One of my friends who is also a Facebook friend posted two queries to her Facebook page. In one she asked what was the god you don’t believe in. The other asked what was the god you did believe in.
Got lots of responses, including, of course, some cross over comments. Some snark. Some heartfelt appeals…
I responded to both queries. I am a professional religious, after all. And I think about God a lot.
Right off I know the God I don’t believe in. In some ways the easier question. No big person in the sky. No projection of human personality outside the human condition. No interventions into space and time from somewhere else.
So, in a very bare way I am an atheist. No God.
And…
There really is an “and” here. Which is why I’m not properly an atheist, or as some of my friends would say of me, an atheistic materialist. That stance suggests the world is dead.
And the world isn’t dead.
There is a quality to both life and to the makeup of things that we human beings encounter as wonder, as awe. And for which it is difficult to refrain from naming. It’s a human thing. However incomplete that name might be, we feel a deep and real need to try…
Probably the best name is no name. Only don’t know. Shut up within the presence. It is the place where such distinctions as self and other collapse, where I no longer know I am and you are.
See, language fails…
And the words are important.
So important…
It calls out of me the language of heart, which has been the language of religions.
And here in that sacred place, I can speak with fear and trembling of a holy now.
Go ahead, call it God.
It won’t mind.
But there is a question.
And it is this.
If everything is holy now, where do you spit?
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