some thing is born or created………..An observer of religions can assert that this realization….. that one of the ways of being for any entity to be God is this capacity to disappear into, to dissolve into, to become, nothing…….empty space in which new things can arise………….and this space of no thing then becomes the space of creation, the space of possibility, the possibility of possibility itself…… this realization that what we call God is at the source of all things , the empty space in which new things can arise, get created………has very useful application to the practices of organized religions, to spiritual practices in general and to how we conduct our lives.
Consider that nothing is the space of possibility, of creation………. then consider this aspect of, this capability of, God to become, to be nothing……….this aspect of God as nothing…..provides something powerful for us which is critical to our sense of God as source, or God as “the space of nothing” . This suggestion that God can be, at least at one level, the space of nothing in which all things arise (even if their arising happens through various pathways, one of which is human creations), this idea of God as the space of nothing can also be observed to be sometimes not well received by some organized/institutionalized religions, particularly in the instances where a religion or a religious group may have fallen into, and become part of, the trap of being identified as some kind of thing, some kind of identity (i.e., ego, survival, righteousness, insular bubbles, as in: “WE know and you don’t …. and you should or you must know and practice our one and only truthful path”) …When organized religions become identified as some kind of thing. attached to having the one and only fixed, absolute, eternal truth, the dogma, the mechanical and unthinking reading of scripture, the practice of blind faith and obedience…………can begin to take over and displace the openness and awe of being present to the possibility of God, or universal source, of a being beyond time and space, beyond any and all things and thingness.
By blind faith, I mean unthinkingly adopted and adhered to without critical thinking, reflection, and then choosing freely.
When worshipful religion falls into the trap of preserving, confusing, and collapsing the direct experience of what we might call God with the institutional Church, with its rules, practices, doctrines, and its budgets, whose intention and attention is on surviving, as an institution, or primarily enduring and persisting as an institution preserving its past memories, or “the glorious pasts”, just to survive, to just preserve the ideas or concepts or notions or memories of God, God merely as a concept, a notion ………….. well then, the ultimate, the transcendent, the direct, awesome, felt and sensed experience of being Present to God … the “mysterium tremendum” (tremendous mystery) … gets reduced to, collapsed into, cheapened into a concept, a memory, a slogan. The practice of becoming and being present to the felt, seen, heard presence of God can get reduced to merely repeating automatic, unexamined habits. In this “fallenness,” or confusing the direct experience of awe, of what we call God with the institutional Church, we can then lose the animating vitality, the spirit, the inspired breath (spiritus in latin means breath) and the openness to new expressions and new ways of participating that mark and express vital spirituality. Being present to what the German theologian, Rudolf Otto called, the “mysterium tremedum” (the tremendous ‘mystery’ from The Idea of the Holy), the awestruckness, the overwhelming majesty and magic of the Universe(?), of all creation, of God………….to be present to the whole of creation and its infinite particles and expressions…. past, present and future…….. is to be awestruck, mind-boggled, and I suggest that this awestruck-ness is at the heart of all authentic humility……not a humility like a well rehearsed homily or genuflection nor humility as unthinking nor as an expected social gesture… “ohhhh, I’m ever so humble” … but humility like you get in being close to death, or birth, or creation, or silence, or nature unadorned………quiet, awestruck, thankful.
What if we were to bring ourselves closer to the realm of possibility that God is, the discovery that God is, the presence that God is …Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, the spiritual worlds of all peoples…. and move away from God as some fixed, final and absolute truth, or answer, as if God is “out there” some where happening to us, being done to us. What if God is more a space than a thing, the space of possibility itself, of all creation, that we can explore, and discover, and inquire into, and practice, and bring into the world ….and thereby benefit the world in all the ways that collaborative partnership does, through creative inquiry, exploration, discovery, and ultimately the love of, the privilege of and the creative challenge of, being alive.
