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Saturday, March 20, 2010

The Language of the Universe

The personification of God is a mistake, in my opinion, but one that is endemic with beings such as ourselves: we cannot but help but make the unknown powers into entities somewhat like ourselves...only more powerful.

When you look at the universe in all its vasty, alien beauty, or when you meditate on the miracle and the great joy of your children, we feel God.
But it is not the joy, and it is not the vast, overwhelming beauty that is God; it the "grammar-less" communication of the Living and the Holy to us that we feel to be God.
We feel it as it is being communicated to us by the "language" of the Intense. (The language of the Intense is the sometimes brutal, sometimes joyful,  crash of the awe-inspiring into us, where words and discrete moments of time are overwhelmed by the immensity of the situation. I trust we have all had such experiences.)

God is the "speech" and "music" of all that is - without grammar and syntax as we know it, without musical theory familiar to us - and all that we perceive. Some of us feel forced to put it into words of human language, and we end up personifying God - essentially imprisoning the concept within the web of words.

We have to learn to accept and feel familiar with the ways of communication that do not rely on language and logic. Such a process does not lead to license and anarchy, rather it leads to a more difficult project: to live life in a godly manner as evidenced by our actions and thoughts, not our words.

God is not Omnipresent.
We do not have God within us. Rather, we are in God.
And you cannot believe in that which is everywhere and at everytime; that's nonsense. God is beyond the picking and choosing of what we call "belief systems".

If you will pardon what may seem an indiscretion, to speak of God in words and logic is similar to speaking of the joys of love in words and logic: it is much better in person, it is much better as a living action. The universe and all that's in it are overwhleming. That's why the Holy overwhelms us; it is the nature of things.
We are forced to live in the Intense and Overwhelming whether we wish to or not: the intense joys, the unspeakable sufferings and evils.

The Holy speaks to us the way it is: Immense, Awesome, Intense, and speechless with wonder.

We try to cope with it, and end up "dumbing" it down.

We have to learn how to make moral decisions in that realm of unspoken Intensity. We can no longer rely on language to first trivialize the things we see, and then to debate about them, and finally to make some sort of decision - the last step in a "decision making process".

(This is the Zen...without Zen. Forty days in the wilderness, fasting, without leaving the city. Forty years wandering, while at home, and the Night of Power every day.)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is a fabulous reflection! It quite captures, in better language and loftier imagery than I could express it, very much of what I have come to believe about God. It is indeed in the personalization of the Divine that we ultimately trivialize it. And to trivialize it, is to dismiss it utterly since it leads inevitably to our own little prison pit that cannot see beyond the little circle of sky we're granted. I trust you will not mind if I turn parts of it to my own uses from the pulpit when it's time.

Montag said...

Thank you, and use anything you want...except the word "God". I just copyrighted it, and you would have to pay me royalties.