Chapter 3: Perceptions of God Edited

Chapter 3: Perceptions of God

There are many different perceptions of God. A traditional Christian perception of God is that God is like an old white man with white hair sitting on a throne, watching events around the earth, and responding to those events. This perception is held by many, even though it is against the teachings of the Bible beginning with the second commandment, make no images of anything or worship them. This same commandment speaks against making an idol of the Bible.

Some see any depictions of God as imaginary views with no basis in fact, that “God” under any name is a fiction created by humans for human purposes.

Most ancient religions saw the gods as having human character with superhuman powers. They could be jealous, vindictive, brave, compassionate, cruel, competitive, and so on.

Mystics mostly see or experience “God” in a non-physical way usually called spiritual.

Another ancient tradition, pantheism, sees “God” as the totality of all that is, that everything is a part of God or an expression of God.

Panentheism sees God as something that is in everything and everything as being in God, though God is not things, sort of like gravity is part of everything and everything is influenced by gravity, though different from gravity. The Gospel of John comes close to this view in its opening with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made.” Some of Paul’s writings come close to this view in describing us as being in Christ and Christ in us. Richard Rohr in The Universal Christ describes Christ in a way that fits with panentheism.

Many authors write of Spirit in a way that sees Spirit as something separate from but supporting creation. Ken Wilbur, in A Brief History of Everything sees Spirit as something that gave birth to the universe and is evolving along with the universe. The evolution of the Spirit is limited by evolution in the universe. An important event for Spirit was the development of consciousness and spirituality by humans.
As some humans develop deeper or higher spirituality, the Spirit also develops spiritually.

Some science fiction writers have used this idea in their stories, but I do not remember the names of the stories or authors where I have seen this.

Some see God as being like a pawn broker, requiring payment for a debt called sin. Others see God as a trader who grants requests in return for an action God wants. Many ancient cultures sacrificed people to gods like this in return for good crops or success in war. Many people will pray promising to do something they believe God wants them to do in return for a particular blessing like healing or success in a venture.

An Anglican monk who visited Atlantic School of Theology described God as like a river flowing across or through the world which can be diverted through prayer.

People choose many other views of God from angry, jealous, arbitrary father to continually caring mother to watchful, loving Shepherd, and beyond.

An important exercise for a person wanting a deeper spiritual life or faith life is considering what they believe about God, how they see and want to see God. My own view is that God is like a Quantum God, sometimes like a river flowing through the world working broad effects, sometimes someone who interacts with us as individuals in a mysterious way. Deep River Community Church often or usually uses “Holy Mystery” and that works well for me.

 

[BetteTheRed]

An important event for Spirit was the development of consciousness and spirituality by humans.

There's a tinge of anthropocentricity here. I certainly don't think self-consciousness is unique to humanity; there's a lot of evidence that elephants, primates, cetaceans, birds, cephalopods have varying degrees of self-awareness. And who are we to judge whether they are "spiritual" or not? I think that the only limitation on consciousness and spirituality is "alive".

 

[jimkenney12]

This was the viewpoint of Ken Wilbur. It is an interesting possibility. I am more intrigued by the possibility everything has consciousness. Some Indigenous beliefs and fantasy writers have explored that concept a little in giving consciousness to mountains and trees and such. For example, to mountains our time frame would be a blur. In the disc world series, trees also perceive time in a slower way.

Thank you for your comment. I will need to carefully rewrite that part.

 

[Mendalla]

This old UU sermon of mine reflects on this question to some degree. Uses the Gita and a couple New Testament passages as texts as well as reflecting on the Greek myth of Semele (and I think I used a version of that as a reading but forget which classical text I got it from, maybe Metamorphoses by Ovid).

SERMON: Face to Face

(Bhagavad Gita, ch. 11)

Have you seen the face of God?

I haven’t. Not literally. What I have seen is that God, or the sacred essence of reality that is what we call God, has many faces, perhaps as many faces as there are beings.

