The Nothingness of God

I was reading a review of the book Merton & Buddhism: Wisdom, Emptiness & Everyday Mind edited by Bonnie Bowman Thurston. The reviewer cited a particular line that I’ve not been able to shake. “(W)hen the Dalai Lama was asked if he believed in God, he replied ‘It depends on what you mean by ‘God’: if you mean by ‘God’ What Thomas Merton means, then yes, I do.'”

I’ve had cause to think about God a lot of late. Now, I do not believe in the God described in the mainstream of Western religion. I feel I can say categorically there is no deity that is similar in any way to a human being with a mind like ours that created and sustains and to whom we can appeal in our need with some thought that he or she or it will intervene in the flow of events. Doesn’t exist.

But that does not put a period on it all.

I was visiting with some friends recently. A friend was dying. Has died now. In he course of sitting with them I had conversations. One with a developmentally disabled family member. And another with an extended family member who is an Episcopal priest.

I found I have absolutely no qualms about praying with the developmentally disabled person. I felt no sense I was being hypocritical or lying, either to that person or to myself. Prayer felt right and it didn’t matter if those prayers were at least in their outer form addressed to a conscious entity outside the universe and couched in petition for healing, if possible. It was heart crying out. It was an act of being present and human.

And with the priest, who knew my Unitarian Universalist Zen Buddhism, we talked a bit more abstractly about God.

I acknowledged how for me Buddhism’s sunyata, which is traditionally translated as emptiness, could just as easily be translated as God. Emptiness not as lack but as beyond all categories of name. Not this. Not this. Not this.

Right down to the bottom.

And from that the miracle…

Only this. And this. And this.

Well, nothing more here.

Just that, hanging in the air, like the full moon lighting the dark night.

Hurt and longing and love, all rising out of the great empty, all bubbling forth, birthed from the mother of us all…