Last June I wrote a blog called Postcard from the Lip of the Void. One small element of that
experience included an experience of God/Not God as a pure principle, signified
by a cold and perfect mathematical equation. I’ve been thinking about that
image a lot recently.
Many of my friends, compassionate, warm, and loving people
who are also highly intelligent, do not experience the relationship, visions, or
emotional release that I experience when I pray. These friends seldom use God
language, and feel a little uncomfortable with some of the ideas generated by
the great religions through the ages. They accept the ethics of the Golden
Rule, understand the human principle that an “eye for an eye makes the whole
world blind,” and experience awe in the presence of glorious art, music, and
landscapes. The idea of surrender to and union with God, however, gives them
the heebie-jeebies. They have never, in their own estimation, had an
experience of God. And so, in order to be authentic, they call themselves “nontheists,”
as opposed to “atheists” who are “against the idea of God.” They don’t hold a
belief that God exists since they have never experienced God. And while they
are not sure what they would do with a mystical experience if it ever came to
them, some of them yearn for God events like mine, with relationship, consolations,
comfort and awe. They just won’t pretend to a belief that is not based on
experience.
I am ashamed to admit that I have felt a sense of
superiority in the past about our experiential difference. In the same way that
the math whiz might feel vanity about being able to calculate rings around the
mathematically challenged, so I felt vanity about my very sensory and
emotionally satisfying experiences of God. I confess this with regret.
Usually, however, when hubris makes an appearance, a
learning experience is given to me. So, in order to help me learn, God led me
to a startling vision in which God suckled me at her breast and simultaneously
appeared to me as the Principle of Perfection – cold, abstract, unapproachable,
mathematical, fearful. Awe-full. This
face of God was an alien one to me, frightening and inhuman. I liked my
humanoid face of God – or even the formless, energetic face of God that is also
part of my experience - much better than this one. I had found an aspect of God
that gave me the heebie-jeebies.
I have never given the intellect – the logical mind – the credit
it deserves. I have treasured my “right brain” functions: intuition, holistic
thinking, imagination, openness to divergent possibilities. I have not felt so
kindly toward “left brain” functions, including linear and analytical thought, logic,
reasoning, and attention to detail. This type of thinking has seemed boring to
me, a necessary evil, a tool for survival which we would someday outgrow.
But the vision of the Pure Principle has helped me understand
that God can also be found through the intellect. How could it be otherwise,
since we are “made in the image of God” and we have intellect, as well as
intuition? I am developing a deep respect for the aspects of the mind that can
focus, capture detail, detect inconsistencies, and reflect order. I have
learned that God is not only sensed and felt but mentally perceived. That God is
not only Something Greater than Ourselves into Which We Can Merge, but a Pure
Principle that is separate from me, and which can be perceived dimly by the mind,
if not the heart. I can’t really perceive God in this way; I don’t understand
God in this way. But the glimpse of a vision has helped me understand that
there are those who can. And that it is a valid way of experiencing God.
I think this might be good news for my nontheist friends. Those
of you who yearn for an experience of God may have been experiencing God all
along, as Principle. If so, you get to redefine God according to your own
experience! You do not have to yearn for a way of perceiving which is not
native to you. I would love to hear what you have to say about this.
And we theists, who favor the consoling warmth of a God we
can sense, might do well to open our minds to the Principle which is Pure. And
drop the hubris. Thank you, John Woolman.
