Does God really exist or is this a figment of the human imagination? Can we do without God? Is the idea of God a proof of human weakness, so that unless we have him close to us we cannot really have any trust in our own strength? Does he, as it were, fill the petrol tank with petrol in our car, so that we can then move on? Without him, on the other hand, the car would remain stationary. All these are vital questions. The concept of God has never been easy to accommodate. The second chapter, which dealt with Job and his terrible experience with God and the suffering associated with it, makes this a vital question which none of us can possibly avoid.
The first thing about God, if we believe in God at all, is that God is a living god; not involved merely in the creation, but also in its growth and its development. One can say this dogmatically, because unless God is a living god we cannot know him, and in a strange way, we cannot know ourselves either. A god who is real is one who is real to us and makes us into something whom we know to be real. I know my name and my being because an essence of the life of the spirit, the Holy Spirit whom I have mentioned on a number of occasions so far, infuses my being, and makes me realize that I am significant in my own right, not because I am especially important, but because I live and I can contribute to life and to the life of other people.
This, incidentally, is ultimately the purpose of my own life, a life which has been recently very much hindered by serious locomotor problems with severe pain. Over the last year I have hardly been able to walk at all, and I can see my purpose as a human being only in the way that I can help other people by writing and speaking to them in a way that can alleviate their own suffering; so, although I am a cripple, I am nevertheless useful to other people by what I can do for them. In a way this is God the Holy Spirit working through me and proving to me, even as he proved to Job, that there is a use in my life, even though it is in a mess and has nothing to offer at this particular moment. I am not ashamed to be emotional at this time, because it is only in showing ourselves as we truly are that we may give ourselves to other people. The unemotional individual who will not share their own suffering, their own pain, their own death and resurrection, is not only useless to the world but actually does not exist as a real person.
It is on this level that we may begin to understand the nature of God. God is a living god, and a god who lives is one who suffers with his creation and will not ultimately leave them until he has re-created them. To me this is what Jesus is about. He died in order that we might live, and in his new life a new creation is born, which may replace all that is sordid by something of the full nature of a full human being.
If we cannot see God in this light, I do not think that we are seeing the real God. This other god becomes a sort of artefact, something artificial that we can put in his place, something that we can use according to our own intellectual fascination, but who has no substantial reality at all. That is why God is a living god and not only an instrument of our satisfaction. If God exists, he exists in order that I may grow into something of his measure, which is the same as into the measure of the form of Jesus Christ himself.
One should always try to see oneself clearly, neither being unnecessarily sentimental nor, on the other hand, denigrating oneself. To be a human is a very great privilege. We can think, feel, act, and do much good. The great works of art in human history are a splendid tribute to the creative function of the human being, especially in the lives of the great spiritual geniuses. Furthermore, in the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us, we can see what it could be to be a real human being.
Why did God create us? He created us out of love. Love is the basis of creation, just as love is the basis of the creation of a child when a man and woman come together. They do not plan to have a child, not directly at any rate, they come together out of love and in the act of making love a child is born. They do not think about the child so much as their concern one for another. But the outcome of that love is the creation of a new individual. That is why sexual intercourse is one of the holiest actions that a human can perform, although it is enjoyed with so much frivolity and irresponsibility in everyday life. But until we can see the glory of the human being as a person who creates, we cannot understand the nature of humanity and the human as a way to the perfection of God. This gives us an understanding of what God is trying to do to us and for us. And until we know God properly, we cannot know his purpose, or our purpose either.
God is not a being that has been thought of, or created out of our own mind. God is the basis of our life, and through him our minds develop and grow into a new understanding of reality. This is the difference between the Christian, or at any rate the spiritual understanding of life, and the purely mechanistic or atheistic one. The atheist sees life as something that is to be created for the purpose of the human being on a purely utilitarian level, and is not afraid or ashamed to kill or destroy anything that does not help them, or gets in their way, whereas when we move towards the spiritual way of life, we give of our lives absolutely to the world and through the world to our common humanity. When we grow in the love of humanity, when we become full human beings, we begin to realize that Jesus is not merely the prototype of God, but that we are all born in the form of Jesus and in that humanity of Christ at large.
The end of our life is to become Christs, so that the world may become a world that is Christian in the sense that all human beings have a Christian identity, and through human beings all other forms of life also. But they could never attain to our stature because of our own superior spiritual, psychical, and mental development. Nevertheless, those who understand domesticated animals can see that even this statement could be arrogant and ill-informed.
Jesus came into the world in order that we might enter into the full life of God and actualize the abilities which lie latent within us, and until we can do this we will never be fully human. In other words, the knowledge of God involves the knowledge of ourselves in the form of Christ. Many people will say this is idealistic nonsense. How many people have attained this knowledge, when one thinks of the horrors that our own century have brought on us: the terrible dictatorships, the cruelties, the explosions of one type or another, the mass killings of innocent people. But the fact that we can react so violently against this proves that we have an inner depth of knowledge as well, which will never be satisfied by a merely experiential understanding of reality!
