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Images of God in our journey towards the divine
I. What is God?
God is just a word. What it tries to capture is, of course, impossible to capture. We cannot describe God or come to understand God through a statement or a creed. God is beyond all categories. It seems to me that religion is all about symbols and metaphors for God. The problem with most religion is that the metaphors are taken literally and then people start to argue that their metaphors are better than other metaphors, when in fact no metaphor can be adequate. This is a problem, since we have no choice but to speak of God in metaphor, and the descriptions of God offered by the various religions give us only a fragment of God: some of these descriptions of God are rather rigid and limiting, some probably do more harm than good. For example, the supernatural theist image of God as a ‘person’ who knows everything, can do everything and directs the world ‘from the outside’ is, according to Keith Ward, the head of theology at Oxford University, ‘a travesty of what the best philosophers of all ages have written about God.’[1]
II. Hunting for God
We are all hunting for God in our own way, whether we know it or not. The whole world is trying to find God. It’s almost as if God is hiding form us, and it’s our job to find him.[2] In the end, I suspect that we will realize that God wasn’t hiding at all, and he has been with us all along, but in the process of coming to realize this, while the hunt is on, so to speak, we create our own images of God, and these images are essentially reflections of how we see the world.
So my basic contention is that any image of God is our own creation, and that the God we create is a reflection of our current understanding or perception of the world. This, in principle, explains why there is such a huge range of images for God in the world. In Christianity, Judaism and Islam, we find an image of a God of power and majesty who rules the universe like a king. In Christianity, we also find a God of compassion who sacrifices himself out of love for mankind. In Hinduism, we find Brahma, the creator God, Vishnu, the sustainer and the God Shiva, who is called the destroyer of worlds.
The images of God we create are not God, but just our projections. As we grow towards God, we go through stages in our projections. In what follows, I will try to give a brief outline of the stages which we go through in our journey towards the divine. These stages are not completely independent: we don’t leave one behind and then go onto the next; they overlap. But they are a good starting point and I have found them a good road map in my own search for the God beyond description.
At the first level, one sees oneself as an isolated fragment, floating around in a hostile universe. The universe acts in a seemingly random way: it acts on us, and we are powerless to control it. As such, we project a God who will protect us but, since God is a reflection of our worldview, this God is as capricious and unpredictable as the world from which he protects us. He is like a father who protects the family but is feared. The family cannot live without him, but he is aloof, he is unfathomable, he is a law onto himself. He meets out rewards and punishment but often in a way we cannot understand: we are at his mercy, and we cling to him since he offers our only source of protection. And yet, as a capricious father, we secretly hate him as we hate the universe we see around us.
Often, when people ‘lose their faith’ and reject God, this is the God they are rejecting. People are now intellectually independent in a way unheard of throughout history and are able more easily to reject this tyrannical God which, it has to be said, is often the God of mainstream religion. This may explain why the churches are emptying. There is also a feeling that we have conquered nature, to some extent, and for this reason also we are able to dispense with the tyrant protector God. Even so, for as long as our image of the world as a hostile and incomprehensible place persists, this will be the God we come back to in times of crisis.
We see this God in the creation story in Genesis. God is the rule-giver, and he gives Adam and Eve a command. The serpent tells them the truth – that if they eat from the tree, they will understand good and evil, so they eat the fruit. When God learns of their disobedience, he panics[3] and throws them out of Eden so that they cannot eat of the tree of eternal life and live forever. In this story, God is the protector, but he is also unreasonable, capricious and jealous.
Importantly, this powerful, capricious God is also afraid, another aspect of our own projection. The image of a God who is himself afraid has had a powerful impact on me. We see a fearful God in the creation story and also in the story of the tower of Babel. One of the most moving descriptions of a fearful God I have come across is in a film called The Big Kahuna, starring Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito. In a beautiful scene, Danny DeVito’s character describes a dream in which he finds God hiding in a closet, afraid to come out. He coaxes God out and they stand, hand in hand, looking over the desolation of a city which has been destroyed. To me, this image of God makes a powerful statement about our own view of the world we inhabit and reveals that we haven’t changed very much since the Genesis story was penned all those millennia ago. The tyrannical, capricious, unreasonable but vulnerable and fearful God is still very much alive and well.
At the second level, we feel that we have reached some degree of control over our lives and the environment, we have become rational and fit into the social order, which gives us protection through the rule of law. Our God of this level reflects this view of the world and our position in it: he is rational and consistent, there are rules which he lays down and have to be obeyed. Lawbreakers are punished.
