With or without God

Last month, along with some of my colleagues, I was invited to give a talk to the Unitarian Renewal Group on 'with or without God' - our brief was to outline our concept of God and to say whether we found both the idea of God and the naming of God helpful or unhelpful. Here is my talk,

Permit me, if you will please, to begin with an old joke - an infants class teacher asks a little girl in her class what she is drawing. The little girl says she is drawing God. The teacher says, “but nobody knows what He looks like, dear.” The girl replies, “well they will do in a minute.”

During an adult RE course a couple of years back I asked the participants to draw how they saw God as a child and how they saw God now. The pictures of childhood Gods were remarkably similar – most people, myself included, had drawn an old man with a long beard, sitting on a cloud. The pictures of how we saw God now were different, but all tried to capture something similar – I drew a large web linking people, animals, plants, stars and planets. 

Today I would like to share with you a little of my journey from the old man in the sky to the “interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part” to borrow the phrase from the UU seventh principle.

I grew up in a loosely Christian household. We went to church as a family at Christmas, Easter and, being farmers, Harvest Festival. My sister and I went to a Church of England primary school and a United Reformed Church Sunday school.

Despite sending us to Sunday school, my parents were concerned not to 'indoctrinate' us and wanted us to be able to choose our own spiritual path. The evidence of my primary school exercise books, which were full of illustrations of bible stories, suggests that I was in fact growing up with a Christian concept of God and He seemed to me to be primarily concerned with judgement - He might answer your prayers if you were good and would certainly punish you if you were bad.

I had spiritual experiences as a child, although I am not sure I would have framed them as such at the time. They were all around connection to the land and nature. I don't remember feeling any kind of connection with that old man in the sky, or with Jesus, and I was a bit confused as to whether they were the same thing or not. And as for the Holy Ghost, I may well have misheard that as Holy Goat too many times to have made any sense of it whatsoever.

Through the influence of friends, as a teenager I flirted with Evangelical Christianity. I met some genuine, caring people, but couldn't accept the ‘sin and salvation’ narrative they believed in and I never managed to 'accept Jesus into my heart as my Lord and Saviour' as they did.

At secondary school we learned about different religions and I was fascinated by the different approaches to ‘the big questions’.  I decided to study Theology and Religious Studies at university. The more I studied world religions on an intellectual level the more I understood how they were all products of human construction. I decided that organised religion wasn't for me, but I retained an interest in mythology, especially those of pre-Christian Northern Europe and India. 

In my studies and my own reading around the subject, I discovered that our modern Western concept of a single God, in the Abrahamic traditions, who is addressed as He, had evolved from earlier forms of human spirituality in which there were many gods and goddesses. The earliest form of human spirituality we know about, before even gods and goddesses arrived on the scene, is usually referred to as animism – a belief system in which all living beings and natural phenomena are thought to be imbued with spirit or consciousness. 

A monotheistic concept of God is a relatively recent development in human history, which seems to mirror the development of patriarchy – although some patriarchal societies retained polytheism, so the relationship isn't quite that straightforward.

The monotheism of the Christian West evolved, through Judaism and Greek philosophy, from monolateralism, as found among the ancient Hebrews, Zarathustra and the Aten-worshipping Egyptian Pharaoh Akenhaten – they acknowledged the existence of many gods, but chose to worship only one. Judaism did of course evolve towards a monotheistic understanding of God, which we in the west have inherited through Christianity, with its blend of Jewish and Greek concepts about divinity and humanity.

Through my love of mythology I discovered that I resonated more with the idea of Goddess than God and more with a sort of polytheism than a strict monotheism. Modern pagans sometimes makes a distinction between hard polytheism and soft polytheism. Hard polytheism is the belief that the gods are all independent beings and there is no overarching 'Godhead' or 'Spirit' from whence they came. Soft polytheism refers to either the belief that the gods are all manifestations of the one 'Source' or 'Universal Spirit' or that they are archetypes and forces of nature. The idea that all gods and goddesses are manifestations of the One Source is also found in certain forms of modern Hinduism.

