It is necessary to define words. It is also at times necessary to undefine them.
One of my aims as a writer of faith is apophatic. From the Greek word apophasis. An apophasis is an unsaying.
Out of all the words I have heard in my time, the word “God” is in my view the word most grievously abused by humans, and the word most deserving of a careful unsaying.
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Our love for a person often leads us to love the sound of that person’s name. I, to cite the handiest possible example, love a certain woman so much I always thrill slightly at the mere sound of her name. If I heard other people using this name as a pretentious or cruel or polluted exhalation resulting in violence or injustice —if I heard them judging, condemning, even killing each other in the name of my beloved — I would try like hell to defuse this insanity, telling the abusers that this is not what she wants of them and not what her name means.
How, if I love Him, can I do any less for the One nicknamed “God”?
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I live on the edge of millions of acres of wilderness. I define “wilderness” as the parts of our world created by God and not yet flagrantly altered by industrial man.
I walk almost daily through places God alone created. While doing so, I see many things that make me feel grateful toward God, but have never once seen a G, O, and D inscribed in His earth or hovering in His water or fluttering in His air. Until I do, I’ll continue to believe that this word “God” is a human creation, and that, because it is human, the word is subject to fallibility. Allah, Parabrahma, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, Ahuramazda, Yezdan, Wahtonka, Gott, Deus, Theos, God — are but a few of the fallible names for the Be-all and End-all Who infallibly gives us a universe and world and bodies and lives.
The apophatic truth remains: God infinitely transcends all His Names.
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As they emerge from the mouths of men and women, God’s names tend to acquire a ponderousness that cannot justly be attributed to the Being to which the names refer. This ponderousness is a result of human usage, human thought, ego, self-righteousness, error, feuding, violence. Blaming God for deeds done in His names strikes me, therefore, as ponderously mistaken. It is humanity’s mental pre-conceptions, delusions, pretensions, so-called “righteousness,” and cruelties that sully the divine names.
This is why apophasis has for thousands of years been an aim of contemplation. Stripped of its ponderousness by an imaginative unsaying, the naked sound we make with our mouths — “god” — becomes as innocent as Moses, Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad as they lay newborn in their mother’s arms, and we are as ready as new mothers to love what we have named.
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God is Unlimited. Thought and language are limited.
God is the fathomless but beautiful Mystery Who creates the Universe and you and me, and sustains it and us every instant, and always shall. The instant we define this fathomless Mystery It is no longer fathomless. To define is to limit. The greater a person’s confidence in their definition of God, the more sure I feel that their worship of “Him” has become the worship of their own definition. I don’t point this out to insult the fundamentalists’ or anyone else’s God. I point it out to honor the fathomless Mystery.
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Why must creation enter into the human relationship with God? Because theologies are manmade, whereas humans and creation are not. Revelation is gift, and the body and creation are gifts, and each helps us unwrap and cherish each other. Without the creation-gift to inspire and true us, human belief becomes mere human projection.
The Armageddonist’s rejection of the world-as-gift is such a projection: an obsession with the “End Days” is surrender not to God but to men with exaggerated reverence for their own partial understanding of holy writ.
We need God in order to love and care for this world, and we need this world to true our love for God. William Blake understood this. Seated, in his old age, beside a little girl at a dinner party, Blake leaned down to her, smiled, and said, “May God make this world as beautiful to you as it had been to me.”
We don’t know this today because William Blake related it. We know it because Blake’s spontaneous words made the world suddenly beautiful to the little girl, and she remembered and recounted those words for the rest of her life.
To every Armageddonist, every earth-lover must keep saying with all the sincerity and affection we can muster: “May God make this world as beautiful to you as it has been to me.”
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We need God in order to love and steward creation.
We need creation to true our love for God.
We also need creation to better love one another.
The Song of Solomon poet understood this:
This form of yours is like a palm tree...I will climb the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs. May your breasts be as clusters of the vine, your breath as the scent of apples, and your mouth as the choicest wine going down sweetly, my beloved, trickling over the lips of sleepers...
