A
Conversation about God, Goddess, or the Absence Thereof
Lone Jensen
Let me begin
with a question: how do you really feel when I say the word God? Do you cringe
a little, shrink from the word and think to yourself: “Oh, I do hope she is not
going fundamentalist on us, or going off the deep end!“
Do you wish I used that word less? Or do you inwardly applaud and hope that
finally someone is going to speak out loud and unashamedly what you already
believe? Are you a closet Theist? Or do you worship the Goddess and wish I
would use the feminine pronoun all the time? Or are you neutral, mildly
curious? Few, I have discovered in my years as a UU minister, few are really
neutral about God. No matter what we believe about God or the absence thereof
there is often high emotion when we hear God-talk. Whether God is there or not
the tension surely is. What is this all about?
Perhaps we
are afraid of the word because we confuse it with dogma or with the kind of
theology that binds us to a narrow mind and even narrower creed. But the
absence of God has as many theological implications as does the presence of the
All Mighty. So short of becoming a kind of fast food religion and ask each
customer: “Do you want God with that?” we really have to find a way to speak to
each other honestly and with respect. That is both our challenge and our
special form of UU grace. And I do understand the hesitations, the anxiety and
the anger that some of us feel about the God that may have been thrust upon us.
Not to mention the way God is being used in certain circles to justify all
manner of prejudice and phobias. No, I do not want to be mistaken for someone
who claims to know that God does not like uppity women or gay men or whatever
other personal prejudice they espouse. But I am not willing either to have God
hijacked by the religious right. Maybe the real questions are much simpler:
Does what we think about God make our lives better? Does it make us more loving
and forgiving? Does it inspire us to act? If not perhaps we had better examine
the quality of our theology.
Now God is
for some of you a word that has outlived its usefulness. That doesn't mean you
are doing bad theology nor would I suggest that simply believing in a God would
make you a better person. In fact there are some images of God I find frankly
abhorrent. Once the word God in my mind was so laden down with centuries of
dogma, with woman hating, sexuality denying, burn in
hell rhetoric that I too cringed whenever I heard it.
But for some
time now it has felt at times as if God was there. Not the easy God of
childhood or the God of Dogma but a simple presence of calm grace with no face
and ultimately no words either. God for me is useful shorthand pointing to what
is ultimately unknowable. It is a word that once again hold power and meaning
for me years after I made my peace with it. It took a long time to get to this
resting place and this faith journey is far from over. You may end up in a
different place. In fact I trust each of us will. That is the beauty of this
sacred community. We honor the differences among us. So if I tell you about my
own religious journey I do not expect you to follow in my footsteps. What I do
hope is that you will consider and honor your own life as if it was a sacred
text. Within which you will find both beauty and meaning. Let us begin with the
God of our childhoods.
"My easy
God is gone, the one I've known since childhood,” writes the poet and we nod.
Yes, for most of us that God is gone. "We walk alone now," we say,
but "not as terrified as when he held our hands."
The God of
childhood for me was an odd mixture. He was at once a kind, loving
grandfatherly figure that I might still long for and at the same time a stern,
angry and often demanding judge who was all-seeing. He knew, just like Santa
Claus, when we were good and when we were bad. A terrifying
image for a child who is not altogether sure about where such a God ends and
his and her parents begin. And I was told that such a God unlike their
parents have absolute powers and can do absolutely anything. What does that do
to you?
Rev. Terry
Sweetser tells his story: "I was seven years old when I had my first
encounter with theology. My mother made a batch of fudge, placed it in the
refrigerator and decreed it could not be sampled until after supper. I was not
pleased. I contrived every scheme I could imagine to sneak some, but someone
always seemed to be lurking around the kitchen.
“At about
“The word
theology means god-study. As they drove off, I was studying hard. It did not
take me long to conclude that I was a seven year old atheist. Boy, did that fudge taste good. Unfortunately for me mother
had counted the pieces, and the recount on her return showed a deficit of
three. When asked how I could brazenly have taken the fudge in front of God, I
said, ‘I don't believe in God.’ My ever practical mother responded, while
administering my first spanking: ‘It would be in your best interest to act as
if God were there.’ Well maybe. It depends upon who you think God is. As Sweetser
wrote, his mother used God as a disciplinary tool with which to develop a
conscience. Our early images of God are crafted out of adult words that seen
through a child's eyes may take on fantastic shapes. But those images change as
we grow and learn, as we question and doubt. My early God was lost at fourteen
when I went for confirmation, an event that in Denmark was similar to a Bat
Mitzvah, a huge feast, a rite of passage that meant you were now an adult. By
then I was reading the Bible myself and as I was taking some of the words
literally I wanted, perhaps expected at least a small miracle, some
supernatural event that would show me that God was indeed whom I had been
taught he was. A voice out of the darkness would have done very nicely. But
much as I waited and prayed there was no answer, only a vast emptiness. My
words it seemed only disappeared, were blown away in that stormy night of the
soul some of us call adolescence. So on the festive day as I knelt with the
others, dressed in a white silk brocade dress and my first high heels and
holding a red rose I said to myself: “OK, God this is it, now show me!"
