Lift up your spirits, with a little spot of soul. By Tijn Touber
Is God a beached whale?
One of the last columns I wrote for Ode was about my notion that God is not a beached whale or a broken bicycle. What I meant to say was that, if we degrade God and turn him into the source of both good and bad, there is no longer any absolute truth and beauty that can act as a standard for our thinking and doing. I like to write about these matters, not because I know the answers or want to impose them on you, dear reader, but because they help me understand these things better and because I get feed back from so many readers around the world. One of them is Cheryl Hamilton, who answers by asking some very profound questions that are worth pondering.
She writes: "In response to your article, 'God is not a beached whale' (April 2007), in which you made the statement, 'If God is not perfect, there is no longer any standard. There is no pure love, perfect friendship or absolute truth we can refer to and return to,' I would like to submit the following comments: Like many humans in the Western world, your thoughts are apparently strongly influenced by Christian assertions that there has to be good vs. evil.
1. Have you ever personally experienced ?pure love, perfect friendship or absolute truth?? 2. Do you know of anyone who has? 3. Have those who have been proclaimed to experience such perfection actually ever existed, or are they figments of mankind?s imagination of what should be? (?Should? is purposefully used here, since it is a word that invokes guilt, fear and despair since the idea it professes never exists.) 4. Is there any such thing as these ?should? ideals? 5. Why are we so afraid of accepting that the Creator of all is also the distasteful, the ugly, the wicked, etc.? 6. How can we human beings be so arrogant as to decide what is good or bad to That, which is responsible for creating, or becoming all? 7. You say we must have a standard to return to. How can we ?return? if we have not experienced that which repels us? Isn?t what repels us then, also divine in its ability to inspire?
Also, my perception of what you wrote is that you are fearful of the unpleasant emotions you experience in response to what you find objectionable (broken bikes and beached whales). Because of this, you feel you need to define the 'divine' as something to aspire to?basically pure pleasure ('pure love, perfect friendship, absolute truth'). Please consider the following:
1. Do emotions allow us to experience life? 2. Should life then, be only that which is pleasurable? 3. How do we define pleasure, since what is pleasurable for some is painful or, by consequence, produces pain in others? 4. How would we know to seek pleasure if there does not exist other than pleasure?
Finally, please excuse my unenlightened state, but I have to ask how you can define what is enlightenment? How can you be so bold as to say that oneness and duality are real and that by living both, one can find enlightenment? My dear fellow human being - if you are right, then you have found the ability to transcend and you no longer need to be writing articles for Ode (albeit a wonderful magazine). Otherwise, please join the rest of us in our journey to becoming more enlightened by whatever means necessary for our specific personalities and needs, which together make up this goopy, psychedelic, soup of spiritual beings."
Embedded in the language we employ are the beliefs we have taken up, inherited, or into which we have been indoctrinated. Examining or challenging our beliefs seems to require an evaluation (re-valuation?) of the language we use to talk about these beliefs. Of course, any direct talk about beliefs is libel to miss the mark and to fail to convey their essence. Poetry, koans, and certain types of singing are forms of verbalizations that may be more useful at conveying the essence.
Tijn Touber writes, "if we degrade God and turn him into the source of both good and bad, there is no longer any absolute truth and beauty that can act as a standard for our thinking and doing."
I wonder if refering to "God" as "him" is not already a degradation, Tijn. I mean this not mainly because of the gender issues implied but because embedded in the language used is the idea of a God person, an entity separate and distinct from me, from you, from All. The problem of reconciling the existence of "bad" in this world with a personal God is immense. As a former Catholic, I never succeded in this endeavor. I felt compelled to lay down the idea of a God I called 'Him', or even using the term 'God'.
This said, I feel that a person may follow a Christian path toward, realization, enlightenment, fulfillment, homecoming. I think of Thomas Merton, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart and others. It seems at some point thought that these people realized that their own religion is but a spring board. Unless one makes the leap into the ineffable mystery, what good is the spring board?
Your writings resonate with me Tijn. Peace.
posted by Waterman on 6/21/2007 2:17 am