“God”
Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
- Jesus, in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.
The word God is a funny-sounding German word. I don’t always like it. My grandfather could say it in a way that sounded truly awesome. He’d stretch out the o, as if there was a macron over the top (Gōd). It sounded like the seas were rolling. He meant it. He knew God as the great, thunderous horizon of his life.
Most Westerners think of God as the Old Man in the Sky. Think Zeus, Jove, or God the Father. Even if we reject this image as false, or want to amend it as partial, or don’t believe in a guiding transcendent reality, it’s still deeply, unconsciously ingrained.
The word “God” is so freighted. In a sense, we know too much about God. Karl Rahner, perhaps the greatest Roman Catholic theologian of modern times, often preferred the term “Mystery”.
Christianity believes certain things about reality, life. None of these require us to use the word “God”. If we have to speak, we might try out Rahner’s “Mystery” for a change.
It’s amazing how often I/Christians/human beings would rather talk about God than turn to the Mystery.
I sit down to meditate. I suddenly think: “God”, that’s a good idea for a blog post! I spend the next ten minutes thinking about the new blog post.
It’s as if someone we’ve always longed to meet is finally at our table, gazing at us directly, patiently waiting. What’s more, they’re strangely familiar, yet we can’t bring ourselves to look at them. Perhaps we believe, as Jacob once did, that such meetings aren’t wise or humanly possible. We’re so nervous, disbelieving, numb, or overwhelmed, that we turn away to something banal instead, or turn to our thoughts about.
But there’s a poverty and great limitation to this metaphor, too - of God as the unknown visitor to our table, of God, that is, as a person. Christianity is often couched in richly relational terms, as a religion of encounter, relationship, and intimacy with the Other. But the more I journey in God, with God, previous boundaries and dualities of experience and language - self and other, God and world, mind and body - seem to dissolve and open out.
