That word 'God'

In God

Do not be afraid.  

This is not the name used to coerce compliance to a set of rules, or used to open wallets for personal profit.  It is not the name behind which people doing bad things have hidden, or the name in which truly awful things have been done.  Some people have always tried to coerce compliance, to prey on the finances of others.  Some people have always sought to get away with doing bad things.  And history is full of people being truly awful.  There will always be people using anything that works to do these things; and we must not be blind to it no matter where or when it happens. ‘God’ didn’t make them do it, no matter how much our cultures and societies may have enabled it.  Those people need to answer for their crimes, and alongside that, other people need to recognise the abuses of systems and to change the systems.

God is not a name.

God is a no-name.

And I believe in God.

I believe in God the way I believe in Justice, in Truth, in Beauty, in Good.  When I say I believe in all these things I am not opening up a debate about their existence, as if I can point at them — or as if anyone would settle anything by pointing to a place where they were not.  I am not using the phrase to ward off responsibility for my words and actions, and I am not using it to give me an authority or power over others, though that can be done with any of those other things I believe in too.  When I say I believe in God I am sharing my experience of the world, and of something important to me about how I live in that world.  

When I say I believe in God I am witnessing to God’s insistence, not God’s existence (John Caputo, The Weakness of God).

Personally or in my community, I have never experienced God as a rare creature found only in particularly unusual habitats, of which tall tales are told and dubious sightings are shared in hushed tones.  My belief in God isn’t a scientific fact to be verified or falsified; it’s my witness to a lived experience of more.  The experience of an insistence that I try to be a better person, that I try to understand the world around me and my place in it better.  An insistence not limited to the will and wants of the people around me, not limited to my ease or preference, not limited to current success or bound by past failures.  An unlimited insistence that is neither without me nor within me (John Henry Newman, A Proof of God).  The experience of an insistence that there is something else just over the horizon, just behind that cloud, or around that bend.  The insistence that things go on, wherever I look.  This experience is subjective, in the sense I can’t ever separate myself from it; but it is objective in the sense that I do not choose it, it does not stem from me alone, and — more yet — it is at the core of everything I do or say. 

That which we call God is always more (Anselm of Canterbury, Monologion). Every time we alight on something and would call it God we are disappointed because it falls short (Plato, Phaedrus).  God is more: we experience God in the difference between how things are and how we feel they ought to be; between what we know and what we feel there is to know. 

God is more, which means for every title we give, for every description we use — however true, however just, however beautiful — there is always more, which it does not convey, than it conveys.  For every new insight that comparison reveals to us about God, it turns out that God is always more NOT like that, than God IS like that.  God is always more NOT as we imagine or intuit, than anything we fixate on God being. 

Not this.

Not this.

Not even this.

That very urge that makes you feel uncomfortable with the word ‘God’, that makes you want to shy away from using it, is your own witness to knowing that God is more than what ‘God’ is said to be.  I, too, do not assert an old man with a long beard on a cloud; I, too, do not assert an angry, joyless dictator.  I, too, can all too often see the human behind the curtain when ‘God the great and powerful’ is proclaimed, and am angry, and sad, at the abuse and the greed and the power-mad, wanton cruelty.  None of this will I call God.

God is the insistence that I cannot deny that these things are wrong, that we can do better, that things can be better, that there is always more.  God is not ‘this being the case because I want it to be’: God is more, and I believe in God.