Our Relation to the Spiritual: The Person of God

Yesterday I had the rather fun, at times amusing, and at other times diabolically mischievous opportunity to talk with Mormons who came to my front door. There was a time I was much like them, though not as strident in my door-to-door activities. i reached out to nearly everybody around me loudly and often obnoxiously proclaiming the truth of God as I saw it, utilizing almost verbatim many of the same arguments these fervent adherents used and resting afterwards in a space of reflective responsibility-negating self-righteous condescension concerning the person’s inability to know the truth that I knew. The look on the trainee’s face, so passionate, so filled with the righteous light of his belief, the mask of care at times breaking to have his anger shine through was a tapestry of human emotion and I smiled throughout it all, utterly fascinated by the comments he never intended to make but did anyway because of my refusal to stick to a script. In the end I told them I loved them and challenged them to the same task they put to me, to continue studying and searching to understand more fully the love of god. It felt good to laugh, to share in their fervent emotional stances, to join with them in that bone-deep desire to identify with a transcendent principle and, yes I have to admit, needle them with some potentially consciousness-raising questions and observations, though the humility my ego constantly tells to go away earnestly reminds me that the likelihood of having helped either of them to expand requires greater than I to create. Still, I can safely and reverently declare that in that profoundly human interaction, with souls bared, I saw the person of God.

Hold up. Come again? Yes, I said it. The person of God. I won’t belabor the point by reminding everyone that my usage of the term god in no way implies a supernatural entity. The term has no inherent meaning anymore than there is a single manifestation of any religion, as even a cursory research into denominations and sects will indicate. So what, pray tell, am I talking about? I mentioned in the last entry in discussing the “Meaning of God,” a quote from Ernest Holmes in his book “The Science of Mind,” where he discusses what constitutes a spiritually enlightened person: “He should feel a unity of Spirit in all people, and running through all events. He should declare that the Spirit within him is God, quickening into right action everything he touches, bringing the best out of all his experiences, and forever guiding and sustaining” (p 167). God or Spirit as a universal holding concept, a metaphor demarcating the totality of existence and indicating the interactive and inter-operative nature of all reality, is here shown to be also synonymous with a recognition of belonging within this one substance or ground of being. It is not a thing in itself but a structural apparatus for seeing the world/existence, though of course it has many material components despite being greater than the sum of those parts, in many ways much like love is a structural term to describe or hold together disparate feelings and instances though of course it has gross material components, e.g. the brain/body interactional organism. Those passionate adherents (we’re back to the Mormons) to an ideological form I certainly don’t agree with and of which some components I find reprehensibly heinous, still exist in a universe which inevitably strings together entities into what our minds supply as transcendental experiences. With more research and education I could describe the firing of particular neuronal patterns, the release of neurotransmitters and the utilization of mirror-neurons that helped me feel empathy with the two men standing in front of me and while this certainly would in no way be inaccurate, it would not sufficiently hold the totality of the experience as I felt it, the visceral emotional pull seeing the consternation at being thwarted and the blissful passion of a true believer. This does not require a supernatural explanation, simply an expansion of what is meant by natural/material and a willingness to look at consciousness as an evolving facet of experience.

I may have gotten ahead of myself here, so I’ll slow down and come at this a different way. We’re all or most of us raised on images of deity in western christianity of a kindly old man or, in what is likely one of the silliest examples of euro-centrism, a white-skinned blue-eyed Jesus. That Jesus on appearance alone would likely appear to us as a Muslim or Arab and result in apoplexies for many Americans in the amusingly named “bible belt,” makes me giggle with barely-suppressed rueful glee. Anyway, point being that many of us have a ready-made image provided by mass marketing and available even as an action figure, of what deity is. The narcissistic quality that pervades so much of western religious ideology simply does not hold room for viewing god as anything other than a grander version of the human person and our brains are of little help here, providing interpretations of human faces on anything from toast to potatoes to over-exposures in film. Just as the sweetest sound is our name so the most delectable sight to see and emotionally connect with is a human face. When monkeys were brought back to England, the queen at the time is reported to have declared the whole experience unsettling with how similar they were to humanity. Watching the documentaries of Jane Goodall, one cannot help if they possess even the remotest of imaginative impulses, to see humanity amongst the folds of skin and fur. Certainly there is an evolutionary reason for this, them being distant relatives of us, but the point here is simply to show how much we identify with the human face and have an immediate connection to it. That god retains a human countenance and is often most-easily associated with and discussed as a particular being in similar framings as we would discuss a human person has far more to say about us than about deity. All I’m here attempting to do is get us to step back and rather than see a single face, see all actual and potential faces, rather than seeing a particular, see instead the transcendent principle.

The person of god is inextricably tied to the meaning of god, it is consciousness given form though never merely to one kind. Just as the meaning begins with community and interconnectivity with a hopeful gaze upon continual integration, so the person of god in which identification with that good, whole and complete becomes manifest in every action and creative instantiation which brings about the raising of that reality as remembered present. We are no more limited to one form of god in our minds than we are limited to the number of people we can love and both expand as we put energy into practice. The person of god is not only your brother and sister, mother and father, neighbor and co-worker, but every instantiation of consciousness struggling in the midst of being asleep to the reality of their synonymity with Purpose. We see each one as we walk to work, ride the train or bus, see on the television, each and every connection we make providing another voice to the song of natural ever-expanding exuberant life. We begin with “there but for the grace of god go I,” and finish with “there I AM.”