God is…

I know that this is a difficult topic to approach.  Each of us has a personalized idea of God, or whether there even is a God.  It is probably even pretty egoic of me to consider this as a topic at all, after all, who am I to attempt it? 

The Tao Te Ching teaches us that it is not possible to define God because the more we attempt it the further away from truth we get; and yet here I am trying to clarify in my own mind, perhaps finding some hidden gem that you will be able to relate to as well.

First, to even start the conversation we must begin with the premise that God exists.  There may be some of you reading this that would disagree with that, but for the sake of this essay it would be helpful to agree in principle that God exists in order to at least play along with my river of thought.  If you can’t then this may not be for you. 

So, assuming that God exists, we might agree that God is omnipresent – everywhere all the time.  How could God be otherwise?  If God weren’t everywhere then things could happen or come into creation that God didn’t know about.  Since God is the Creator of all that is that wouldn’t be possible, God would know about everything being created, so God must be everywhere all the time.  If God is everywhere there can be no where that God is not; no home, no church, no mosque, no mountaintop, no country, no heart… nowhere that God is not.

Our next agreement then would be that God is omnipotent – all powerful.  That would go without saying, how could that which creates all that is be anything but all powerful?  The universe is so immense that our little human brains cannot even begin to understand its infinite beauty.  Looking at pictures taking by the Hubble telescope serves to reinforce this truth.  There are places that are so amazingly beautiful that even seeing them brings wonder and awe to our experience and our imagination. If God is all powerful then there is no person, no place, and no thing that has ever, or will ever, happen that God did not create.  This idea is difficult because we all want to believe that there are people and things in the Universe that are not of God.  Believing that diminishes God though, bringing God to our level, which makes it easier for us to take God personally, but in the process takes something away from the power and grace of the Creator.

The third agreement must then be that God is omniscient – all knowing.  While this is similar to our first agreement it goes beyond God being present to God being an active participant in the creation of life, and that there is intelligence in the Universe that allows a knowingness to exist.  It is this knowingness that allows a seed planted in the ground to take water and sunshine and know whether to grow into an oak tree or a lettuce leaf.  It is this same wisdom that allows humans to build bridges and spaceships, and the same wisdom that allows children to learn to talk, birds to know the best flight path to take, and gives devotees of God the desire to learn to worship in whatever way allows them to feel their own personal connection to God.

So, God is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, but what does that have to do with what God is?  While those are qualities, they aren’t the crux of the biscuit, so to speak.  Let’s take our inquiry a little deeper now.  Perhaps we have such a difficult time understanding the nature of God because we keep trying to attach human qualities to something that is not human.  It is our nature to anthropomorphize our world.  We watch movies where animals have human characteristics; we give gender identification to ships and cars, when we think of God we think in terms of human form and function.  According to our three agreements this simply can’t be true.  There are no omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient humans, no matter what we have grown to believe about our heroes, social icons, or the others whom we look up to.  And yet, God is in all of them (everywhere, all the time).

After all of this, I am going to propose that God is Life itself.  Life meets all of our criteria of omnipresent, omnipotent, & omniscient.  Life is everywhere and is at work in the creation of all that is.  There is no place in the Universe in which there isn’t some essence of life whether it be mineral, or some other form of intelligence which allows light or energy to pass through or become stuck.  We can’t really see Life, just as we can’t really see God, we can only know of its presence by the ways in which it animates form.  And the beauty of saying that God is Life is that God & Life can take on any form, persona, or quality possible.  God can be as personal as our own beloved, or as impersonal as images of interstellar nebulae.  Allowing that God is Life removes our egocentricity, reminding us that just because we are at the top of the food chain doesn’t mean that we are also at the apex of creation.  If we can accept that perhaps there is more to creation, more to Life, then we can see, taste, touch, hear, or know about, perhaps that realization will lead us to see God everywhere. 

Another implication of this is understood if we use the ocean as a teaching metaphor.  If we take a drop of water from the ocean we understand that the drop is not the entire ocean, and yet the drops nature remains entirely ocean.  We are that drop.  We are not all God is, and yet God is all we are.  God is so much more then each of us individually, because God is all there is.

I can’t help but think about the Joan Osbourne song: What if God was One of Us? If you knew that God was living in the heart of your children, your neighbors, your enemies, how would you talk to them today?  If we were to see that we are each a new disguise that God has chosen to show up in today, what would be your response to God’s disguise as a homeless person sitting on the street corner asking for help, or your boss saying they don’t have the money to give you your well-deserved raise?  If you were to look at everyone you saw today and know that they are God, what would you say to them, what would you be willing to do for them, and if you knew that you are also wearing one of God’s disguises what would you do to bring more Life affirming love into the world?  What would you choose to create today?