Theological Hospitality

READINGS

A number of writers have been attracted to the thesis that God is a verb. Buckminster Fuller, in 1940, wrote:

Here is God's purpose –
for God to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law,
not academic dogma, nor ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.”

Here’s how the poet Wild Bill Balding puts it:

God is a verb, not a noun:
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be.'
dynamic, seething, active
web of love poured out,
given, received, exchanged,
one God in vibrant community
always on the move,
slipping through our fingers,
blowing through the nets we cast
to hold and name,
confine to nouns, to labels,
freezeframe stasis,
pinned like a butterfly,
solid, cold, controlled, lifeless.
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be' -
not pinned down by names, labels,
buildings, traditions,
or even by nails to wood:
I am: a verb, not a noun,
living, free, exuberant,
always on the move.

Jean-Claude Koven writes:

“God is indeed a verb. He is not the creator. He is the ongoing unfoldment of creation itself. There is nothing that is not a part of this unfolding. Thus there can be nothing separate from God. . . . When we perceive God as a noun, we envision him as the creator, the architect of, and therefore separate from, his creation. Identifying ourselves as part of that creation, we see ourselves not only separate from our source but separate from each other and all other manifest things as well. . . . Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life shifted. Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was only God. When someone spoke to me, it was with God's voice; when I listened, it was with God's heart. As you begin to view God not as the creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself, you'll discover God in everything you see – including yourself.”

PART 1: HARD TRUTH AND DEEP TRUTH

On the one hand, we Unitarian Universalists do cherish our theological diversity. We like being around people with a range of viewpoints and practices.

On the other hand, though, we aren’t always able to be as hospitable to divergent religious viewpoints as we could be. Some years ago, our Unitarian Universalist Association conducted a nationwide survey of our various theological identities. It asked people to identify their own theological identity and indicate whether they felt completely welcomed in their congregation. The UU Christians by-and-large said they felt more-or-less accepted, but they were sometimes marginalized. The UU Pagans said they felt basically accepted, but sometimes marginalized. The UU Humanists also felt mostly accepted, albeit, they said, sometimes a little marginalized. The UU Buddhists said, “We’re fine.”

To think in a welcoming and hospitable way about people with diverse theological views – a way that makes everyone, regardless of their preferred metaphors for matters of ultimate concern, fully accepted and integral to the center of our congregational life, it helps to think for a moment about: Truth. The thing is, our default position – which we think to ourselves even if we don’t say it aloud – goes like this: “My way of understanding the world is true, and other people’s bizarre fantasies will just have to be tolerated – because we’re proud of our theological diversity.” So let’s think through a little bit this notion of truth so as to minimize the (perhaps unconscious) stumbling block that it can be for us. As a tool for conceptualizing this, allow me to submit for your consideration, that there are two categories of truths: call them hard truths and deep truths.

Hard truths are the domain of scientists and historians. Hard truth is also the concern of criminal trials to ascertain the hard truth of who did what. This is a kind of history, as the attorneys attempting to convince a jury of what happened on the night of 23rd are functional historians, sifting through evidence to tell a story of what happened in the past. If you find yourself on the witness stand at a criminal trial, they are not going to be interested in poetry. They do not want your creative metaphors that limn the unspeakable depths of what your soul has experienced.

Indeed, the methods and claims of the historian may be seen as an outgrowth from the earliest forms of criminal justice. The genre we know as history is commonly said to have been invented by the Greek writer Herodotus, whose Histories was written between 440 and 430 BCE, providing an account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was able to conceive of this new genre, this new kind of writing, and his readers were able to comprehend what he was doing, I think, only because Herodotus was building upon and extending modes of thought available from centuries of community practices for dealing with transgressors against the community’s norms (i.e., criminals).

To decide if a person was, in fact, a criminal required the beginnings of a notion of what I’m calling hard truth. Early human communities had to ascertain the hard truth of just what was done to whom. They has to consider available evidence and how best to interpret that evidence. There may not have been anything much like Sherlock Holmes-type deduction from the physical evidence, and the parties’ status in the community probably carried more sway than, to us, would seem fair, but still, there was likely something like character witnesses and some attempt to work out what most likely really happened – to discern, that is, the hard truth of the matter.