But of course nothing happened at all, and as the priest put the dry oblate in
my mouth I felt indeed confirmed, but as an atheist, a very young angry and
rebellious one. Perhaps there was also a sense of betrayal because if one could
not count on God then what could one count on or believe? It is difficult to
look back through the years and not smile a little at the arrogance of that
young woman who thought that she deserved a miracle, a special spectacular
event just for her to show her that she wasn't alone in the Universe. This is a
journey many of us in this room have made. Again I quote my colleague Terry
Sweetser: "I doubt there is a person who hasn't wanted to believe in a
stern and grandfatherly God. Like all human beings we are afraid of life and
would have liked to know for sure that we are loved and cared for by God and
his son. But what I discovered was that I could not believe it. And so with
fear and trembling I confronted my oneness in the universe. Only then could I
painfully begin to learn that there is wonder in that oneness that can be
shared."
I agree. Most
of us have at one time or another confronted our aloneness. In the process we
learn what kind of God we do not believe in. As Sam Kean
found: "Any God with self esteem would not need me to sing praises to
his/her holy name. Nor would a provident God, like a forgetful CEO, need
to be reminded to intercede and grant clemency to some little one caught in the
pain and the tragedy that are an inescapable part of the human condition."
Again I agree. Worship to me means lifting up that which is of worth and God
surely does not need our praises though gratitude in general may be good for our
mental health. We made these images of Gods who needs our sacrifice. It is
easier to understand a kind of barter God than to try to follow someone’s
teachings. Remember that not even one of the founders of the great religions
were Orthodox. Abraham left
"In the
first generation the men were golden and the goblets were wooden. In the second
generation the men were wooden and the goblets golden." The images we got
from our old faiths are sometimes best lost. They are as wooden gods, worthless
when examined closely. Herb Richardson, a conservative theologian once said:
"I will tell you what it means to believe in the authority of the Bible.
If you ask me if I believe what is on page 313 of the Bible I will say Yes. And then I will see what is on that page." Such
blind faith is incompatible with a love of truth and reason. As
is the image of God as a judge who condemn us to Hell. That idea, apart
from being likely un biblical, is frankly immoral to
me. So it was with a sense of liberation that I rejected the word God, threw it
out along with hell fire and brimstone and other human nightmares. But I have
to admit that something was missing. It was hard to find a satisfactory word to
replace it with. In
With Seminary
my reaction to God changed. But it began long before that. When women began to
reclaim the divine nature, to look for or re-invent ancient Goddesses I began
to see another side of that feared G-word, once “ess” was added to it. It
wasn't that I suddenly decided that God is female, although if seen as a
creator that would make more sense, as she could give birth to the universe as
only the female sex can give human life, but what changed me was the discovery
that the word could feel positive, affirming, empowering. Ultimately though, I
could not be a literalist here either. Goddess might be more palatable to me
than God but the problem remained, I could not see the Ultimate Reality, prime
mover or creative force as being either human or of either sex. The All
Embracing Universe would have to do as my religious metaphor.
But that
would not quite do either. If the word God designates “that about which we are
ultimately concerned" (as Paul Tillich says) then I asked: “who or what is
my God?” We will, I believe, worship something or someone. The Unitarian A Powell Davies saw God as “the aliveness of reality, the
breath of life in the world.” Dana Greeley once challenged Unitarian
Universalists to: “Acquaint thyself at first hand with
divinity.” What he meant was find out who or what your
God is, do theology, understand first hand what it is you give your life to and
determine if it is worthy. Henry Nielson Wieman called God the creative force
for good. There is in fact no shortage of definitions that many of us can agree
with. But they may be missing the point. At one of Paul Tillich's very abstract
lectures at Harvard on the nature of God, woman rose to ask a question: “Dr.
Tillich," she said, “it is well known that psychoanalysts have an
exceedingly difficult time with patients who know psychoanalytical theory. Do
you think God has the same problem with theologians?"
There is also
a story told at the
Mystics have
always known this. “The paradox of authentic mysticism is that something as
ordinary as the first blue flower of spring growing out of the snow suddenly
opens a vista to eternity. In the twinkling of an eye our perspective shifts
and we see that the ordinary is miraculous."
It is perhaps
not that God does not speak but that we do not know the words. Let me end with
this story: “At forty two, two years after her divorce and the tragic death of
her only daughter, Susan was painfully trying to begin again. In her grief she
retreated to a small cabin in the woods. One night she had an extraordinary
experience: ‘I woke to the coolness of the cabin, the wood stove having spent
its heat. I decided to start up another fire in the hope of keeping the room
warm the rest of the night. It was so peaceful, both externally and internally.
I was in love with the moment, standing in the dark, in this small cabin, in
this quiet draw: waiting for the flames to make union with the wood; looking
out at the thin moon leading stars in a friendly chase through the trees;
listening to the waterfalls pouring over the rocks. I became aware of a song of
universal grace coming from the room, right where I was standing. It's was a
song felt more than heard, coming from even deeper than the heart. It was still
with me when I curled down into the bed and cast off, smiling, into the gentle
dark river.’ Tao Te Ching said: "Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding. The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.”