At this point, you might be looking forward in confident expectation to an upcoming sermon, "God the Interjection." I’m not planning to do that, although when arguments about God get going, interjections – including expletives – are likely to fly.
Speaking of arguments about God, you might remember that last March, I gave a sermon titled, “The Ontological, the Semantic, and the Tribal.” I said that an argument about God might be ontological, or it might be semantic – but at root, it’s usually tribal.
An argument about God might start off appearing to be ontological. Ontology is the study of being, existence, and how to determine if things exist. The ontological question is: does an entity exist that knows, that desires, and that creates whole worlds?
The argument might then shift to being semantic. What exactly does the word "God" mean? Is it a legitimate use of the English language to use the word “God” to refer NOT to a person-like entity that knows and desires, but only to a source of beauty and mystery; a power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; an ultimate context and basis for meaning and value; the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; or the Cosmos: “all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”? Can you say that there is nothing in the universe except what the scientists describe and still call THAT “God”?
Why do people get riled up over semantic arguments about the word “God” when no other semantic argument elicits much concern or passion? I think it's because the real conflict is neither about ontology nor semantics. It’s about tribe. Are you in my tribe – do you speak the tribal passwords, affirming or denying the existence of God, adopting my tribe’s definition of the word “God”? If you’re not in my tribe, then we must fight – or else avoid the subject altogether.
There are meanings of “God” acceptable within the English language that don’t mean person-like or supernatural, so I want to ask you: Do you still prefer not to use the word because of tribal identity? You don’t want anyone to think for a minute that you might be in the Woo-Woo tribe? I think, for some of us, that’s the hang-up. We’re more interested in protecting our self-identity as members of the No-Woo tribe than we are in connecting with other people through the meanings that we share: awe, wonder, beauty, mystery, source of hope and healing that we call by many names.
Let me tell you some of my history with God. The G-word and I have had a checkered relationship. When I was in first grade, in Pinetops, North Carolina, where there was no Unitarian Universalist congregation, the neighbor kid sometimes invited me to go along with him to his church. Several times that year, I went, and as a result of the instructions given me at that Presbyterian Sunday School, there was a brief period in my life during which I did a nightly bedtime ritual called “prayer.” “Prayer” involved asking someone named “God” to do, for various friends and relations, something called “bless.”
By fourth grade, I had left behind “that kid stuff.” I was then living in a different small southern town: Carrollton, Georgia. Carrollton didn’t have a Unitarian Universalist congregation either, but it was only an hour’s drive from Atlanta, where, sporadically, I was taken to the UU church. Soon after learning there was a word “atheist,” I decided that I was one. I made this declaration at the UU church, and no one seemed very interested. I made this declaration during lunch at my elementary school cafeteria, and a palpable buzz shockwaved through hall.
The news reached an ardent and incredulous girl a few tables over. She arose, and, flanked by a silent friend to function as diplomatic observer, came over and confronted me. “You don’t believe in God?” she asked. “No,” I said, suddenly interested in the lima beans on my plate. “Do you know what the Bible is?” she pressed. I offered my considered and scholarly assessment. “Just some book by some stupid people,” I said sullenly.
She gasped. The diplomatic observer gasped. The two of them withdrew to tut-tut with others over the lostness of my soul and the rift to their social fabric that my apostasy represented. That was the beginning of my career in theology and scriptural hermeneutics. In my remaining seven years in the town’s public school system, I ventured no further discourses on religion, but that was enough. Throughout that time I was “the class atheist.”
Back then, it was clear what “God” meant – and clear -- to me – that the universe included nothing that instantiated that meaning. Now, nothing about God is clear: there’s only ambiguity and mystery – beautiful, rich, joyous ambiguity and mystery.
The theist says there is such a thing, the atheist says there isn’t such a thing, and the agnostic says “I don’t know whether there’s such a thing or not,” – but they all pretend to know what sort of thing it is they’re talking about. The universe, however, is more amazing – life is more profoundly awesome – and the Bible’s authors, editors, and redactors were wiser and more insightful – than my fourth-grade self was prepared to comprehend.
In the years after high school the issue in my mind gradually shifted from being about God to being about "God" – that is, from the ontological question about the way reality is to the semantic question about the way words are used. Might not the word “God” be used, not to make a controversial empirical claim about what is, but to draw our attention, as a good poet does, to certain qualities of existence – qualities which are not subjects about which to dispute, but are a felt reality momentarily overlooked? It’s not about being convinced or persuaded. It’s not about believing. It’s about being reminded of what we already know deep down: that this present moment – if we truly show up for it – is so sweet and so delicious that we need words like “holy” and “divine” and even “God” to help us notice it.
It’s not about what exists; it’s about the qualities of existence: is it wondrous, mysterious, beautiful, awesome? Those adjectives are the crux of the matter, and that’s why I suggest to you today that God is an adjective.
Glen Thomas Rideout has a poem titled, "god is no noun." It’s beautiful and evocative -- and it is dismissive of the idea of God being an adjective. The poem begins: “God is not a noun and certainly no adjective.” But I think Rideout overlooks that the qualities of things are more important than the things. It doesn’t matter much whether it’s a house or a cave if it’s luxurious, comfortable, warm, cozy, well-equipped, affordable, energy-efficient and conveniently-located. It’s those adjectives that matter.
It matters what we say exists or doesn’t exist – but it matters more whether we apprehend that whatever exists – existence itself -- is holy, sacred. “God” is an allusion to the quality that existence has when we are so fully present to it that we perceive divinity there.
Two writers – one of them who did not identify as Christian, John Dewey, and one who did, Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- both support this emphasis on the adjectival. John Dewey said religion, the noun, didn’t do much for him. But he recognized the deep value of religious, the adjective. “Religious” referred to a kind of experience, a special quality that suffuses some experiences. You don’t have to have a religion in order to have religious experience. The noun, religion, indicates some particular religion, and any particular religion carries a lot of particular baggage – doctrines, rituals, theologies, moral dictates.
