Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

Where to Look for God
by Reverend John Alexie Crane
I. Strange Gods
The word is heavily charged. Carries an enormous load of negative associations for many of us. On one hand, the word God is for many a source of meaning, love, and comfort; and for many others it is thoroughly repugnant. For others still, it is just incomprehensible. A murky idea.

When you look back in history, you can see that many atrocities have been committed in the name of the traditional God of the Western world, that almighty Lord and Ruler of the Universe. Omnipotent, omnipresent, just, merciful, loving. Creator of the heavens and the earth.

This has been the dominant idea of God in the West for centuries. It evolved out of the Hebrew tradition in the ancient world, was taken into and reshaped by Christianity. This is the God of our Fathers. I must confess that I do not now and never did believe in this God. Though as a child I was heavily exposed to the idea, I found no meaning in it. It baffled me.

It was not until much later that I came to understand that this idea was not actually God, but simply our culture’s long-accepted conception of God. That it was in fact an idol: an image of God made by the hands, heads, and hearts of humanity.

What I want to discuss today is not any particular conception of God’s nature, but rather that something, that reality to which the word points our attention. I can’t tell you the exact nature of God, but I can, I think, tell you where to look for God. Where to seek an experience of God. If you are one of those who find the word repugnant, I understand and sympathize. However, do what you can to be patient with my attempt to shed some light on this exceedingly ancient and widespread idea.

II. Atheism and Understanding
I am an atheist. I do not believe in God. Never did. I know that this is not a big problem here. I am confident that you will not regard me as a bad person merely because I am an atheist, an unbeliever.

But there is more. I also love God. I am an atheist who loves God. I am aware that this is a peculiar theological position, not a popular one. I won't insist that you adopt my understanding of the matter. But I thought I would like to share with you how it looks to me.

I do not now and never did believe in the God of our Fathers, in the conception of God that has been dominant in the Western world. However, I now cherish the word and what I have come to see as its underlying meaning. For the first thirty years of my life, the word was almost a complete blank to me.

In theological school, it was my duty to study the idea, and I found that the more I learned, the more irritable I became. I was an active, practicing, militant atheist all through the period of my professional education, and was delighted to find that I could run rational circles around all believers, even terrorize some of them.

Still, I continued to study the matter off and on, in search of insight. Then, one rainy day, it all fell into place, and I saw, I understood, it made sense. Still did not believe in God, but I knew then where to look for God.

As I now see it, if people find they require belief or faith in order to relate to God, they are looking for her, for him in the wrong place. If they do not know where to look for God, they must believe in somebody else's conception of the deity. We do not have to believe in the moon. We know where it is, and can go have a look at it. Similarly with God. If we know where to look.

I feel uneasy about belief. I try to keep my beliefs to a bare minimum. Beliefs can be exceedingly destructive, especially beliefs about the ultimate. Joseph Campbell points out in The Power of Myth that belief is actually more of an obstacle than an asset to experiencing God.

Campbell quotes Carl Jung, who said once that a religion, a system of eliefs, "is a defense against the experience of God." Belief and faith are required not in God, but in your culture's or your church's or your guru's conception of God. I think the problem has been that the dominant idea of God in Western culture, the God of our Fathers, the idea of God as Lord and Ruler of the Cosmos, so vigorously propagated by fervent Christians, has generated widespread confusion about God.

Certainly it confused me. This old idea, dominant though it has been, strikes me as a grave misconception, crippling and destructive, one that separated people from each other and from reality. From God.

The brilliant British-American philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, shed light here:: "When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered..." The Christian God was fashioned "in the image of the Egyptian, Persian and Roman imperial rulers... The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar." (1)

This traditional concept never touched me, reached me. Like a good little fellow, I dutifully memorized all of the answers I was told to; but they did not generate any enthusiasm or affection in me. I neither feared nor loved this ancient deity.

At the same time, though I do not believe in this notion, I think I have some understanding of the meaning of the word "God." I know what the word points to. I have a relationship to God that matters profoundly to me; but I do not find either belief or faith necessary.