For a long time in human history, this may have been the only sphere where hard truth really mattered to the community. Outside of needs to determine moral responsibility, storytellers wove stories about the origin of the world, of how the people came to be the people they understood themselves to be, and these mythic tales were assessed by communal agreement that they were satisfying stories. Such mythic stories were not matters of “hard” or “evidence-based” truth, but they did tell deep truth with moral lessons. The stories were true by virtue of corresponding to the moral reality of the community.

Then Herodotus came along and by his example created an interest in telling stories about the past that were not just edifying and morally instructive and uplifting, but were hard true, or “evidence-based.”

Then science came along – though it sure took its time getting here. There were various methodologies of what I’d call pre-science or proto-science through ancient and medieval times, but a full-on embrace of the experimental method didn’t happen until about 400 years ago. If I had to pinpoint it, I’d say 1642. That’s the year Galileo died and the year Newton was born: kind of the center year of the transitional period into our scientific age. Scientific method doesn’t come naturally to homo sapiens brains. Our species has been around for about 300,000 years. Suppose we say exactly 300,000 years. That would mean it took us 299,600 years to grasp and adopt the scientific method, which we have had for only the last 400 years.

What science has given us in these 400 years is amazing powers of prediction and control. When you can predict what things will do, you can set up conditions to make them do it, and, boom, we’re off – steam engines, electric lights, automobiles, airplanes, radios and so on to all the devices we live with today.

I hear my Mom’s voice – she was a physics professor – saying that science aims to explain our world. OK, Mom, but science is a particular kind of explanation – namely, the kind that facilitates prediction and control. The hard truths in history and in criminal law provide us our best guess about what happened. The hard truths of science provide us with amazing prediction and control. But we want more than to predict and control our world. We want also to befriend it. We need to love, and to belong, and to know how to think about what’s right and what’s wrong -- what’s good and worthy and valuable and what isn’t – and who we are. We need to know not just what has happened or what we now could make happen, but how to decide what should happen – what we want to happen.

For that we need truth that is deep rather than hard -- poetic truth that speaks to the depths of who we are and what is our place in all of this. Science and history figure into that, but they cannot by themselves convey these deep truths. A good novel is fiction, but it contains deep truths that science and history alone cannot.

I’ve said before that theology is best understood as a kind of poetry. So science and religion can have no quarrel with each other. One is in the hard truth business and the other in the deep truth business.

I know that sometimes some people have thought that what scientists were saying was a threat to what their theology said. The Catholic church tried Galileo for heresy for saying the Earth went around the Sun, not vice-versa. And a lot of people even today regard evolution as in conflict with their religious teachings. But that doesn’t mean we have to see any conflict between science and anybody's religious teachings.

Religious teachings – whether ours or someone else's – provide a person with deep truth, while evolution is a product of our quest for hard truths. It’s out of place to start citing T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” on the witness stand, and in just the same way it’s out of place to start citing Genesis in biology class – though both “The Wasteland” and Genesis are profoundly meaningful and important works of literature that command our attention in our quest for deep truth.

If our religious differences are understood as matters of different poetry, then the fact that some people are Catholics and some are Shinto may be regarded the way we regard the fact that some people prefer Walt Whitman and some prefer Emily Dickinson. If a new style of poetry shows up, then let us be interested, curious, and maybe even playful with the possibilities that these new metaphors open up. After all, we are a religious institution – and the human grappling after deep truth is what we’re all about.

Theological literacy helps – it’s helpful to know more about what sorts of theological options are out there. So let me give an example. Maybe for some of us this will be good practice in being sympathetic and open to ways to think about God. Maybe there’s some poetry here that you can add to your very own heart’s spiritual anthology. Radical hospitality, you see, goes beyond tolerance, beyond accepting, beyond welcoming, and embraces a willingness to be changed by the other. Radical hospitality is interested in finding new poems to add to one’s own personal spiritual poetry anthology. The example I will go into is one that some of us may know, but not, I think, all of us – or, at least, maybe we could a reminder: Process Theology.

PART 2: PROCESS THEOLOGY

Process Theology began in the early 20th century, as a development from Process Philosophy, created by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Whitehead, a mathematician turned philosopher, published Process and Reality in 1929. Western thought since Plato has privileged Being over Becoming. Whitehead flipped that. He said reality is fundamentally becoming. Process is what’s fundamental, and things are just temporary manifestations of unfolding process -- as opposed to the predominant presumption that things are fundamental and that they change is nonessential, an imperfection, a design flaw. The perfection of God, from the Platonists through Thomas Aquinas and up to modern times, was God’s unchangingness. Whitehead said change is not a bug in the system. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Change is not nonessential – it is the essence. The ultimate principle is creativity – the process of creating takes precedence over any product creation.

