God is _______!
As a child I heard many responses meant to fill in this blank . . . just, holy, righteous, perfect, omnipresent, omnipotent, savior, love, and the list went on. I heard many names for God, mostly rooted within Jewish and Christian traditions and holy books. I heard many attributes ascribed to God; patient, slow to anger, jealous, kind, merciful, gracious, etc.
I lived in a small Christian bubble mostly made up of conservative Evangelicals and Anabaptists. So most of the “God is _______!” answers proclaimed to me were rooted within those Christian traditions or movements. I didn’t yet understand that religion is a type of culture and theology is its language. It was made abundantly clear to me that my community’s proclamation of its “God is _______!” answers were unquestionable truth. Those truth claims were further undergirded with “doctrines” of the knowability of God and inerrancy, which made my questions feel like a lack of faith or simply exposed my ignorance. I had no sense that theology was an ongoing conversation, and even less of a sense that I might have anything to contribute.
When I was about 10 years old. I stayed overnight at a friend’s home. Hilton and his younger sister had recently transferred to the school I attended. We became friends. His family lived in home on a small acreage just outside of Brandon. They had a pool table and a dartboard in their basement and horses in their pasture.
After breakfast Hilton and I went out to feed, water, and brush the horses. It was a beautiful day. Spring – I think – definitely not Winter. I vividly recall that morning’s clear sky. On that beautiful day, carelessly playing in a grassy field teaming with the lives of grasses, wildflowers, mosquitos, gophers, horses, and friends I looked up into the big sky of the Sioux Valley prairie and saw an airliner parting the near cobalt blue with its fluffy white jet-stream. And something happened within me. For the first time that I can remember I was overcome with a profound sense of belonging. Unity. Love. I was part of the world and I was not alone.
Somehow as I stood there staring up, I knew that airplane was filled with people just like me. We were one. Everyone of those people had hopes and dreams; fears and grief. All that I had known and experienced, they too knew and understood. They had places they were from and places they were going. People they cared for and who cared for them. Sometimes they felt lonely and sad, like I did. Sometimes they did things they weren’t supposed to and got in trouble, like I did. Sometimes they needed to be held with whispered kindness and warmth, like I did. And I felt a deep desire to let them all know that it is going to be Ok; that our world is somehow better because they are alive, and they are beautiful. That they are not a problem. They are not a disappointment but a treasure to delight in, a story of wonder, a lyrical poem to listen to, that they are loved . . . that we are love.
I didn’t have language for moments like that as a child, and words still fail to communicate the profundity of that mystical experience even today. I certainly didn’t understand how I was trying to care for myself in that moment (or this one), anymore than I had an imagination that this was a spiritual moment… what mystics often refer to as a unitive encounter. If I was Samuel, I needed Eli; if I was Saul on the road to Damascus, I needed Anaias; if I was Augustine, I needed Ambrose; if I was John of the Cross, I needed Teresa of Ávila. I don’t recall my parents or people from my faith community helping me understand this moment, or guiding me to attend to the aliveness of this encounter. In fact this moment didn’t join my conscious spiritual narrative for decades. Yet its been alive within me my whole life, like an open invitation to presence. To receive the gift of every living thing, system, animal or person. To say yes to my belonging within the relational ecosystem that is God’s creation. That moment was over 40 years ago, yet even as I hold this encounter, and search my soul for the least inadequate words to describe it, tears are streaming, my heart grows larger, and I am filled with gratitude.
I’m coming to learn that many, maybe most people have moments like this from time to time… maybe you have?
I’m a little concerned that we religious people – especially those of us who seek to live in the Way of Jesus the Christ – do ourselves and others a disservice when we tell people about God without testifying to the various ways our encounters of the Divine soften us, open us up, and woo us toward what is real even if we can’t quite find the right words to describe it. Even if we feel exposed, or a little foolish. In my experience such encounters foster curiosity when hearing others’ experiences and greater humility as I navigate my God claims.
I posted Dr. Susannah Ticciati’s introduction to apophatic theology, here as I feel like she helps fill out something that was profoundly absent in my early faith development. Dr. Ticciati clearly demonstrates the gift of pairing cataphatic and apophatic traditions. They are not in competition, but dance together: personal experience & collective language.
Peace, dwight
