What We Talk About When We Talk About God (7 page)

Now it's true that religion can lead people to be incredibly closed-minded, but the terms
open-minded
and
closed-minded
aren't usually applied accurately. To believe that this is all there is and we are simply collections of neurons and atoms—that's being closed to anything beyond that particular size and scope of reality.

But to believe that there's more going on here, that there may be reality beyond what we can comprehend—that's something else.

That's being open.

CHAPTER 3

BOTH

Now that we've explored a bit about the kind of universe we're living in and how we think about thinking about how we know what we know, we'll talk just for a bit about
how
we talk when we talk about God.

Have you ever heard someone confidently asserting this or that about God down to the most striking and exact detail and thought, “Who is this person to know that?” Or maybe it was the opposite—have you ever heard someone going on and on with great conviction about how it's all just a giant cosmic hairball and how could any human ever claim to actually know anything about God?

In the one case, it was the speaker's certainty that was unnerving;

in the other case, it was too much ambiguity that didn't sit well with you.

But in both cases, what we see is the importance of understanding that there's
what
you're saying, and then there's
how
you're saying it . . .

 

Let's say that you work in a large office, and one day you come back from lunch and there's a group of people gathered around the cubicle three down from yours, which belongs to Sheila from accounts payable. You wander over and learn that Sheila's boyfriend Simon has just proposed to her during a picnic lunch in a nearby park and she said yes. Everybody is happy for Sheila and they're taking turns examining her ring and Sheila can't stop smiling, and so you ask her, “Sheila, tell us about Simon.”

And so Sheila starts in: “Well, he's five-foot-ten, he drives a Toyota, he wears size nine and a half shoes, and he was born in Kentucky and he's left-handed and he's in a Tuesday night bowling league and he doesn't like mayonnaise . . .”

At some point while Sheila is telling you about Simon you probably think to yourself, “This is strange.”

You think this not because Sheila is lying or avoiding the question or distorting the truth, but precisely because she is
telling the truth
about Simon, things that can be objectively proven to be true. It's just that women who have gotten engaged an hour earlier don't usually feel the need to tell you whether or not their man likes mayonnaise.

Or let's say your car is making a loud ticking noise and so you take it to the repair shop. A mechanic looks under the hood, takes it for a drive around the block, and then comes out to the waiting room and tells you that the car “is in a bad mood—it's clearly got some issues it needs to work out.”

This is not helpful, because you want to know exactly what is wrong with the car, exactly what replacement parts are needed, how long it will take to fix it, and how much it's going to cost.

Or let's say you're having open-heart surgery, lying there on the table with your rib cage spread open, and you hear the surgeon say to one of the nurses, “Hey, gimme one of those scalpels over there—how about a feisty one with some attitude?”

Aside from the obvious question, “You're
awake
during open-heart surgery?” why would it disturb you to hear the doctor talk like this? Because you want to know that the surgeon knows exactly what scalpel she needs to do the work; you want to hear her ask for the “RQ8F7 double-edged Incisotron” or something like that.

There are, it's important to note, different kinds of language.

There is technical, precise language, the kind that surgeons and car mechanics use to be as objective as possible in naming exactly what is wrong, describing precisely what is needed, or accurately listing steps and procedures with great care and definition, as in this online discussion about transistor modules:

The part marked k2313 is a metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor[;] . . . a voltage on the oxide-insulated gate electrode can induce a conducting channel between the two other contacts called source and drain. It is a Toshiba 2Sk2313 . . .

Clear, unambiguous, with as little as possible that could lead somebody to think you were talking about something else. We use language like this in thousands of ways every day because without it, we wouldn't get the right doses of medicine, planes couldn't take off and land, and we wouldn't know which transistor module to use.

But when Sheila's going on about Simon, telling you facts and truths and being quite precise about exactly how tall he is and where he was born, something doesn't feel right, because you were expecting Sheila to say something less technical and factual and literal and more figurative and poetic—something like, “I feel like I finally found my other half.”

Technical language has limits. It can describe some things very well, but in other situations, like love, it falls flat. It's inadequate. It fails.

When we're betrayed, we say it feels like we've been kicked in the stomach.

When our child takes her first steps, we say that we're over the moon.

When the DJ plays just the right music, we say she blew the roof off the place.

Now the truth is, we weren't kicked in the stomach. We aren't over the moon; we're right here. And the roof is still firmly on the building.

Intense experiences and extreme situations—

like great pain and anguish,

or unspeakable joy and ecstasy—

need extreme, large, giantesque language because other kinds of words and phrases aren't enough.

Language is flexible, fluid, able to twist and morph in vast and varied ways. There are rants and poems and metaphors and parodies and stories and fables and analogies and similes and haiku (remember those?) and instruction manuals and palindromes . . .

When Jay-Z raps,

I'm not a businessman,
I'm a business, man

he's doing something really powerful
with a comma,
using it to evoke meaning and history and power. And it's funny.

All with two lines that are virtually identical.

When that old song begins,

   Sometimes I feel like a motherless child . . .

we all know that to be alive, you have to have been born from an actual mother. But there is a pain that comes from having a mother but not having a mother, the haunting ache of abandonment, the feeling of distance from the primal, nurturing embrace we know to be “mom.”