Instead of being an unpredictable and capricious father-protector figure, this God is like a sports coach or a teacher. He is our mentor, he always knows best and, though we don’t always understand his ways, we know he has our best interests at heart. He is just, impartial and rational. He lays down and follows the rules. We see that following the rules and putting in effort brings rewards. The evildoers are punished and the righteous are rewarded. The characteristic response to the God of the first level was fear; now it is awe.
We see this God in many of the Psalms, and as Job tries to understand his plight, his friends constantly remind him that God is just and his suffering must be a deserved punishment for some sin.
This God fails when we see bad things happening to good people, and people we regard as evildoers prospering. The Psalms, once again, are full of cries about the injustices in the world. When our just and reasonable God seems to let us down, we are often very confused. We may come to believe that God is testing us or that there is some greater purpose in our suffering. But this is precious little comfort to the millions who suffer terribly every day.
The best outcome of the failure of this projection of God is that it can propel us onto the third level, in which we find peace. Here, we give up our search for an intellectual understanding of God; we give up our struggle to know, to control, to compete; there is no peace in the outer world, and so we go inwards and break into a place where we simply feel God’s peace. Here, we experience God as calm and undemanding. There are no rules now, only love. God is found not through ritual but in silence and meditation, and God isn’t ‘out there’ any more – he is here, inside us, in our heart.
Throughout history there have been people who, amidst enormous suffering, were able to be utterly at peace. One thinks of Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest who was at great peace despite being starved, tortured and ultimately murdered in Auschwitz. One thinks of St John of the cross who, when in 1577 he was imprisoned by his own Carmelite order in a cell so small he could not stand upright and tortured every day, wrote the following lines:
On a dark, secret night,
starving for love and deep in flame,
O happy, lucky flight!
Unseen I slipped away,
my house at last was calm and safe.
I lay, forgot my being,
and on my love I leaned my face,
All ceased. I left my being
leaving my cares to fade
among the lilies far away.
There is a sense of detachment, as if the world, our lives are a movie and we are sitting outside, looking in. We see ourselves as the still point, around which the world moves in all its chaos. Anthony de Mello[4] speaks at length on the subject of detached awareness, which seems to be the hallmark of the God of level three. We begin to see that we are not what we thought we were: we start to understand the truth of the Buddhist teaching that the individual is a collection of constantly changed features and so, as such, has no reality. We are now becoming free from the need for other people’s approval and free from the need to acquire, whether money, possessions, qualifications, status or respect. This frees us and allows us to expand: Ghandi was a man who was able to take on the British Empire because he cared nothing for money, status, power or esteem.
How can our perception of the world change so as to allow this new God to enter? To use a famous analogy given by Shankara, a seventh century Indian mystic, we are like a man walking along a dark road who comes across a snake and is afraid. On closer inspection the snake turns out to be a piece of rope, and our fear vanishes.
When we reach the fourth level, instead of seeing the world in a fearful way, we see abundance everywhere and we project a God who is nonjudgmental, tolerant, inclusive, accepting and generous. This God is a bit like a wise old man, and shares rather than dominates. We are able to reach this God because we have come to accept ourselves as we are: we can live with ourselves and feel little guilt: we are not now asking God to forgive us.
At this stage, as well as being able to stand outside our experience of life in a detached way, we are able to see that all is as it should be: there is order, not chaos, events which seemed random now take on meaning, every event has purpose and there are no victims. The universe is now full of unfolding patterns, and we are able to see these patterns by paying close attention. Here we start to see clearly how the law of karma works, how every action has consequences which ripple out through the years.
At level four, we are still observers. We can clearly see the hand of God at work and that all events have meaning. I love the films of M Night Shyamalan: ‘Sixth Sense,’ ‘The Village,’ and ‘Signs’ are my favourites. I also love ‘The Matrix.’ They tell of a world which isn’t what it seems: below the surface is something totally different, and sometimes we are able to see it. When we do see it, our view of the world changes forever.
When we get to level five, we no longer simply see the hidden meaning in the universe, we realize that we can participate in it and even direct it. Now we give up all our notions of accidents, random events and coincidence, and we realize that we are ourselves the creators of reality. The God we project at this level is sharing his power with us: he is a master and we are his apprentices: he is teaching us all the tricks and we have control over our life. The world is not hostile now, and neither are we part of some giant plan which we are just observing. Rather, we are orchestrating the whole show and we are just becoming aware of this fact.
This is not to say that we are perfectly in control of our environment, but we now know that everything will work out right for us. We have some general control over the direction things take. We intend, and then we witness all things falling into place, perhaps not as we expected, but we know that our God of level five is working it all out in the best way.
