It is hard to imagine the universe. It is even more difficult to imagine what
many theoretical physicists are calling the “multiverse.” String theory
proponents postulate as many as 10500 different possible universes,
each operating with different physical laws.[1] The universe we inhabit, even if it is just one
of many, is difficult enough to comprehend.
It has been expanding and cooling since it burst into existence with a
Big Bang about 13.7 billion year ago. Our
galaxy, the Milky Way, just one small part of the universe, contains some 200
billion stars, with a diameter of approximately 100,000 light-years. One light-year equals the distance that a ray
of light travels in one year: about six trillion miles. We cannot fathom such immensity.[2]
Even more difficult to comprehend is the rarity of the
constellation of factors that make life possible. In March 2009, NASA launched a spacecraft, Kepler, with the mission to search for
planets orbiting in the “habitable zone” of other stars; that is, planets
located such that the liquid water necessary for the emergence of life may
exist. Dozens of planets have been identified as possible candidates. It is estimated that a life-sustaining planet
orbits about 3% of all stars in the universe.
If this is true, then the fraction of matter in the visible universe
that exists in living form is something like one-millionth of one-billionth of
1%.[3] The fact that we are here today is itself a
source of tremendous awe and wonder, a wholly unnecessary and fortuitous
occurence.
It is hard to imagine the observable universe. How then, do we even begin to imagine God? In moving from a consideration of the
universe to a consideration of God, let me be clear that I am not suggesting
that God is a force or cause within nature, nor a supreme natural
explanation. This would be to reduce God
to one being among other beings, one cause – even if the first cause – among
other causal forces. To do so would be
to speak of the god (small “g”) that the militant new atheists reject and that
modern religious deists and fundamentalists affirm. This is the god of the clockmaker variety,
who builds a world, winds it up, and lets it go; but such is not God; at least,
not the God of the great religious traditions, both East and West.[4]
As Thomas Bentley Hart argues, “Beliefs regarding God
concern the source and ground and end of reality, the unity and existence of
every particular thing and the totality of all things, the ground of the
possibility of anything at all.”[5] God is then, the necessary logical presupposition
for the existence of the universe; not the creator of the universe at some
point in time past, but rather the infinite actuality from which everything
that exists continuously receives its being; or in Paul Tillich’s felicitous
phrase, God is “Being Itself.”
We must imagine God, because, while science can describe the
shape of the universe and the relationships among its constituent material
elements, it can not explain the universe’s very existence. Existence is not a natural phenomenon; it is
logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever. Science can explain, in large part, what is but not that it is. We are driven
therefore, by reason and wonder, to imagine God.
Our images of God derive from modes of knowing that are
either acts of logical deduction and induction, or derived from contemplative
or sacramental experiences that are by their nature episodic and intuitive.[6] Classical philosophy and theology embrace
both modes of knowing. Our experiences of transcendence give rise to our
logical reasoning about those experiences, taking such forms as the Trinitarian
symbol of Christian orthodoxy. The
adequacy of such speculative formulations is determined by whether or not they
illuminate our experience. The symbol
must correspond to reality and participate in its power.
Our scripture readings today include two images of God that
are well known, but whose evocative power is too often understated. The first image comes from the prophet
Isaiah’s temple vision, and the second image emerges in the course of Jesus’
ironic and ambiguous conversation with Nicodemus. Both of these stories challenge us to imagine
God in ways that may be uncomfortable and even life changing.
Isaiah was a priest serving in the Jerusalem Temple about
700 years before the time of Jesus. He
became a prophet during a time of great international turmoil, including a war
between Judah and Syria and threats from the Assyrian Empire. While serving in the Temple, he had a most
remarkable vision of God that the prurient interest of translators utterly
fails to convey.
Our translation describes God as seated on a throne, with
the hem of his robe filling the temple. As
Lyle Eslinger notes in an exhaustive philological and comparative study, the
Hebrew word sûl, translated here as “hem of his robe,”
actually refers to the male or female pudenda. Isaiah reports then that he has
seen God, naked on this throne, with his (the personal pronoun here is
masculine) visible genitalia filling the temple.[7] This is not an image you will find in any
edition of the Children’s Illustrated Bible!
But then, 8th Century BC Hebrew prophets were not 16th
Century AD English puritans. Even so,
Isaiah has inadvertently trespassed the boundary between the sacred and the
profane to his horror and shame. The
Seraphim quickly use there wings to covers God’s face and genitals to re-establish
the cultic boundary, reinforced by the liturgical image of smoke or incense and
the cry “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his
glory.” Here again, the translators fail
us by describing the Seraphim as covering their own eyes and “feet” – a
euphemism if there ever was one.
