I’ve been very peaceful with my theology for some time. I start with the basic foundation that there is a God and that God loves us. Everything else grows from that premise. Everything must fit with the concept of a loving God.
So what’s the problem? It occurred to me a few days ago that the energy that I experience and what I call God could be the ‘collective unconscious’ of humanity. What if ‘God’ isn’t a conscious being or deity, but, rather the great cloud of ‘us.’ I’d rather believe that God is a benevolent entity, but how do I know? I won’t believe something just because someone said it’s so. I have to experience it for myself and it has to make sense to me. I thought I’d done that, but maybe not.
So… tell me… how do you come to believe that God exists? How do you know God is God and not just our higher selves?
My Answer:
I don’t know. And for me, that’s not a problem, it is as it should be. Not knowing is a prerequisite for faith. Or, rather, knowing that I don’t know, having the humility to know that I don’t know, is the prerequisite for faith.
There are a lot of the collected scriptures that teach us that when we think we know God, we had better watch out: God is going to surprise us. Like the bit from the book of Job that we will read in church on Sunday. Everybody in that story thinks they know God. Job’s friends think they know God. They consider all that Job has lost—all his children have died, all his wealth has been looted, and he is has become a sick, sad man—and they say to him, “Oh, man, you must have really messed up. Job, what have you done to made God so mad?” That’s a paraphrase, naturally.
Job thinks he knows God too, and he thinks that he has been treated unjustly. But when God finally speaks out of the whirlwind, God puts everybody in their place, saying, “You think you know me? You don’t know nothin’!” That’s a paraphrase too.
The fact that scriptures were written by people, who were doing their best to understand the unknowable, that in itself is an aid in interpretation. For thousands of years people have tried to understand God, and have told stories and written poems and songs to pass on to others the idea of God. Taken as a whole, the Bible, the Koran, the collected scriptures of the world's religions are perspectives on this mysterious concept of that presence that we sense, that in which we live and move and have our being, that breath that stirred the waters of the deep, that breath of life which is our beginning and our end.
So what if God is our “collective unconscious?” So what if God is the web of being that connects us to every living thing? So what if God is “our higher selves?” Those are all good metaphors. Metaphors are, by nature, both true and untrue. “A mighty fortress is our God,” is true and untrue. The experience of God can be like hunkering down in the castle keep during a battle, but not always. Sometimes God is an eagle that lifts us up out of danger. Sometimes God is a mother and I am a hungry infant, sometimes God is a shepherd and I am a lost sheep. Sometimes God is Ad-Aware and I am the hard-drive burdened with spy-ware and trojans—there’s an image too new for scripture, one which is probably already out of date.
I trust that God is. I believe that I will never know God perfectly, but that God is a worthy pursuit. What I have come to believe about God is that God is love, or the ability to love, or the quality that is love, that life-creating power. I believe that God smiles upon fairness, justice, mercy, kindness, whatever is good and pure and life-giving. I think God gets really pissed off at greed, and war, and waste, and meanness.
I believe that people live abundant life when we are part of the love of God. And I believe people are diminished when we fail to be loving. And I believe that whether people succeed or fail to love, as long as we live, we are undeniably connected to God, and in that connection is the potential for redemption, salvation, new life.
And I believe that we may continue in that relationship with God even when we cease to be, even in death, and afterwards. But I don’t know. And that is as it should be, for now.
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