Now, I began life as a Christian. I was born and raised in the United Church of Canada, the grandson of a minister, administrator, and theologian of that church. And so, the first faces of The Divine that came to me were those of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The first representing God as a parent who gives life, sustains life, and provides rules to ensure order in society. The second representing God as a teacher and mentor figure who reaches out to us with His teaching, seeking to bring us closer to sacred reality. And the third representing God working in the hearts of humans, inspiring them to great deeds in the name of love, justice, and peace. Seen in this light, as three possible faces by which we may approach and understand our relationship to a greater reality, the Trinity does, in fact, have a place and purpose in my spiritual quest to this day. However, the Trinitarian notion that the Trinity IS God and IS therefore the only legitimate “face” of God represents a form of becoming “stuck in the myth”, taking the imagery to be the whole Truth, rather than a way to approach the Truth.

Another element that entered into my spiritual growth rather early on was scientific knowledge. I had an early fascination with dinosaurs, evolution, astronomy and astrophysics, atomic theory, and many other fields of scientific endeavour. Perhaps only my lack of interest and aptitude in mathematics kept me from a career in the sciences. One thing that became clear to me fairly early on, through my own thinking and reading and through conversations had with my grandfather, is that spirituality and science are not as mutually exclusive as some on both sides might think. Indeed, one face of God that stirred me during this time was the face of the cosmos, of great shining nebulae and remote galaxies. These images, from my various books on astronomy, showed me the wonder and power of the universe. The wonders that I found in reading about the structure of the universe or about nature in all its forms didn’t just educate me about science, but became powerful reminders of just how marvelous, even miraculous, the cosmos really is. What I didn’t have, was a clear image of how God and this wonderful Cosmos actually fit together. I only knew that the traditional versions of Creation didn’t tell the whole story, and neither did the raw equations and theories of science.

And so, we come to the Bhagavad Gita, which I read from at length before this sermon. I first read it in university, during an overview course on Eastern religion. In chapter 11, I found a vision of God that was powerful, beautiful, and that encompassed the whole of creation within it. This was not the Christian “Father” or the “Celestial Clockmaker”, but an expression of the wonder and power and life that lies within the Cosmos. This vision of God didn’t create the Cosmos, it is the Cosmos. It is the soul of the Cosmos, if you like. More importantly, this God, like the God of Christianity, came to us in human form, that of Krishna. For this is a vast and powerful vision of Divine Reality that the mind can scarcely encompass, let alone develop a relationship with. And so, in the person of Krishna, God provides us with a human face and voice so that we can understand and relate to the wisdom that he brings.

Of course, my spiritual journey didn’t end there, any more than it ended when I discovered U-Uism or when I actually became a UU. I continue to look for, and sometimes find, the faces of the Divine Reality around me. For there are many faces of God/the Cosmos/Divine Reality. The Encyclopedia of Gods by Michael Jordan claims to list more than 2500 entries, and there are probably far, far more than that. From the numerous gods and goddesses found in polytheistic traditions, to the bodhisattvas of devotional schools of Buddhism, to the animal headed gods of Egypt, to the Christian Trinity, human culture is full of faces of God and many, probably most, of them are human faces. Certainly there are those traditions, such as Judaism and Islam, where God is not seen personally but rather is experienced through his teachings. However, even in these traditions, the message often bears a human face, that of the prophets who bear it.

Why do we so often see God with a human face? I’m not learned enough in psychology and sociology to give a hard, scientific answer. However, it does seem to me to a completely logical phenomenon for a couple of reasons.

One is human egotism. As the only species we know of that considers and contemplates spiritual matters, it is only natural that we have tended to put ourselves at the centre of all things and to assume that Divinity would bear our face. This is not necessarily a bad thing, although it would behoove us to start thinking of ourselves less exclusively as our ability to impact on and damage the world becomes ever greater. It is simply the product of our being the only lifeform that has actively sought to find meaning in its world and had the ability to communicate what it found.

The other is the simple fact that we relate better to other humans than to anything else. The forces of nature and spiritual ideas that are encompassed by the Divine are often complex and either unknown or poorly understood. Few of us are really equipped to fully approach and understand reality in all its complexity, let alone to try to relate to that reality on a personal level. But when we see that reality as having a human face, even a human nature, it becomes something that we can relate to in terms that we can readily understand.

In the Classical myth of Semele, mother of the god Dionysios, Semele is married to the god Zeus, who has adopted a human guise in order to live as her husband. When curiosity gets the better of Semele (with some prompting from Zeus’s divine wife Hera, at least in some versions of the story), she elicits a promise from him to grant her any wish. She then wishes to see him as he really is; as a god. Reluctantly, he puts aside his human guise, knowing the outcome before it happens. The power of his divine nature destroys Semele, and only the timely intervention by Zeus saves her unborn child, who is to become a god himself. The message here, perhaps, is that the true power and wonder of the universe is too much for us to take in and so we cloak it in symbolic language, including our own shape.