At level six, we reach a point where mastery of the physical world is possible. Here, we can perform miracles. Miracles are baffling to most of us, and that’s because they are so rare. But miracles come from us: we can create them, but only when we see that we are able to, and this is why they remain inaccessible to most people. At this level, the God we project is a great magician and he gives us all his power over the universe. In truth, we had this power all along, but only now do we realize it.
We are no longer seeking God – God is an ever present reality, the source of all our power. We see God’s true nature – love – with the utmost clarity. I believe this is where Jesus was in his early ministry, a man so attuned to God that anything was possible for him. Now I am very skeptical about the literal truth of the gospel stories, but they are full of miracles and I see no reason why all this should have been made up. I suppose the stories have been exaggerated, but I see no reason why a man who was so spiritually developed should not possess the powers of healing and mastery over the physical world. I believe that Jesus saw a world of love and his God was a God of abundance, a God whose presence he felt so acutely that there was no other choice but to live the life he did.
Here, there is really no struggle against evil, since ‘evil’ is just an aspect of the one cosmic force – love. If God created everything, and God is love, then what we thing of as ‘evil’ was created by God, and so this must be an aspect of love. This is really a hard topic to get into, since very few people have reached this stage and saying that there is no real evil in the world sounds like a terrible thing to say. But Jesus did seem to accept evil and submit to it as part of the process. Indeed, the Catholic Church speaks of the ‘happy fault’ of Adam, and sings at Easter ‘O necessary sin of Adam, which won for us so great a redeemer.’ Even the church, then, on some level, sees evil as part of the bigger picture, part of God. As we saw earlier, in Hinduism, there is an aspect of God the creator and an aspect of God the destroyer.
III. The end of the hunt
At the end of our searching, there is an end to projecting God. At this point, one could say that we have reached complete union with God. And what is God? God is the primordial stillness from which everything arises and to which everything returns. God is the screen upon which the movie of the universe is played: without the screen there is no movie, so it is God – the most fundamental substratum of existence – that gives the universe its reality.
An image which has had a really big impact on me is that of a tornado. Our life is like one of these – so full of energy and having such a great impact on the surroundings. But it’s made of air, the same stuff that surrounds it: it comes from still air and it returns to still air. Yet even while it appears to have a being of its own, it is still made of the same air, and right at the center is the eye of the storm, the still point where can be seen the air in its ‘pre-tornado’ state. The still air is like God, and the tornado is our life - if we can find the still point in our life, we can know God. God is, in this sense, within us and all around us, as Jesus says in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas.[5]
God as the silent, eternal ground of all being is hinted at in a poem by RS Thomas
Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness between stars.[6]
In the course of my reading, it has often seemed to me that Hinduism describes God in the most credible way. It seems to offer a ‘fuller’ fragment. I quote the following from a website which provides information about Hinduism, though I cannot imagine many Christians would argue with it:
According to the tenets of Hinduism, the whole universe is pervaded by one Universal God, who is imperishable, indestructible, infinite, without form and beyond human thought. There goes neither the mind, nor the intellect nor the senses and none can truly define Him and comprehend Him. In His unmanifest state He is unknown, vast emptiness or nothingness, and since He is prior to all, no one is actually aware how He wakes up and manifests all this that we know as His creation.[7]
References
[1] Keith Ward, God: a Guide for the Perplexed (Oneworld publications, 2003), p.219
[2] In line with Judeo-Christian convention (my own background), I refer to God as ‘he,’ simply because I have to use a pronoun. I could have chosen ‘she’ or ‘it’ but they are all inappropriate in the sense that God is not a ‘thing’ that can be categorised and described.
[3] It seems to me that in both the creation story and the story of the tower of Babel, we are presented with a God who is afraid. For a long time, this baffled me. Why would God, the creator of the universe, be afraid of his own creation? When we regard the image of God in these stories as reflections of the way the writer saw the world, the mystery is resolved. At the time of writing, the Israelites were wandering in the desert and fear must have been a very dominant emotion.
[4] Among Anthony de Mello’s many wonderful books, I have found Awareness to be the richest.
[5] … the Kingdom of God is inside of you, and it is outside of you. [Those who] become acquainted with [themselves] will find it; [and when you] become acquainted with yourselves, [you will understand that] it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty. Gospel of Thomas v.3
[6] R.S. Thomas, ‘Via Negativa’ in Collected Poems 1945-1990 (London, J.M.Dent, 1993)
[7] http://hinduwebsite.com/hinduism/pantheonfaq.htm
