What We Talk About When We Talk About God (9 page)

When they spoke of the
ruach
of God, they weren't talking about something less real; they were talking about what happens when something becomes more real right before your eyes.

When they spoke of
ruach,
they weren't talking about an abstract realm somewhere else; they were talking about the giant megaphone parked one millimeter from your ear, announcing to you in clearly pronounced, unmistakable sounds that
this is real
and it is happening and it is not to be denied or dismissed.

When they spoke of
ruach,
as the poet does in the first lines of the Bible, they were talking about the very life force that brings everything into existence, the presence of God within the world, dwelling in every created being, present to everyone and everything all the time.

They repeatedly spoke of this presence of God everywhere in all places, events, and beings. As one of the Psalm writers asked,

Where can I go from your spirit,
where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens,
you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths,
you are there . . .

(It's important to note that the Hebrews were careful not to say that God
is
the flower or sunset or pasta or lump in the throat—they didn't say God
is
creation, because they understood that in giving life to everything, God also gives creation freedom to be whatever it's going to be, with all of the possibilities and potentials for good and bad and beauty and chaos and love and loss that that freedom might lead to.)

All of which leads me back to the start, to where we began, to the simple, straightforward belief that God is with us.

I believe God is with us,

around us,

beside us,

present with us in every moment.

The question, then,

the art,

the task,

the search,

the challenge,

the invitation is for you and me to become more and more the kind of people who are
aware
of the divine presence, attuned to the
ruach,
present to the depths of each and every moment, seeing God in more and more and more people, places, and events, each and every day.

Several thoughts about this seeing.

First,
what our experiences of God do at the most primal level of consciousness is jolt us into the affirmation that whatever
this
is, it matters.
This person, place, event, gesture, attitude, action, piece of art, parcel of land, heart, word, moment—it matters.

When my wife Kristen was fifteen, she went on her first date with a guy she knew from school. He came to her house, picked her up, they went to a movie, and then he drove her homeward. Her family lived in the desert at the time, and on the way home, on a remote stretch of road several miles from her house, a drunk driver coming the other way crossed the centerline and hit them head-on. The cars were totaled and Kristen and her date were rushed in an ambulance to the hospital. Her parents, who were called by the first responders, quickly got in their car and headed for the hospital, down the very same road Kristen and her date had just been driving on. Several miles from their house Kristen's parents saw a commotion up ahead in the road—commotion that they soon realized was due to the car their daughter had been riding in, which hadn't yet been removed from the road. And so they passed by the smashed relic of a car their daughter had been in moments earlier when she was hit head-on by a drunk driver going way over fifty miles an hour.

My mother-in-law Judie told me that it's the first time she'd ever seen Kristen's dad with a tear in his eye.

I tell you this story because Kristen's father has always loved his daughter, and at any point in her life if you'd asked him if she mattered to him he would have said, “Yes, of course.” I imagine as well that if you'd ever asked him if she could matter any more to him, he would have said, “No, I can't imagine how.” And yet we can safely assume that in that moment, as he drove by the wreckage of that car with a tear in his eye, his daughter somehow mattered
more
to him than before.

It's like there's a scale from 1 to 10, and you always would have sworn that someone or something mattered to you with a 10. But then you almost (or you actually do) lose her or him or it or them, and suddenly your heart is filled with a 17 or a 39 or a 4,291 kind of mattering. New capacities, ones you didn't know were possible before, open up inside of you.

Sometimes you realize that something that
didn't
seem to matter to you actually
does
matter, other times something that mattered to you suddenly finds a way to matter even
more
to you, but every time something within you
expands.

The ancient Hebrews had a word for this awareness of the importance of things. They called it
kavod.
Kavod
originally was a business term, referring to the heaviness of something, which was crucial in weights and measures and the maintaining of fairness in transactions. Over time the word began to take on a more figurative meaning, referring to the importance and significance of something.

Kavod
is what happens when you're exchanging the usual “How are yous?” with a person you see regularly, only on this particular day she doesn't respond with her normal “Fine, and you?” but instead says, “Not good”—and suddenly everything changes. Now you ask her why she
isn't
good and she tells you and you quickly find yourself in the midst of her pain and you feel what she's feeling and you hurt like she hurts and the conversation is no longer brief and shallow like it has been for years, because now it
weighs
something, it is significant, it matters.

She matters;

you matter;

the fact that she decided to be honest with you matters; the thing that is happening between you matters.

That's
kavod.

Kavod
is what happens when you're trying to talk someone out of suicide and you keep insisting that his life matters. You're trying to find better ways to explain it and you're begging and pleading and persuading and doing your best to convince him not to go through with it—and you keep coming back to the conviction you have that life matters, even though that sounds so simple and
duh
and obvious in the moment.

It's what happens when you meet up with someone who has just shaved his head and you make a joke about it and he tells you that it's because a friend of his is going through chemo and his shaved head is a sign of solidarity—and suddenly you're staring at that shiny head in a whole new way.

That's
kavod.

We live in a
lite
world—one that bombards us from thousands of directions with advertisements and escape in every conceivable form and television shows about people doing mindless things and elevators that play mind-numbing versions of songs we used to like before we heard them a million times. This noise, in all its visual and psychic forms, can numb us, making this day feel like it's
without weight
because it's just like all the others as they all run together.