Isaiah is not trying to be provocative and neither am I. Yet, his vision does startle us out of our
usual placid images of God as “the guy upstairs.” What Isaiah’s vision is trying to communicate
is the tremendous, generative power of the divine that fills the whole earth;
indeed, that continuously holds the universe in being. To come into contact with that power, even
for a moment, is an overwhelming experience.
We cannot bear it for too long; it has to be covered up! It reduces Isaiah to a sense of his being
“unclean;” not because his image of God is somehow a “dirty” one, but rather
because it reveals the smallness of his own preoccupations and the limits of
his own comprehension and power. Isaiah
is reduced to “nothing.”
Isaiah is possessed by this image of God, so much so that he strips and
walks around Jerusalem naked for three years as a sign of the impending
disaster that Assyria would visit on Egypt and Ethiopia, and then Judah itself.[8] Isaiah’s nakedness conveys both the
vulnerability of Judah and the absolute power of God, upon which all contingent
realities depend. The moral of the
story is to place our trust in God, not in the transient power of people or
empires.
Isaiah’s vision of divine potency undoes him and radically opens him
to being an instrument and sign of God’s power.
This power is not safe or predictable.
It may lead us in paths we would not choose. It is the source of both fascination and
fear. Yet this absolute, unconditioned
reality is also naked to our perception, even jarringly intimate to those who
have eyes to see. Isaiah’s vision
emphasizes God’s patriarchal potency, if you will, a power that is overwhelming
and distancing but at the same time strangely seductive, capable of possessing
us.
In the course of his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus offers another
image of God that emphasizes the way in which divine power is in the service of
universal renewal. Here the metaphor
shifts from a patriarchal image of God to a maternal one. This is clearly the case as indicated by the
literalism with which Nicodemus’ misunderstands Jesus. When Jesus speaks of being born anew, Nicodemus
wonders how one can re-enter the womb when one is old. Jesus, of course, is speaking of a different
kind of womb: the metaphorical “womb” of
God.
Jesus, too, is speaking of divine generative power, but in a different
key: not so much the power of being as the power of consciousness. Birth by water (an allusion to child birth)
and the Spirit, speaks of an initiation into a new awareness of reality (the
kingdom of God). When we are born from
above (of God) we are given a new vision of the world such that our perception
and reality are in alignment, no longer seen through the false prism of
cultural and ideological lenses that delimit and falsify our perception. This transformation of consciousness is
nothing less than a new birth.
This awareness is not just an intellectual insight. It is an existential reorientation of our
whole way of life such that we entrust ourselves to the power of the Spirit, a
power greater than us, which we cannot fully comprehend or control. We come to trust what we do not know. God is the inexhaustible source of our being
and our consciousness, and being born anew is the acceptance of our ultimate
origin and end in God in such a way as to live more fully, freely, and
compassionately.
This dying to false forms of consciousness and being given a new
perception of God’s generative power leads to the insight that God not only
gives being to existence; God not only gives birth to us as conscious beings,
capable of perceiving reality; God also loves the world and desires us to share
in the bliss that is eternal life.
In Jesus’ vision, God is like a mother who not only gives us physical
birth, but also spiritual awareness so that we might perceive that our creation
is an act of love, and so come to accept this love as our ultimate origin and
end. This is the taproot experience from
which emerges the Trinitarian symbol of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which
shares much with the Indian idea of Brahman as ultimate and unconditioned being
(sat), consciousness (chit), and bliss (ananda); or what the great Sufi theologian Ibn Arabi, describing
God as absolute reality, referred to as wujud,
wijdan, and wad.[9]
It is hard to imagine the universe.
It is even harder to imagine it without God: without Being,
Consciousness, and, finally, Bliss.
[1]
Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe:
The World You Thought You Knew (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), pp. 18-21.
[2]
Lightman, pp. 92-93.
[3]
Lightman, pp. 100-101.
[4]
Thomas Bentley Hart, The Experience of
God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2013), pp. 19-41.
[5]
Hart, p. 33.
[6]
Hart, p. 34.
[7]
Lyle Eslinger, “The Infinite In A Finite Organical Perception (Isaiah VI 1-5),”
Vetus Testamentum (XLV, 2).
[8]
Isaiah 20:2-5. On naked prophets, see
Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Jacob’s Wound:
Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 87-89.
[9]
Hart, pp. 42-43.
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