"God"

Is this the worst nickname ever?

By David James Duncan

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.

*

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”?

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.”

*

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.

*

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?

*

Terry Tempest Williams: If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate.

*

John of the Cross:
      My Beloved is the mountains,
      And lonely wooded valleys,
      Strange islands,
      And resounding rivers,
      The whistling of love-stirring breezes...
      In the inner wine cellar
      I drank of my Beloved, and, when I went abroad,
      Through all this valley
      I no longer knew anything,
      And lost the herd which I was following
      There He gave me His breast;
      There He taught me a sweet and living knowledge;
      And I gave myself to Him,
      Keeping noting back;
      There I promised to be His bride.
      Now I occupy my soul
      And all my energy in His work service;
      I no longer tend the herd
      Nor have I any other work
      Now that my every act is love.

*

The physical world is God’s. The world of imagination is also God’s. To labor in either world with clarity, diligence, humility, and humor is a service to humanity whether one mentions God while so serving or not.

*

How to unsay the ponderousness we humans attribute to this word “God”? How to strip the man-added dreck from the word, that the Being may be loved for Who the Being is?
      In The Upanishads, God is called “the Unbounded, Unseen, Guileless Perfection.” I would love, in my faith life, to become apophatic enough to strip “God” down to this!
      If this aim sounds odd to fundamentalist ears, imagine me saying instead that I’d like to journey backward through time with the word “God” until It lies naked in a manger in Bethlehem. It would be as impossible to kill, in the name of a word this naked, as it would be hard not to love the infant.

*

The word “God,” looked at not as a Being but as an English word, is very simple. Three letters. “Dog” backwards. And the word is English, mind you. Three letters of a language invented just a thousand years ago, by Norman conquerors trying to work out a way to command their Anglo-Saxon chattel. To kill or condemn others in the name of a three-letter mongrel Norman/Anglo-Saxon word is tragically absurd. A mortal being who presumes, via the study of holy writ, to know the Mind and Will of Absolute Being is, I think you could literally say, Absolutely mistaken.
      There is a way of holding a dog-ma that sees it as the termination of thought, but religious dogmas (“There is no God but Allah”; “Jesus is the Son of God”) are meant to be windows, not walls. Infinite Truth infinitely transcends even our best statements about it.
      Unforgettable words by Montana’s late great fly fishing philosopher, Henry Bugbee: “The tenets of scripture are meant to be occasions for wonder, not the termination of it.”
      We were given a mind that swings from doubt to faith back to faith, for a reason. We were given an imagination and a conscience and an intuition for a reason. When a televangelist claims to know the precise meaning of a biblical passage, and his meaning feels to my intuition like a termination of, rather than occasion for, love and wonder, the God in whom I believe encourages me to obey intuition and conscience, not the televangelist’s, or my own, frail human understanding of the bible. Otherwise I could end up worshipping — or worse, obeying — nothing more than my misunderstanding of another man’s misunderstanding.
      There is no book so holy it cannot by misunderstood and abused. As humans (including me!) demonstrate everywhere, daily, not even God is holy beyond misunderstanding.

*

Saint Francis said to God: “No one is worthy to pronounce Thy Name.”
      Jeremiah said of God, “I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word is in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones.”
      God is beyond every imagining and every mode of expression. Every-thing we mortals say of Him falls short of Him. Given that common failing, why not listen to, and better yet tolerate, and if possible even good-naturedly grin at the multifarious, contradictory, sometimes stupid sometimes beautiful ways He burns as a fire shut up in out bones? To wit:

On His infallibility:
      Ursula K. LeGuin: We need the idea of a God who makes mistakes.
      Archie Bunker: God don’t make mistakes. Dat’s how He got to be God.

On His touch:
      Tukaram: God hits you!
      Rumi: Every instant man receives a slap from the Unseen.
      John Coltrane: God breathes through us so completely, so gently, we hardly feel it.

On God and finances:
      Billy Graham, speaking of Jesus: We have a great Commodity here!
      St. Francis (chanting with glee): For Sister Poverty we give thanks.
      John D. Rockefeller: God gave me my money.
      Tukaram (singing with glee): I am bankrupt and God is ruined!
      Gloria Copeland, wife of televangelist Kenneth Copeland: You give me a dollar...[to her and Kenneth’s 1500 acre ranch and private airport and private TV studio]...for the gospels sake and the full hundredfold return would be a hundred dollars...A hundredfold return on a thousand dollars would be $100,000...
      Meister Eckhart: There are those among you who want to see God with the same eyes with which you look at a cow, and to love God as you love a cow — for the milk and the cheese.

On God and gender:
      Sherman Alexie (in Reservation Blues):
      Journalist: ‘Is God a man or a woman?’
      Thomas Builds-the-Fire: ‘God could be an armadillo. I have no idea.’
      Nancy Litton: Literally ‘Shaddai’ means ‘God of the two breasts.’ God is Almighty because God nurtures, holds all things together, sustains, as a mother would a child in breastfeeding.
      Karen Armstrong: The masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic, and French...grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah — the supreme name for God — is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God — al-Dhat — is feminine. All talk about God staggers under impossible difficulties.

On the Name itself:
      Martin Buber: We cannot clean up the term “God’ and we cannot make it whole; but, stained and mauled as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it above an hour of great sorrow.
      The Cloud of Unknowing’s anonymous author: No man can think of God himself. It is therefore my wish to leave everything that I can think and choose for my love the thing that I cannot think.
      Herman Melville: As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off your stool and hang from a beam... Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street.
      Tukaram:
      Though You contain the fourteen universes
      We fit You in a frame to worship You.
      Though You have no definition or form
      We display You to show our gratitude to You.
      Though You are way beyond words
      We sing songs addressed to You.
      Though You are apart from all action
      We put garlands round Your neck.
      Say Tuka: O God, become limited
      To pay us a little attention!

On understanding God:

      The actor, William Hurt: God didn’t put us here to understand what’s going on.
      Mother Teresa: I do not understand the ways of God.
      Walt Whitman: I understand God not in the least.

On the existence of God:
Simone Weil: It’s a case of contradictions, both of them true. There is a God. There is no God. Where is the problem? I am quite sure there is a God in the sense that I am sure my love is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles whatever I conceive when I say that word.
Tukaram:
The main message is absolutely clear:
This whole world is God.
First, scatter your own ego to the winds,
Then you will pass the crucial test.
The decisive thing to know about Absolute Being?
Says Tuka: Once the mind is blown up,
There is neither a cause nor an effect.

On the unspeakable nature of God:
Ruzbihan Baqli:
His eternity has no measurable beginning... Substances and accidents vanish in the fields of his oneness, and spirits and intellects are annihilated in the courtyards of his splendor...His attributes are sanctified beyond the comprehension of intellects and imaginations. He was by virtue of his divinity before every existing being, and he will be by virtue of his power after all limits are passed. Lofty aspirations do not plumb the fullness of his depth, and searching intelligence does not scale the heaven of this attributes. There is no penetration of the secrets of his majesty, nor is there any comprehension of the lights of his beauty. The sublimities of his greatness obliterate vision, and the assaults of his magnificence erases thought. The power of his everlastingness confounds temporal understanding, and the wrath of his unity overpowers the constraints of space.

On loving God:
Simone Weil: In the period of preparation for loving God, the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no such thing as bread. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty.

David James Duncan, who received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University in 2004, was the 1997 Schoenfeldt Series Visiting Writer on The Bluff. He is the author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K, and the story and essay collections River Teeth and My Story As Told By Water. This essay is drawn from his new book of essays, God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons (Triad Institute), which will be published this fall.