What is God?

For my first Lenten post, I will be explaining what exactly I think God is!! As you can imagine, this is not exactly a question I can answer in a few pages of writing. Luckily, that is not my goal. My goal with this, and with the rest of this series is to explain what I personally believe, in the the hopes that it might help at least one of the beautiful people reading this find God!! First, I will say that I do believe in the Trinitarian Christian conception of God. I went through a few years as a Unitarian, but that was mainly because I had never really given it much thought. The Trinity never made much sense to me. But after reading through Richard Rohr’s masterful book on the subject, The Divine Dance, I now feel comfortable in saying I believe in the idea of God manifesting as three Persons in our reality. With that said, I will split this up into three sections, one for each Person. I plan on writing about my religious history at some point but that’s not what this is. This is more my beliefs (Keep in mind, they are subject to change.)

The Father - God all around us

I have found that a lot of people, atheist and believer, seem to have this idea of God being a “Sky daddy”, just a man in the sky who smites people and threatens them with Hellfire if they don’t bow down. This, to me, is one of the most tragic aspects of modern religion. We tend to think of God as if He is Zeus or Odin. He rules from a fixed point in reality, Mt. Olympus, or Asgard, or what have you. But I do not believe this is true. I believe that God exists outside of reality. He created reality. He created time. Why do we try to place the Creator of reality inside of His creation? Why do we force God (or our conception of God) into our flawed, human, view of reality? God is beyond our wildest dreams. The universe itself floats inside of Him, and He transcends and yet intersects all of reality. Isn’t that incredible? Just go outside. Go outside, listen to the birds, feel the wind blowing against you, look at the greenery, or the white of the snow, or the sandy desert. God is there. God exists everywhere, not at a fixed point in His own creative work. He is found in everything that is and everything that isn’t.

This view is called “Panentheism”. It is different from the concept of “Pantheism”. Pantheism says that God IS the universe. I think that is closer to the truth then the idea of Him being just, a man in the sky. But it isn’t what I believe either. God intersects reality and binds all of it together. The Father exists everywhere. I do not believe Him to be a gendered being. I think gender is a human creation. But the Bible uses male pronouns for Him, so I will do the same. I believe that is the gender that the patriarchal societies of the ancient world placed on Him. But He is neither male or female. He embodies both, as well as every other gender. In many ways, I believe Him to be diversity itself.

Romans 1:20 goes like this “Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse (NRSVUE)”. Creation itself is, as Richard Rohr puts it, “The first Bible”. The majesty of the mountains, the trees, the rivers, the galaxies, and all living things scream in joyous worship of their Father. Before our scriptures were compiled thousands of years ago, nature itself was shouting the praises and preaching the word of the Father. He shouts at us through our surroundings. He is within, and without, His creation. In many ways, many indigenous nations are closer to the truth then the Christians who stole their land and massacred them. The Great Spirit is everywhere in nature. This is His planet and His creation. We are lucky enough to share it with each other. I do not believe in a man in the sky. I believe in the omnipresent, omnidiverse, all-knowing, all-loving, Creator of the universe, who both transcends and intersects his creation. Go outside, close your eyes, and just feel the presence of the Father. I can feel Him all around me, thickening the air I’m breathing!!

The Son - God with us

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” - John 1:1-5 NRSVUE. This legendary passage from the Gospel of John illustrates something I think that many people do no understand. Jesus was not the first incarnation of God in the universe. The first incarnation happened over 13 billion years ago in an event we now refer to as “The Big Bang”. Out of nothing, God’s Word manifested into reality. Before Christ was incarnated as Jesus, Christ was the entire framework of the universe! Christ is the very Word of God incarnated in matter. Colossians 3:11 says that Christ is all and in all. There’s that Panentheism again. Later on, in around 4 BC, Christ was incarnated a second time, into a human being. I believe that God did this so that we as humans could see how we are supposed to be. God loved us so much, that he emptied himself into the lowly form of a human being. Just as before, when God emptied himself into the form of atoms at the Big Bang. In His death on the Cross, Jesus completed his self-emptying. It was a show of radical solidarity with the human condition.

This is what makes Christianity radically different from other faiths (No disrespect to other faiths btw). The God I worship, the God we worship, is not all about lording over us from a far off throne in Heaven. No. Christianity isn’t about “going to Heaven”, it is about Heaven coming down to Earth. That’s what makes Jesus different. He is God sharing our lot as humans. He is God coming down to Earth to share in our human condition. He showed us the way to live. He charged us all with the quest of bringing, and embodying, His Kingdom (Which I have come to call “The Divine Realm”). He summed up the teachings of God, made manifest in so many other faiths in the past, into just two commandments “Love God, and Love your Neighbor”. Here’s the thing, they are not mutually exclusive. You cannot love God if you don’t love your Neighbor. By loving your neighbor, you ARE loving God. Remember that verse from Colossians I mentioned earlier? Christ IS your neighbor man! I personally believe that, even if you don’t believe in God, you in fact are loving God by loving your neighbor. When someone asks Jesus who our neighbor is, he responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Our neighbor is everyone, even the lowest of society who we might despise, even our enemies. Christ in all. We are all siblings in Christ, whether we believe in Him or not.

