Sunday, July 5, 2009

God is Bigger

God is bigger than the boogie man
He's bigger than Godzilla,
or the monsters on TV

Oh, God is bigger than the boogie man

And He's watching out for you and me.
(Lyrics from VeggieTales-Where's God When I'm S-scared)



God is bigger than our superheroes, our movie stars, and only slightly bigger than Chuck Norris. God transcends gender, and human emotions and characteristics. He(?) does not become jealous, angry, or vengeful for He(??) is bigger. He transcends the need to parcel out eternal punishment in the guise of mercy like a boy with a magnifying glass hovering over an ant hill. He is bigger than our labels, words, and ideas which may not even come close to describing the thoughts, actions, and desires of the Divine.

The Western descriptions of God is more of a Superman: He is a man but super-sized. No Christian, Muslim (definitely), nor Jew would acknowledge that God acts human yet in our holy text he is described with human characteristics, traits, and reacting with human emotions. Monotheists have used words that attempt to override God's Old Testament anthropomorphic descriptions:
omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omnibenevolence. And yet these are also mere mortal words used to attempt to describe the indescribable. Forget trying to rationalize what God can be because the picture is too BIG! Forget trying to analyze the words of men (mine included) to figure out the will of God. Forget trying to justify your beliefs based on the unseen. Just sit, listen, and BE.

If God is not a man but something grander that we repeatedly fail too describe then God falls into the category of experience. God can not be described any better than the love between two people. When asked how to describe love we stutter into describing feelings and past experiences. So is that it, God is no more than a feeling? No, I believe God is as real as fire is to the human hand yet must be experienced by different senses on a different level. We only see and hear faint echoes of the Divine in our daily walks whenever we see someone feeding the hungry or clothing the naked. We see this and say, "God is here". But we forget at times that God can also be found within ourselves, not as a localized and exclusive force found only within you but permeating throughout all of Reality. God is (and here I will fail in my description) our internal potential, an inner creative loving force that drives us to become better than we were 2 seconds ago. I believe this can be said by anyone of any faith without sounding like heresy. Is humanity then God? No, that would be like analyzing the atoms of a single grain of sand and declaring this to be the beach.

In the end I acknowledge that I do not KNOW what God is but I can point it out when I see it. I do not believe for a second that this leaves me lost, confused, or morally bankrupt. I am guided and drawn in by the hand of Love. How can this fail me, how can I be lost with Love as my guide?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wonderful! It is only AFTER we liberate our anthropomorphic perspective that we truly learn to "see" the REAL God.

Anonymous said...

Excellent! As you say, impossible to describe, but recognizable (able to point out) the presence.

Don R

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