It appears to me now that everybody — atheist, agnostic or theist — has a knowledge, an awareness of God. However, because of the prevailing idea of the deity in the western world, they may not connect the awareness with the word.

The 17th century philosopher Spinoza once said, "The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God." This has been a key insight for me, one that unlocked many doors. It points to the meaning of God I want to explore. It told me where to look for God.

"The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God."

III. Humanism and God
Many UU humanists reject the idea of God. They may feel uncomfortable or irritated or angry if they hear the word mentioned. This is easy enough to understand. Hideously oppressive and brutal acts have been committed in the name of the reigning God of the Western world.

One of the first ministers to preach humanism from a Unitarian pulpit was John Dietrich, who spoke out in 1916 in Spokane, Washington. He was a brilliant speaker, an unusually learned and gifted man. Though he was a pioneer humanist, he can teach us significant things about the meaning of God.

Dietrich was one of the thirty-four original signers of the document titled, “A Humanist Manifesto,” published in 1933, which was a public rejection of the idea of God. Some of America's leading philosophers, such as John Dewey, were among the signers.

Then, 20 years later, in 1953, an interesting thing happened. Edmund Wilson, another Unitarian minister, also one of the signers of the Manifesto, was then serving as editor of The Humanist magazine; and he conceived the idea of soliciting from surviving signers a discussion of "The Humanist Manifesto: Twenty Years After." The responses were published in two successive issues. John Dietrich was one of the respondents.

Dietrich said that the Manifesto, 20 years later, seemed to him to be "too narrow in its conception of the great cosmic scheme."

"...we should not have drawn such a hard and fast distinction between theism and humanism, making them contradictory. That was all right so far as orthodox theology and supernaturalism were concerned, but there is a type of theism which does not stand in opposition to humanism, and I have come to accept that type." (2)

"This broader conception of human life and its relation to the all-embracing and all-sustaining universe, makes life much more valuable and satisfactory to me. And I believe it is a better type of Humanism than what I was proclaiming twenty to thirty years ago." (3)

Then, in a letter he wrote early in 1954 to another signer of the Manifesto, Lester Mondale, also a Unitarian minister, Dietrich said, "I no longer feel that we can entirely ignore the 'Power behind Phenomena’ or God, if you please. I still hesitate to use the latter term because of the crude connotation which it suggests to most people...

"I would not attempt to define it... but ... by meditation we can experience its presence, bring ourselves into harmony with it.... I am no longer in complete agreement with Humanists, who take much too narrow a view of our relation to the universe." (4)

In an essay he was working on in the last few years of his life, titled "Thoughts on God," Dietrich added an insight that I think is exceedingly important in knowing how,as well as where, to look for God.

He said that to approach understanding and awareness of God, we must use the intuitive rather than the rational approach. "He [or she] must be felt and experienced rather than thought of and reasoned about." (5)

This is a crucial insight. God must be felt and experienced rather than thought of and reasoned about.

IV. Joseph Campbell on God
Joseph Campbell died not long ago. How fortunate that Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell at great length while the scholar was still vibrantly alive. Many of you will have seen the dialogue between these two men on television. I got a copy of “The Power of Myth,” a book which contains the dialogues in print.

You see, Campbell said at one point, "an intense experience of mystery is what one has to regard as the ultimate religious experience."

The problem is that as soon as we begin to attach words to the concept of God, we begin to short-circuit the mystery. We get to thinking we have it all spelled out in our tidy little verbal description. We hold on to our concept, our belief, and lose the deep, direct experience of mystery, of God — the ultimate religious experience. (7)

Actually, Campbell went on, the word God is a symbol that points to the ultimate mystery of being. Which is beyond philosophy, beyond theology, beyond the reach of language. It must be experienced directly, without the mediation of words. One's whole being is involved in the experience, not the intellect alone.

The ultimate mystery. God. It is an ambiguous term, Campbell said. (8)

Why then do we use the word at all? It is a wonderfully rich symbol that may, if we can rise above our negative experience with the word, call up a significant awareness in us, renewed again and again.