All that, in the first line of the song.

When George Mallory was asked why he climbed Mt. Everest, he replied, “Because it's there.”

Language soars and dips and sometimes gets right to the point and other times goes on and on and on with flourish and flair. Sometimes it describes accurately and completely complex and detailed concepts and mechanisms and processes, and other times language just isn't enough.

Recently my family and I were in the car when a friend called to tell us that the father of one of my son's friends had just killed himself. Every day for three years I'd seen that dad when I picked my kids up after school; we'd talked in the parking lot and on the sidelines of the football field and in our front yards countless times. And then he was gone.

Sometimes there aren't words.

Sometimes sentences and phrases can't do the moment justice.

Sometimes language fails,

and you're speechless.

So when we talk about God we're using language, language that employs a vast array of words and phrases and forms to describe a reality that is fundamentally
beyond
words and phrases and forms.

In the biblical book of Exodus, Moses is told to hide along a section of rock because God is going to pass by and Moses is going to get to see God's
back
. In one ancient commentary on this story, the best Moses gets is a glimpse of
where God just was
. This same Moses reminds the Hebrews that when they experienced God, they “saw no form of any kind.” In the New Testament it's written that God is the one “who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.”

There are limits to certainty because God, it's repeated again and again, is spirit. And spirit has no shape or form. Spirit, Jesus said, is like the wind. It comes and goes and blows where it pleases.

Words and images point us to God;

they help us understand the divine,

but they are not God.

For example, gender.

In the ancient world, it was observed that a woman became pregnant only when she'd been with a man. It was assumed, then, based on primitive, limited understandings of biology, that the man's contribution must be the essence of the life force and a woman's the place where that life force was carried and held and nurtured. God, it was believed, was the life force of the world, so God must be like a father.

Or take early agricultural settings, where women used hoes to break up the ground for planting. Women in those cultures were responsible for putting food on the table, and so the gods in those cultures were generally understood to be female. But then the plow was invented, which was pulled by an animal. When women used this new invention, it required significantly more physical effort, and as a result miscarriage rates increased. So men took over working the plow, which led to the gods being perceived as male.

These forms and expressions come and go over time because our conceptions of God and the images we use to picture and explain those conceptions are deeply shaped by the patterns, technologies, and customs of the world we live in.

And so there are masculine images of God—Jesus prayed to his “Father in heaven”—

and there are feminine images of God—

the prophet Isaiah quotes God saying,

“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast

and have no compassion on the child she has borne?

Though she may forget,

I will not forget you!”

When God is described as

father or

mother or

judge or

potter or

rock or

fortress or

warrior or

refuge or

strength or

friend or

lawgiver,

those writers are taking something they've seen,

something they've experienced, and they're essentially saying, “God is like
that
.”

It's an attempt to put that which is beyond language into a frame or form we can grasp.

An image of God doesn't contain God, in the same way a word about God or a doctrine or a dogma about God isn't God; it only points to God.

Whatever we say about God always rests within the larger reality of what we can't say;

meaning always resides within a larger mystery;

knowing always takes place within unknowing;

whatever has been revealed to us surrounded by that which hasn't been revealed to us.

When you hear about a teenage girl being kidnapped and sold into the sex trade, it makes you really, really angry, correct? It breaks your heart, right? And you know it: you
know
that it's wrong, evil, corrupt, vile, and violating to all of us in some way.

You're
sure
of it.

I know a man named Charlie who is in his late fifties. When he was fifty-five, he and his wife Kim became deeply grieved by how many orphans there are in the world. And so they started adopting kids from all over the globe. They currently have five children and they're in the process of adopting two more. When you see their family coming, it's like a mini United Nations. There is something tangibly divine about what they're doing.

We do know things—

we know them with every fiber in our being—

they're revealed to us,

they seize us and they won't let us go.

They haunt us,

they capture us,

they plant themselves deep in our hearts and

they don't leave.

So when we talk about God,

we're talking about our brushes with spirit,

our awareness of the reverence humming within us,

our sense of the nearness and the farness,

that which we know

and that which is unknown,

that which we can talk about

and that which eludes the grasp of our words,

that which is crystal-clear

and that which is more mysterious than ever.

And sometimes language helps,

and sometimes language fails.

 

Several points, then, about
how
we talk about God.

First, it's important for us to acknowledge that when we talk about God, we often find ourselves in the middle of one paradox after another.

Near and far,

known and unknown,

words and silence,

answers and questions,

that which is deeply mysterious and ambiguous and

that which is right in front of us as plain as day.

I point this out because the dominant consciousness of our world continues to perceive and process reality in mostly either/or categories—we want to know whose side you are on, which one is
the
answer, how the tension is going to be resolved, how the paradox will be eliminated.

But some truths don't fit in a twenty-second sound bite on television.

Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites; they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.

Back to paradox, and an observation about our world today: fundamentalism shouldn't surprise us. When a leader comes along who eliminates the tension and dodges the paradox and neatly and precisely explains who the enemies are and gives black-and-white answers to questions, leaving little room for the very real mystery of the divine, it should not surprise us when that person gains a large audience.

Especially if that person is really, really confident.

Certainty is easier, faster, awesome for fundraising, and it often generates large amounts of energy because who doesn't want to be right?