So where do I place myself in all this? 

With apologies for introducing yet more 'isms', I'd define myself as a pantheist or perhaps a panentheist – pantheism is the belief that all IS God; panentheism the belief that all is IN God. For me, this means that God is both the universe and the creative energy behind the universe, the earth is the body of God, my body is the body of God, the earth is sacred, all life is sacred. 

Within the divine unity of pantheism, I acknowledge the existence of particular gods and spirits, and I have an affinity with some of the Teutonic and Celtic goddesses, but I don't consistently cultivate deity/devotee relationships with them.

Pantheistic philosophies can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, especially Plato and the Stoics, and perhaps even further back, to Lao Tzu and the authors of the Upanishads, although the terms pantheism and panentheism weren't coined until the 1700s. Pantheism was taken up by the early Enlightenment Jewish philosopher Spinoza.

Pantheism has long been a strand in Unitarianism, especially through the Transcendentalists, such as Emerson and Thoreau. Unitarian Universalist Frank Lloyd-Wright is credited with perhaps my favourite pantheistic quote, “I believe in God, only I spell it nature.” 

Pantheism, unlike other forms of Theism, doesn't view God as a personal being. Yet, Pantheism and Christian monotheism need not necessarily exclude each other. Much of the writings of Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart can be seen as pantheistic and yet they absolutely believed in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit Trinitarian God of the Roman Catholic church too. There are glimpses of pantheism in many mystics of monotheistic traditions, from Julian of Norwich, who wrote, “God is the same thing as nature,” to Sufi mystic Ibn al-Arabi, who wrote, “The existence of all created things is His existence. Thou dost not see, in this world or the next, anything beside God.”

There is perhaps a similar tension between my concept and my experience of the divine, between theory and practice – my concept of God is impersonal, but my experience, sometimes, is of being held by a mysterious, loving presence, and my spiritual life does include devotional practices – for example, I love singing hymns, Taize chants and Kundalini Yoga mantras.

Since, for me, God is all things and all things are in God, God is Love, Community, Connection, Awe and Wonder, Joy, Beauty, and Sensual pleasures, but also darkness, difficulties and struggles, isolation, pain, grief and anger. 

Are the idea of God and the naming of God helpful? I think it is important to acknowledge that there have been both great and terrible things done in the name of God. Without the idea of God we would not have had the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the witch trials, and all the many so called 'holy wars' that have been and continue to be fought in God's name. And yet all the good things achieved by such great souls as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Theresa, to name just a few, were also inspired by their idea of God.

Our Unitarian community embraces those who do and do not find the idea and naming of God helpful. I am grateful to belong to such a community that holds so many different perspectives. I do use the term 'God' even though it is problematic – for so many people it comes with so much baggage, like the baggage of the patriarchal, judgemental God of my childhood – and that baggage needs unpacking.

When I first started leading Unitarian services I shied away from naming God, but I have gradually become more comfortable both with the naming of God and with the unpacking of the term. Sometimes I say things like, 'this prayer/song/reading contains the word 'God' - if God-language doesn't work for you, try adding an 'o' in the middle or an 's' on the end, or translate it into whatever works for you as a term for how you view the sacred. I also use the terms Source, Ground of Being, Great Mystery, and Spirit of Life, alongside the term God. Despite its problems, I do value the term God as a marker or a pointer to the sacred. 

I will leave you with the words of contemporary UU Minister Marisol Caballero, who writes, “I lose interest the minute that God is spoken of as an enormous celestial ATM who doles out rewards to some, and punishment to the kids who are too busy to call home every once in a while. Yet I appreciate the word God for the sake of common vocabulary. It’s a good universal shorthand to describe the little moments in our daily life that smack us into paying attention: “Hey! This, right here — this moment, joined with all other such tiny moments — is why you’re alive. This is Holy. Here it is.””