FROM THE BOUNDARY - Hiya! – Part 4
Does God have form, body, length, breadth? No? Then what can we say about Him? How can we say we know His ‘mind’? Yet He must pervade our world else He wouldn’t be God, would He? Does He have a name? No? Then let’s use a metaphor.
Let’s call Him ‘Endless Fountain’. He pours His endless life-streams upon the earth, streams from which new forms perpetually spring, within and outside us – for at root they’re one. He’s not an abstraction. He lives through all the patterns of life and death – all Truth, of course, but beyond our understanding; all Creating, of course, but beyond the limits of our imagination; all Love, not some wild, cosmic joker, yes, but we can’t count the ways He expresses it. We simply don’t have the words. OK, then, how can we imprison Him in book texts? Is He THAT small?
What of these book texts? Scripture affirms again and again that God speaks to us, that’s to say it tells of men who lived thousands of years ago who claimed that God spoke to them in a language they understood, and typically issued very detailed instructions, often couched in petty rules and orders backed by threats like a very full-of-himself criminal law judge, from somewhere ‘up there’ or ‘out there’, the old man in the sky who went so far as to inscribe tablets of stone – well, according to Moses. At best they made Him a very superior human being who ‘spoke’, typically, to other superior human beings, the patriarchs and prophets. “I heard the voice of the Lord saying”; “Thus saith the Lord”; “This is the word of the Lord”; “And God said”: all encapsulate the idea of God directly communicating with His people, typically through the medium of narratives. The Gospels are different. It’s the remembered words of Jesus which are recorded, though still spoken with a like authority and introduced similarly: “He said unto them”; ‘He lifted up his eyes to his disciples and said”; “And He answered them saying; “I say unto you” – and typically in the context of stories. I suppose that when God allegedly ‘spoke’ directly in a detailed way, He did so in Hebrew or Aramaic, that He didn’t use ‘glossolalia’ or mere body language. How else would He have allegedly been so clearly understood? H’mm.
The important lesson in all this relates not so much to what God is said to have said, but to the reality that He is ever at hand, not afar off. He’s not a remote God who sits passively by while his creatures make a mess of it. As the Psalmist reminds us (Psalm 115), there’d be no point in believing in a God who doesn’t communicate meaningfully with us. A meaningful relationship, after all, only arises in the context of self-revelation, directly or through the medium of others. How else can we label someone ‘friend’ or ‘enemy’? And sure the divine may ‘speak’ through the words of other people.
Does He only ‘speak’ to special people? Is the key to revelation wealth, or education, social position, position in the Church? No. People are ‘special’ because He DOES communicate with them as He wills. Ultimately we’re ALL special – well, if we have ears to hear and are not obsessed with ‘I’ and ‘Mine’. Indeed, as St Paul tells us, He may speak even to an enemy and transform him as a lover. Portuguese village kids, a French shepherdess, a washer-woman, a tax collector, a vagrant, and yes, a carpenter’s son, we’re all His. Isn’t He the Breath of our breath?
How does God reveal himself? I suppose the form of His revelation will depend upon the kind of people we are and what’s needed NOW. It may be insight about ourselves, or guidance in surmounting a difficult situation, or a confirmatory miracle, or rest for our souls, or a revelation about the divine nature. It may come as a test. We may need humbling. His voice may thunder in the storm; more likely it will come as the still small voice Elijah heard (1 Kings 19:12). For the poet it may come as disconnected images. For the child, it may be heard in a dream or in cuddling a teddy bear. For the insensitive, it may be transient personal disaster. For the Christian, His Word is always with us – in the life, teaching and saving grace of the Anointed One. Yes, ‘What would Jesus think, say, do?’ That may be all we need.
His voice may be heard in all the complexities of our personal stories – cajoling, calming, prodding, gratifying, humbling. To Mother Teresa of Calcutta He spoke in the voice of a beggar, “I thirsty”. To St Francis of Assisi he spoke in a voice from nowhere which impelled “Repair my Church”. He may speak through inspirations, intuitions, flashes of insight, in the nagging of conscience, through the solicitations of friends or strangers. Chance and luck may turn out to be merely earthbound explanations of divine intervention in our lives. The list goes on and on. We’re all different. Our needs change as the shape of clouds. In all things, we are His and He is ours.
Go safely, then – until the next time.
Hiya, from the boundary: “God suits His language to the understanding of His hearer” (Kabir).