It is evident that the way of life is the way of meaning. If there is no meaning, our lives soon disintegrate. The meaning of our life is one of concern for others, primarily human beings, but then for animals, plants, and everything that grows. It shows itself in our attitude to each other and also in our response to the great arts of the world, especially music, literature, and the pictorial arts. In all of these we grow from mere animals to people of great sensitivity. We cannot escape long without a deep awareness of the nature of relationships coming to us, and it is here that we may begin to sense the meaning of God. This God is not a god who is a pleasant god. We saw this in the story of Job, in the second chapter of this book, in the great study of the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament, and we know it in our own lives only too well. What sort of god can it be that has allowed countless holocausts to occur, droughts, earthquakes, many natural disasters, the cruelty of human beings to which has been added the suffering coincident on natural disasters of one type or another? And yet we have been given a mind, a mind resident in the brain, we might say, and this will never be satisfied until it grasps an answer.
To be a human being is a very great privilege. The fact that we suffer so much does not detract from the privilege at all; it makes the privilege all the more poignant. This chapter started in a mood of tears and now it moves towards a mood of triumphant assurance. I am now at peace in myself and at peace with the world; I am no longer sad, either at the world or at my own state of infirmity. All these seem somehow to have evaporated before the great mystery of relationships and healing. I myself now feel healed; not in terms of bodily function but in terms of my mind. I no longer am filled with self-pity of any type, nor do I care what happens to me on a purely physical level. I know that whatever I do will be done according to the assurance of God, and that all the gifts that I have will be used according to what I can give to other people; whether I can move about or not is irrelevant.
What alone is relevant is what I can give while I am still alive. To be alive is the greatest of all privileges. While we are here we can do so much and help so many people. Some help by activity, others help merely by being quiet and listening. Some help by giving of themselves in terms of artistic creativity of one type or another. It is only when we start to compare ourselves with others and feel that we are not getting our just due as compared with them that we really do go off course and cause both ourselves and others a great deal of trouble. This is the one thing that I have thoroughly learnt by bitter experience. I knew it always, of course, intuitively, but now I know it in terms of direct experience as well. It does not matter at all whether I will ever be able to walk properly or not; what does matter is that I can give assurance to other people, and write the types of books that I have been writing, especially recently, because in them there is a spark of truth and hope that can joyfully be given to others and help them on their way.
This is not a sort of reassurance or trying to make the best of a bad situation but is seeing life as it is in the raw, and giving of oneself as perfectly as one can to other people. Only in this way can one begin to do the work that was set out for one. In any life there is tragedy. Some people like Job suffer rather late in life; others, like young children who get cancer, have a terrible death early in life. But it really does not matter at all. What does matter is how they die. Job was alive and relatively well cared for with plenty of the good things of life before tragedy struck him; many young people have died of cancer in their earlier years when they were still adolescent, but what matters is that they may understand and see something of the nature of reality. It is well known that young children who die of cancer, particularly tumours of the brain, seem to have a wisdom that their parents do not possess at all. Far from needing to be consoled by their parents, they try to console them, so that when they do die, their parents will be in a better position to bear their particular bereavement. This degree of maturity is absolutely marvellous; it tells us also how very impermanent our lives are and how wrong we are in so much of what we believe is real and what is unreal. We do not know the difference between reality and unreality because we feel that everything ought to suit our requirements, and that it is wrong when we fail to get our own way.
When we are still we can begin to see the nature of reality, and then we can begin to know who God really is; not an anthropomorphic image. The type of god who appears in the Old Testament is certainly not the real God, he is what would be called "Nobodaddy", particularly by William Blake. William Blake, one of the great prophetic geniuses of our culture, swore that the god of Reason was not the same as the god of Imagination. He called that rationalistic god "Nobodaddy", the title added later in a different coloured ink!
The difference between the real God and the god of jealousy or "old Nobodaddy" is that the latter is a human construct, the human mind working on its own deistic and ultimately atheistic principle and finding a being of its own with which it works and makes contact. It is not still and does not know the one true God, which is the god of reality. Atheism is a frank disbelief in the existence of God, whereas deism is a frank construct of a god without accepting prior revelation. It is a type of "natural religion", and is useful for the active human mind in trying to explain the phenomena of the universe. But it has no autonomy, nor any caring for its creatures. Deism is a type of worship of the human mind, which has formed a creature that can act according to what humans desire. In both deism and atheism the object of worship is the human; as we all know, the result is the emergence of a god of selfish, amoral power.