The religious quality in experience, on the other hand, requires no doctrines, rituals, or moral rules. A religious attitude “may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal,” wrote Dewey. When something feels profound, or moving, or like a revelation or an epiphany – while on a nature hike, or through involvement in some project – we might say “it was a religious experience!” We wouldn’t say it was a religion.
An experience has religious quality when it results in adjustments to life’s conditions, orientation, a sense of peace and security, said Dewey. It might be brought about by devotion to a cause, by a passage of poetry, by meditation. The religious quality is a unifying, connecting quality. It re-orients us, brings a feeling of peace through awareness of interconnection with everything.
Writing along lines similar to Dewey was Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- a German theologian and outspoken critic of Hitler, imprisoned and eventually executed by Nazis. Bonhoeffer called for a religionless Christianity. Wrap your mind around that term: “religionless Christianity.”
Bonhoffer wrote in a letter from prison: “The New Testament must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a precondition of faith” (329). Religion, he said, “is only a garment of Christianity – and even this garment has looked very different at different times.”
I think Bonhoeffer had in mind the same idea Dewey had: that this noun, religion, denotes some set of doctrines and practices. No single set is necessary for giving experience that religious quality. A wide variety of sets of doctrines and practices can help cultivate the religious quality of experience. In Bonhoeffer’s way of putting it, the religion of Christianity -- that is, the doctrines and practices -- was only a garment covering over the true Christianity beneath – a Christianity that had nothing to do with doctrine or ritual and everything to do with the experience of transcendence in our lives. Christians discarding the garment of their religion – Christians, that is, those who possess “religionless Christianity” – will recognize that very different doctrines and practices – say pagan ones, or Buddhist ones – also facilitate our awareness of that which goes by many names: the oneness of reality, the divine, the ground of being, the transcendent, the awesome quality of the universe, the interbeing of everything, the interconnected web of existence -- God.
Christians discarding this religion garment, said Bonhoeffer, will cease to regard themselves “as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world” (280-81).
So that’s a little conceptual background from Dewey and Bonhoeffer.
It seems to me that God as a noun splits us apart, creates tribal division. God as a noun begs the question: what properties does this noun have? Is God loving or angry and punitive? Merciful or just? All-knowing or just very knowing? All-powerful or just very powerful? God the noun begs the question: what does this noun do? Does God intervene in human affairs daily? Or did God create the universe a while back, and is now watching it unfold, the way a child watches carefully laid-out dominos fall?
While God the noun has properties – leaving us humans to argue what those properties are -- God, the adjective is a property that we can pretty much agree on. Most people in any faith tradition would agree that life and the universe is awesome and sacred.
If God is a noun, then we must face the question of whether God is the sort of noun that the Catholics describe, or that the primitive Baptists, or the Eastern orthodox, or the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Hindu describe. If, for example, you posit God as an ultimate cause, then you can’t help but get stuck in conundrums like what caused God?
In one form of Hinduism, the earth rests upon the back of an elephant. You may have heard the story of an Englishman encountering an elderly woman of this Hindu faith. What does the elephant stand on? he asked. The elephant stands on the back of a monkey, she answered. And what does the monkey stand on? The monkey stands on the back of a turtle, she replied. And what does the turtle stand on? he asked patiently. The turtle stands on the back of another turtle. “And what does that turtle…?” he started to ask. At that point the woman interrupted him. “From there on,” she said, “it’s turtles all the way down.”
See? That's the kind of conundrum you get stuck with if divine and holy are made into a noun. We get arguments about different conceptions of that noun. “Do you believe in God?” is a question used to divide people. I believe in the adjectives, and they tend to be less divisive. I believe in green and growing, dark and peaceful, loving and kind, amazing and wonderful. I believe in the beautiful and tragic quality of life. I believe in religious qualities. I believe in awesome, in grateful, in hopeful, in joyful. I believe in full. I believe in earthy. I believe in wise, and compassionate. I believe in sufficient: this life, this world, come what may, it is enough. It will do.
I believe in a god world: a world not of our own making that supports us and sustains us, which grounds us for the meaningful pursuit of ideals. I believe in the god life, which can be experienced by people of any religion or none – a life of awareness, a life of attention to the interplay of forces, a life of deep sympathy with all of them even when it does come time to take a stand against some of them. I believe in holy, for each breath is holy. I believe in sacred, for each step is sacred: we have but to be mindful and know it.
God the noun is an ultimate cause of things. God the adjective is a quality we can perceive of the flow of all the causal forces, none of them ultimate, interacting continuously. We experience those forces adjectivally: luminescent, transcendent.
I’ll close with three further illustrations of the importance of the adjectives. First, Tagore:
"Is it beyond thee to be glad with the gladness of this rhythm? To be tossed and lost and broken in the whirl of this fearful joy?"Notice that it's the adjectives that convey the force of Tagore's words: glad, tossed, lost, broken, and fearful.
Second, the well-known e.e. cummings’ passage:
“I thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes ...”It’s the adjectives that carry the impact: amazing, leaping greenly, blue true, natural, infinite – and yes, which cummings is using as an adjective.
Finally, a parable from the Zen tradition.
A man fleeing from a tiger came to a precipice, caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Then some mice appeared and began gnawing at the vine. Just then, the man saw a strawberry growing near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How luscious and sweet it was!Again, it’s the adjectives that carry the punch: luscious and sweet.
Our time here is short, before the mice hand us over to the tigers. All we can do is notice, notice, train ourselves to notice – notice the god quality in every luscious and sweet moment.
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