For non-mystical theologians, The Song of Songs has proven well nigh impossible to interpret, largely because the poems’ purposes seem a-theological. Mainstream dogmatic theology for the most part denies or distrusts the body and creation, stressing a infinite gulf between God and humans, and citing “the Fall” and “original sin” as the reason for our maker’s harsh judgments against and ceaseless punishment of humanity.
This is why the religious masses are lost without the mystics. Mystics stress not the gulf but the astonishing intimacy between humans and God. “The Word made flesh.” Naming each of us “brides” or “lovers,” naming God “the Beloved” and Christ “the Groom.” Mystics perceive love in all its forms as an eternal interplay between lover and Beloved and openly yearn, like the Song of Songs’ poet, not just for heaven but for union with Love itself.
Mystical yearning in The Song is played out in vividly physical bodies. Yet for all their beauty, these bodies are not just mortal objects; they are the essence of the holy homeland and gifts and mysteries of God. In the imagery of The Song of Songs, God’s art is creation, and the very essence of this art is the body of the human beloved. The beloved’s form and incomparably desirable parts, in turn, are described in shockingly specific botanical, biological, and geographical imagery. The love the poet infuses in this imagery then radiates in at least two directions: when the eyes of the beloved are compared to “pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim,” legs are likened to “cedars of Lebanon,” the head is “Mount Carmel,” the breasts “fawns” or “fruits,” the lips “honeycomb,” the well beneath the tongue “milk and honey,” and the breath “apples,” we feel both the intricate bliss of lovers lost in one another and the love of an entire people, after long, harsh exile, come home to their promised and holy land.
The result — in vast contrast to earth-loathing and enemy-loathing of a self-righteous Armggedonist — is a spirituality of Yes! and More Yes! Insofar a the body houses the soul it is holy, and insofar as the body is Creator-given it is doubly holy, for the body is literally of the land; is the essence of the land. This doubled intensity of feelings creates in The Song what we might call an eroticism of loving sacrifice: in taking the beloved in love, one consumes her; in offering oneself to the beloved, one is consumed; yet what one is offering, receiving, and celebrating is not just one person in a sexual heat, it is the herds of the holy hills, the figs, fruits, and spices, the orchards, honeycomb, milk, secret gardens, and wells of living waters emphatically seen, in these anything-but-puritanical verses, as components of the physical body. The beloved’s body is not just like a divine gift: God’s giving can be literally touched, felt, and tasted in her body. Through each other, lovers drink, eat, and know the divine gift that is the land.
And where is the line, here, between love-making and worship? When the Everything-that-has-made-my-beloved is precisely what and who one yearns for and makes love to, when this same receiving, Who is making love to Whom? To seek and cherish our beloved, as The Song of Songs has it, is to seek and cherish, via our bodies, the divine art of the Artist Who gives us bodies. The most complete giver, amid this cherishing, becomes the most complete receiver. The Song’s “double beloved” — land as body and body as land — lets us see and feel this. She/He is the spiritual lodestone, and the undying beauty of these poems.
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Many fundamentalists have no patience for even a word of mystical belief — then wonder why others have no patience for listening to what the fundamentalist believes. I can explain my own such impatience with a parable:
If you were basking in bright sunlight, and hugely thankful for it, and a man a quarter-mile away suddenly shouted, “Hey you! I can see the sun from over here! Stop what you’re doing and come over where I am! HURRY! You’ve GOT to come here! I see the SUN! Come out of your darkness, sinner! Quick! Come HERE!”, is there any reason to obey him?
On the contrary, if you obey, you indulge the shouter’s peace-shattering belief that the sun is so limited that it can only be seen from where he is standing, and you reinforce his false assumption that you are a fool and that everyone but he is living in darkness.
Is it the work of sun-worshipers to honor those who think that only they can see the sun?
Or to worship sun?