It is only when we can know that we ourselves know nothing at all, and can learn to be still and listen, that the one true God can come to us and inspire us, and form us in his own image; otherwise, we try to inspire God and tell him what to do and form him in our own image. The result is destructive and evil, and this has been the god that man has fashioned and worshipped in modern times, and it has also been the god of much "religion", if one is honest about it. Priests and people alike have worshipped this idol, whom they have made in their own image and elevated in the form of various religious leaders. Now, as a religious leader, but in their own form, they can decide what should be done in human terms.
Why art thou silent and invisible,
Father of Jealousy?
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
from every searching Eye?
Why darkness and obscurity
in all thy words and laws,
That none dare eat the fruit but from
the wily serpent's jaws?
Or is it because Secrecy gains females' loud applause?
This was Blake's poem against Nobodaddy, which really means nobody's daddy of course, the hypothetical father of all, which was Blake's jocular nickname for Urizen, the father of jealousy.
Here is more of Blake's meditation:
Are not the joys of morning sweeter than the joys of night?
Are not the vig'rous joys of youth ashamed of the light?
Let age and sickness silent rob the vineyards in the night;
But those who burn with vig'rous youth
pluck fruits before the light.
They said this mystery never shall cease;
The priest promotes war,
And the soldier peace.
Love to faults is always blind;
Always is to joy inclin'd;
Lawless wing'd and unconfin'd;
And breaks all chains from every mind.
Deceit to secrecy confin'd;
Lawful, cautious and refin'd:
To anything but interest blind,
And torges fetters for the mind.
That, of course, is the whole point about the mystery of God. When we are quiet we can know something of what we believe about God, and "wisdom" comes flowing into our being, and then we can understand that when we search and find, we tend to form an image in our own mind, in other words, a pure heresy, making God in our own image; and that image is a travesty of the human being. Whatever it says is plausible but basically wrong, and in its place we might have something that is quite evil.
The same applies to religion. Most of the leaders of religion, the various prelates of one type or another, are equally unsatisfactory, if not evil. But they have been given the place of honour in churches and other places of religious worship. If we were quiet, we would know the true word of God, and that word would guide us to the right church and the right leaders.
Why do we behave in this foolish way? Not only are we unsure of our own judgements, but there is a desire in all of us that we may be proved right and the others wrong. This applies particularly in the realm of religion, of course, where nobody knows the right answer. There is absolutely no certainty in any religion, but when we are quiet Christ comes to us in the form that we know, in terms of our being, and then we start to do the right work.
We will never know Christ by reading a book about him, or thinking about him, but if we are still he comes to us, and we see him in a new form and then the light of reality dawns on us as well, and we at last do the right thing and work in the right way. If I were to tell you what was right and what was wrong, I would simply be giving you my own opinions, and they would be bound to be wrong, if for no other reason than I would be trying to impress you with my own spirituality. But if I admit that I do not know, and am still and quiet, we can work together and be inspired, and then we will know the right way.
True knowledge, in other words, is not so much experimental as experiential; when we know that we know nothing, we can know the power of God within us, and start to do the right thing. Then there is nothing interfering with our own senses and understanding. But when we come knowing the right answer, we ourselves get in the way and the results are always bad, sometimes very bad indeed.
When we think of the evil that has been done in the name of religion, particularly theistic religion - the religion of the West, in other words - we can see that the god of theistic religion has been a very intrusive entity who has been built up on the desires and understandings of human beings. We have worshipped him rather than known him. We have worshipped a form made up in our own mind rather than being quiet and listening.
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength" (Mark l2.30). But this god is often only a human artefact full of the human problems of fear and the desire for power. There is ignorance and general prejudice associated with the god that most people, particularly of the West, worship. This is ridiculous in the East where there is quieter, much more still, worship, and here God may be known in quietness and worshipped in unostentatious devotion.
You will never come to the fullness of reality by thought. "By love may he be gotten and holden but by thought never." These are the words that we remember so well from that great mystical treatise, The Cloud of Unknowing.
We can never know God by our mind alone. We tend to make God into an idol so easily, and that idol soon becomes our dictator as well. The God that we make is the god that we want. And he is a god that does what we want him to do for us. We, on the other hand, do not usually listen to the great voice of eternity that leads us on to ultimate reality. Only when we have gone beyond the quietness and stillness of our own being to the reality of the eternal can we know what God really wants of us and what his nature is.
The enigma of God is that he never makes any demands on us at all. He merely shows us the way, but we are to follow according to our own will. If we do not want to follow on, we can get stuck and killed, and we will never produce anything worthwhile. But if we are humble, we will learn something about which even the greatest intellects of the age were completely ignorant, and then we, and ultimately they as well through our example, will begin to understand.
The point about God is that nothing positive can be said about him until we know that nothing negative cannot be said about him. When we know that nobody can know God, then, in a strangely paradoxical way, he shows himself to us and we begin to live the life that Christ lived, and we see that in Christ, God shows himself to us at all times, in all places, and throughout all lives.
Praise be to God.