Jesus is far more then just a really wise teacher of morals. He IS morality. He is the divine Image of God. He is the Word of God, the very fabric of the universe, made manifest with organs and bones. By His life, death, and resurrection, we are saved. Not because He was sent as an appeasement for an angry god, as the fundamentalists believe. But because He is God incarnated as one of us. He lived, loved, laughed, and died as one of us, and showed us the way to live. He showed us the way to salvation. He pointed to the Divine Realm inside of and around us (Luke 17:20-21). By our prayers, by our lives, the Divine Realm will spread everywhere. Jesus showed us the way. Jesus showed us the way here on Earth. We don’t need to go up to Heaven, we need to bring Heaven down here.

The Holy Spirit - God within us

Do you feel Her? Do you feel the imprint of nature’s law on your heart? The law that is repeated in so many great religious and philosophical traditions? Can you feel Her calling? Pulling you towards what is right? The one universal human law, that can be found in cultures worldwide? Baked into our cultural DNA long before we knew about each other? Treat others the way you want to be treated. C.S Lewis in Mere Christianity posits in the beginning of his book that this universal moral law that we can all feel inside us as something pointing to a creator. We as humans are (so far) unique in the universe as the only beings that seem to have this kind of thing. Can you think of another principal that’s so shared by human diversity? I can’t. We all know that it is the right thing to do. But do we all follow it? No. We don’t. I myself have broken this law numerous times. But I have also found that trusting in Her, instead of endlessly resisting will lead to inner peace. This is the Holy Spirit. This is God within us. This Spirit of truth and wisdom that manifests in all of us. From Her, the Divine Realm springs out of our hearts. She transforms us into beacons of love, ever radiating outward toward our fallen world. I have said before that I believe there is truth in every religion. Who are we to limit where the Holy Spirit can go? In our little church boxes? Who are we to say She cannot manifest in Islam, or Buddhism, or Wicca? Or even Secular Humanism? I think we do Her a great disservice when we try to limit Her reach. Whether you believe in Her or not, the Spirit works inside you. She inhabits your heart and pulls you, DRAGS YOU, towards doing what’s right. You can resist, you can slip up, you can do the wrong thing, but that doesn’t make Her messaging any less true.

But when you don’t resist. When you let Her flow through you, unencumbered. Oh man, She can light you on fire. The power you feel in that moment can move mountains. Doing good is holy work. So many of us are advancing the Divine Realm without even knowing it. Do you think the Buddha thought he was “advancing the Divine Realm” when he claimed that life is suffering? Probably not. But he was, because suffering is an integral part of being able to see and feel the Divine Realm. He wasn’t Christian. But the Spirit worked in him to bring humanity that noble truth. Are you seriously going to sit here and tell me that the Spirit only works in a select few? Instead of all of humanity. Are you serious? No. No No No. God doesn’t work that way. God uses everyone. God uses every nation and culture to proclaim His truth. Can’t you see Her? Can’t you feel Her inside you? If you haven’t felt the high, the sheer courage, power, wisdom, and desire to do good, that the Spirit can awaken inside of you. You haven’t lived. She PULLS that out of us. I recently watched an excellent movie about Harriet Tubman. While I was watching it, I was awestruck at how full of the Spirit she was. She escaped, on her own, from slavery, trekked hundred of miles to Philadelphia from Maryland, and then trekked BACK to free her family and friends. She repeated this numerous times. Her actions freed hundreds of human beings from the demonic evils of slavery. Is it mere coincidence that she claimed to have talked to God? No. She was on fire with the Spirit, driving her to do good. Driving her to act as a point of light from Heaven onto Earth.

That’s what the Spirit does. She draws us towards the truth. She draws us in to follow the law imprinted on our hearts.

The Holy Spirit drives us to love. For our God, and for our Neighbor. You do not have to be a Christian to feel that inside you. You do not have to be a Christian to do the work She is calling you to do. You just have to be a human being. Writing this, in the middle of one of the darkest periods my country has ever gone through, I feel myself burning with the Spirit. I want to give myself over to Her wishes, I want desperately to love my God, and to love my neighbor. Stop resisting the call to love. Stop resisting Her holy fire building inside you. No matter your beliefs. Let the love and the desire to love overwhelm you. Burn with the Spirit.

This threefold God is the God I worship. The God who created, sustains, and guides the universe towards it’s ultimate conclusion, Love. Come and worship!! Come and Love!!! Come and spread the Divine Realm. Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!! His truth is marching on!!!