We humans see the Divine as having a human face because we are human and we both want and need to relate to the Divine as being one of us. I suspect that whales, if they have in fact evolved to the point of contemplating the meaning of it all, probably see God as having the face of a whale. It is only natural.

In our tradition, we uphold the principles of “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning” and “encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations”. It would do well for us to ask what fundamental truths we can derive for the human faces of The Divine. Are they just manifestations of human egotism and the need to relate to the universe in a personal way or can we look at them in some symbolic way that can carry meaning beyond these considerations? What is the meaning of the idea that The Divine, The Cosmos, can have a human face? I have some thoughts on this, drawn from Christian roots, so you may have to bear with me as I explore those roots a bit.

(Luke 2:1-14)

In the Christian birth narrative, we are presented with the notion of The Divine coming into our world like any other person. Out through the birth canal. If we divorce a few centuries worth of Christian doctrine about the birth narrative, and look at the event in it raw form, it opens a very radical human face of The Divine. For it presents a God who is not our parent, our authority figure, our teacher (except in a symbolic way) or our companion. It presents a God who reaches out to us for our love. A God who needs to be suckled, and burped, and changed, and played with. Things that my wife and I have done with our son when he was a baby, things many of you do or have done with your own children. In the first moments after my son's birth, when I held him for the first time, it was a very emotional experience for me. In retrospect, I probably knew, for the first time, what the birth narrative was really all about, because I was doing the same thing that Joseph and Mary must have done when they wrapped Jesus in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. The notion that a newborn child is God is true, and every parent knows it. Not just because they command and control your entire life, but because they are so beautiful and so real that you can’t help but love them. They are human face of The Divine that teaches us that our world needs to be loved, and cared for, just as we care for our own children. Furthermore, the birth narrative invites to see each child as The Divine being born into our world, deserving of our love, care, respect, and even worship.

Perhaps, even more important, is something Jesus said after he grew up. As he was discussing the final judgment, he tells us that:

(Matthew 25:34-40)

In this passage, Jesus is inviting us to see each and every person in need as a face of The Divine. He is telling us that we can serve The Divine by serving each other. And that those who recognize this are the one who will enter God’s kingdom. Now, I do not, by a long shot, believe in traditional notions of judgment and damnation, some of which are derived from this passage. But, I do believe that by treating each of our fellow persons as if there were The Divine, as if they were sacred beings deserving of our love, respect, and worship, then something like the Kingdom of God is a lot more likely to come into being. Jesus isn’t the only who intimates the notion that each and every person is divine. The Hindu expression of “Atman is Brahman” puts forward the notion that the soul, the divine core of each being (not just humans), is but a manifestation of The Divine, the soul of the universe. The vision of God in chapter 11 of the Gita reflects this, placing all things in God and God in all things. In our secular scientific world, Dr. Carl Sagan’s famous “we are all star stuff” carries a similar implications as it puts forward the idea that humans are faces of the cosmos and, as such, represent the universe coming to know itself. And, of course, there is the powerful first principle of own religious community: “The inherent worth and dignity of every person”.

Perhaps just as importantly, on an individual level, it tells us that we are each a face of The Divine and therefore that something of what makes the universe sacred resides in us. That my revelations and ideas about the nature of the universe are as valid as anyone else’s because I have that tie to the universe just as all others do. The idea that we are all somehow a face of The Divine, that we are all star stuff, gives new importance to our “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” and to the need for “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth within our congregation.” For, if we accept that we are the human faces of the cosmos, or God, or whatever other name we give to the fundamental forces of the universe, then we must accept that we all have inherent worth and dignity.

Have you seen the face of God?

Try looking in the next seat.

It’s a good start.

 

[jimkenney12]

A very good sermon. Thank you. Some traditions use meditation focused on a single object and coming to see all of the universe in that object, whether it is a rock, a snowflake, a flower. There are many faces of the divine that is at the heart of all that is. What matters to individuals at a given moment in time is finding a face of the Divine that helps them in that moment.