It is an awareness that matters in human life. We need to keep alive in ourselves a sense of awe and wonder in relation to the complexity and the beauty of the nature of things, the profound mystery at the heart of existence. It is when we think we know it all, that we can control everything, that we begin to destroy the natural world, to erode the quality of life, to lose our humility and our full humanity.

The fact is that our lives are totally dependent upon a vast reality which we know only in part, and yet, to which we are intimately and inextricably related. Personally related.

It is not compulsory that we use the word God in either thought or speech to designate this reality. It is not a matter of hellfire and brimstone. We simply do not need the word in the urgent sense that we need air, water, or sleep. In much the same way, we do not actually need music. But the presence of music can greatly enrich the quality of our lives. So it is with the word God. It is an exceedingly rich symbol.

In what way does the word enrich the quality of our lives? Consider this: the searchlight of science reaches out to embrace the entire cosmos in both time and space. How the world began, and how it will end. In its own way, the Bible does the same thing. Which, in turn, is a reflection of the fact that human nature is such that we experience a sense of relationship with all that is, was, or will be.

Our minds and hearts reach out in relationship to the whole of being. Of reality. This vast whole flowing through time matters profoundly to us. It is the ultimate context of our lives. We understand it in part. Much of it remains in mystery. But we are intimately related to it all. In thought and feeling we are in touch with the whole of reality.

The word God serves as a symbol, a focus for the thoughts, feelings, and intuitions that go into our intimate, inward relation with the whole of reality, both known and unknown, seen and unseen.

V. The Meaning of God
Wilfred Cantwell Smith is Professor of World Religions at Harvard, and a leading thinker on the great religions of humanity. One of his books, “Questions of Religious Truth,” was published by Scribner in 1967.

His understanding of where to look for God, I was pleased to discover from this book, was very similar to my own.

The idea is breathtakingly simple, but radically different from the most widespread conception of God in our society. Listen closely to Smith's wonderfully concise way of framing it: "Any statement is the word of God insofar as it is true." This is so because "God is truth... Wherever truth is found, there is God. And wherever truth is stated, there God is speaking."

Any statement is the word of God insofar as it is true. Because God is truth. I ask myself then, what is the connection between truth and reality?

Every day, each day of our lives, we move about in reality, in the real everyday world; and as we move about in it, we take experience of it into ourselves, where it accumulates in some form, whether biochemical, electrical or symbolic. When we have lived for twenty, thirty, forty years, we come to contain a vast store of experience of reality, encoded in our own being. Within us.

God is truth. Truth is reality encoded in some form, in some way in human substance. In each of us. In each human culture. Hence, it is also true to say that God is reality. God is that vast reality, which we know only in part, that ultimate mystery in which we live and move and have our being.

Truth is what we know about reality. Hence, as Spinoza said, "the more we understand individual things, the more we understand God."

And when you think about it, you realize that this is what we strive for here in church: ever growing understanding. As we grow in understanding of individual things, we grow in understanding of God. Of reality. It is our love of God, of truth that moves us to seek an expanding, deepening understanding of the nature of things and of ourselves set down in it.

Our lives are totally dependent upon a vast reality, which we know only in part; and yet, to which we are intimately and inextricably related. And in which, every day of our lives, we live and move and have our being. As we live and move, we take God into ourselves, so that, it is within us that we are closest to her or to him. Within. That’s where to look for God.

As John Dietrich put it, God “must be felt and experienced, rather than thought of and reasoned about. One’s whole being is involved here, not the intellect alone. Out of this feeling and experience, an intimate, inward, personal relationship emerges. Awareness of mystery in the nature of things is kept alive, is repeatedly renewed in us.

FOOTNOTES


1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan Co, 1929), pp 519-20.
2. The Unitarian Universalist Christian, Spring 1987 (Volume 42, Number 1), p 30. 3. Ibid.
4. Ibid, p 31.
5. Ibid, p 32.
6. Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p 22.
7. Ibid, pp 209-10.
8. Ibid, pp 48-9.
9. Huston Smith,The Religions of Man, (New York: Mentor Books,1958), p19.

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com

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