[vimeo id=”22439234″ width=”600″ height=”350″]For the longest time I couldn’t utter the word God, even silently. Not because I thought God was dead as some headlines clamored nor because God had failed to live up to false hopes or expectations that I wrongly conceived. No, it was because my sense of God was much bigger, much grander than the bearded, throne occupying figure that my early religious upbringing had left me imaging. This characterization of God – a being having a human-like identity can lead one down a slippery slope. It’s a natural progression to go from a child offering prayers to a ‘heavenly Father’ to an adult beseeching God for special interventions. Sadly, the oversimplification of a more complex reality leaves many blaming God when tragedy strikes and the world goes to hell, leading far too many away from the love and bliss of God.
Perhaps you too have concluded that God cannot be the ‘being’ that you construed so long ago. And like many, this has led you to wonder and speculate about the true nature of God.
Throughout millennia, humanity has looked to the heavens – above and beyond itself — in wonder and adoration of the force grand enough, incredible enough to account for creation and existence. Buddhists shy away from identification with a deity named God yet recognize the ubiquitous nature of the SOURCE of everything – Divine Mother evokes 1000 names in some traditions. Islam offers the 99 names of God, each one descriptive of one of God’s qualities – The Omniscient, The Supreme, The Almighty, The Omnipresent, The Absolute, The One; names shared with many Christian traditions. And in Hinduism, God above creation is Undifferentiated. Mystics of every tradition have experienced God as absolute Love, while contemporary metaphysicians refer to God as the One Mind – shorthand that connotes all consciousness. Each of these implies an understanding that God cannot be reduced to mere personality or PERSONALITY.
I have long been moved by the simple phrase the Alpha and the Omega – understood as the Beginning and the End, the All and the Everything. As my own search to connect with God continues, these words have taken on deeper meaning. I now see and feel God everywhere. Right now for example I am sitting on the deck of someone’s mountain home, encircled by stately oak trees, serenaded by birds awash in the sounds of the nearby brook. I know as I sit here enjoying this that God is present and the essence of all of it – the mountains, the trees, the birds, the brook and even me and the wooden deck I am comfortably perched on! I feel God’s presence – God in the leaves and trunks and branches of every tree; God in the ferns and grasses and rocks underfoot; God in each and every droplet of the cascading brook; God flapping the wings of the butterflies and yes in each cell of the annoying mosquitoes and gnats that swirl about. God everywhere, present and accounted for in all things.
The 8th century Hindu philosopher and theologian Shankara offered a metaphor–a simple yet I think profound approach to understanding the nature of God.
Imagine if you will that God is like clay and then envision the clay being crafted into countless cups, bowls, urns and vases of myriad configurations and colors. Each one different and distinctly named; and yet, each and every one is clay.
The same holds for everything and all things. Look around you. Look up into the star filled sky or at a drop of water or a grain of sand. Notice the countless forms – each different and distinct, each named and labeled accordingly. Each and every one of them and the ‘apparent space’ in between is God.
Contemplate: quadrillions of animals and insects, hundreds of trillions of plants on this one planet of the estimated 8.8 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way, which is one of 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. ALL OF IT IS GOD! Seven+ billion humans each of us crafted out of the substance of God. Each of us a different shape, size and color; each of us assuming different functions; yet each and every one of us God!
ALL OF IT IS GOD !!!
Phenomenal, incredible, beyond imaging and in truth beyond comprehension to all but the enlightened. Yet even at my current level of understanding, thoughts of God fill me with awe and profound joy, even amidst the horror, chaos and insensitivities caused by those who have yet to realize that they too are God!
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