But
kavod, kavod
is something else.

Kavod
is serious—not in an overbearing, stilted kind of way but in a sacred, holy kind of way. The word is often used in the scriptures to refer to God's
glory
—that which happens when the monotony is pierced, the boredom hijacked, the despair overpowered by your sense that something else is going on, just below the surface, something that's bigger and wider and deeper and more powerful than anything you could begin to imagine. Something that reminds you of your smallness, frailty, and impermanence. It's that gut-level awareness you're seized by that tells you, “Pay attention, because this matters.”

When we're talking about God, we're talking about every single one of those moments—whether they're Earth-shatteringly loud and large or infinitesimally small and whisper-like, mere slivers you inadvertently stumble upon—

moments when you are convinced, even if you've been burned and

let down and

betrayed countless times—

that cynicism does not have the last word, that life is not random or meaningless or empty, but that what you do and how you feel and what you say and where you go and what you make of this life you've been given
matters
.

This realization—that things matter—leads us to a
second particular response
our brushes with
ruach
provoke within us, one that takes me to a small city in Virginia I recently visited for the first time.

As I drove up to the town square, I noticed that it was crowded with tents full of people who were camping out to protest the growing economic inequality in our country. Later that evening, a number of the protesters came marching through the center of town, shouting and chanting and singing about injustice and poverty and greed and the ways that those things tear at the fabric of our common life together.

Shortly after that I was talking with a friend who had just recently joined a food co-op where participants pay a monthly fee and then receive delivery of a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and grains from local farms. She was raving about the quality and freshness of the food and how much less the food had to travel because it was locally sourced and how that cut down on the carbon footprint and how that was teaching her about the farming community that was just a few miles from where she lived.

And then shortly after that, I ran into a young couple who were toting around their newborn son and I did what we all do—I made the obligatory comments about how cute he was and how much he resembled his mom and dad, and then I inevitably grabbed his little hand and held it up and said, “It's so small!” as if I were surprised.

Why do I always do that? Was I expecting his hand to be large? I bet you do the same thing.

You hold up that hand and you stare at it and you talk about how small it is and what a marvel it is and how you can't get over the miracle of new life, etc., etc. Why do we do this?

We do this because it's not just about the baby.

We hold up the baby's hand and marvel at it because it reconnects us with the wondrous mystery that is our own life.

New life
is deeply moving and mysterious

because

all life
is deeply moving and mysterious.

We hold that newborn baby's hand up for the same reason that protesters march and people join food co-ops—because
we have an intuitive awareness that everything is ultimately connected to everything else, and I believe that is one more clue to who it is we're talking about when we talk about God.

How we eat is connected to how we care for the planet which is connected to how we use our resources

which is connected to how many people in the world go to bed hungry every night

which is connected to how food is distributed

which is connected to the massive inequalities in our world between those who have and those who don't which is connected to how our justice system treats people who use their power and position to make hundreds of millions of dollars while others struggle just to buy groceries

which is connected to how we treat those who don't have what we have

which is connected to the sanctity and holiness and mystery of our human life and their human life and his little human life

which is why we hold up that baby's hand and say to the parents, “It's just so small.”

There's an ancient Jewish prayer that begins,

Hear, O Israel:
the L
ORD
our God,
the L
ORD
is
one
.

One is the English translation for the Hebrew word
echad,
which refers to a unity made up of many parts. The oneness the Shema prayer refers to is important because it makes a clear distinction between God and everything else that exists—preserving the beauty and transcendence and otherness of God while at the same time speaking to our sense that all of the diversity and difference and pulsating creativity we know to be life comes from a common, singular source and center who is one in a way that nothing else is one.

This is one of the reasons we watch movies, attend recovery groups, read memoirs, and sit around campfires telling stories long after the fire has dwindled down to a few glowing embers. It's written in the Psalms that “deep calls to deep,” which is what happens when you get a glimpse of what someone else has gone through or is currently in the throes of and you find yourself inextricably, mysteriously linked with that person because you have been reminded again of our common humanity and its singular source, the subsurface unity of all things that is ever before us in countless manifestations but requires eyes wide open to see it burst into view.

We live in a dis-integrated culture, in which headlines and opinions and images and sound bites pound us with their fragmented, frantic, isolated blips and squeaks, none of it bound together by any higher unity, coherence, or transcendent reference point.

This fragmentation can easily shape us,

convincing us that things aren't one.

But when we talk about God, we're talking about the very straightforward affirmation that everything has a singular, common source and is infinitely, endlessly, deeply connected.

We are involved, all of us.

And it all matters,

and it's all connected.

All of which leads me to a
third particular response
to
ruach,
one that takes me to Long Beach, California, to a TED conference. Each February over a thousand people gather at this conference to listen to some of the brightest, most creative, most innovative people in the world give talks on technology, environment, design, science, and a number of other topics. It's an extraordinary thing to sit for a week and hear scientists and inventors and writers sharing what they've discovered and created and pioneered and achieved in their efforts to make the world a better place.