Whitehead gives us Process philosophy, and while Whitehead did write about the place of God in his philosophy, process philosophy did not become full-fledged process theology until the Unitarian Charles Hartshorne’s work expanded, extended, and revised Whitehead.

Born in 1897, Hartshorne lived to age 103. He was giving a talk at our UU General Assembly as recently as 1994, when he was 97. For Hartshorne’s Process Theology, God is not omnipotent. God is finite – changing and growing along with creation. Reality is made of events, not material substance. God, being finite and not omnipotent, doesn’t have full control of what happens. Rather, God engages with us in a process in which both we and God develop together. God changes. God offers us possibilities the full meaning of which God doesn’t know. As we, God’s creatures, explore the offered possibilities, Creator and Creation alike learn, grow, develop, allowing new possibilities to be offered.

Hartshorne held that people do not experience subjective immortality, but we do have objective immortality in that our experiences live on forever in God, who contains all that was. Just as you, throughout your life, build on your experiences, developing new experiences shaped by all prior experience, so, too, God, after your death, continues to build on your experiences. Your experiences continue to contribute to God’s new experiences for all eternity.

Yes, God transcends the world, but the world also transcends God. Yes, God creates the world, but the world also creates God. We are a part of God. Our growth is a part of God’s growth. God’s knowledge is the sum total of the knowledge of all life-forms – God’s desires, the sum of the desires of life.

The emphasis on change leads to the idea that God is a verb. In the readings above, Buckminster Fuller, Bill Balding, and Jean-Claude Koven, articulate this “God is a Verb” thesis. UU minister Stephen Phinney puts it this way:

“I believe that the holy is in the process of giving and taking of the love we have. In other words, the holy or God is the process of interchanging love.”

You might find this perspective radical or exhilarating. You might also have noticed that the God-is-a-verb people are not actually using “God” as a verb. They say, for instance, that reality is more a matter of events than substances. “Events” does convey a more dynamic quality than “substances,” but if we’re talking about parts of speech, “event” is just as much a noun as “substance” is. They speak of God as “process” and as “creativity” and as “energy.” All three are nouns. Jean-Claude Koven said God was “unfoldment,” and “infinity,” and “everything,” and “a dance.” Nouns every one. For that matter, “verb” is a noun.

Still.

The point is: there is in our life and our experience a cause for wonder, mystery, reverence. This is better thought of as a process, a dance, a creativity, a love than as a person or entity. Calling it a verb is just a way of alluding to its active doing.

But supposing – just to be playful -- we did want to be sticklers for actually meaning what we said. How would that go, for God to be a verb? Well, verbs need a subject, if we’re going to speak in sentences, so we could say: The universe gods. There’s the vast cosmos, quietly, grandly godding along through the ages. Reality gods. I god, you god, he she it gods, we god, you god, they god. All God’s children . . . god.

And what sort of activity is it “to god”? Following the lead of the process and the creativity theologians: to god is to unfold, like an infinite flower opening its petals; to develop through a process of interaction with all the rest of the godding universe. To god is to become transparent to the creativity of the universe shining through you. Certainly not a hard truth, but possibly a deep one.

To god is to fandango across the ballroom of oneness, to trip the light fantastic with -- no, as -- mountains and rivers and great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars. To god is, in the words of Sufi poet Hafiz, to “laugh at the word two.” It is to swim in the sea of mystery; to quaff from the cup of abundance. To god is to suffice. Whoever you are, whatever your imagined shortcomings, you are enough – ample. To god is to do and be everything that you do and are. Why would anyone want to call these activities "godding"? We might call them godding to help us remember, to help us wake up to, and attune ourselves to, the fact that everything we do and are is a part of the whole, a part of the dance, the mystery of creativity, the unpredictable unfolding of new things under the sun.

For the medievals, to apprehend reality at its most ultimate meant to conceive of changeless eternity. Above this world of corruption and change, God was pure, immutable, outside of time. To think of God as an active verb is to emphasize the time during which the actions take place. It is to put God in time, rather than removed from time. It is to perceive the holy in change, rather than imagine it in changelessness. It calls attention to divinity as spread throughout all of nature, as manifested by the activities of nature.

Verb theology can incorporate modern science, building a deep truth with building blocks of hard truth from science “that reality at the most fundamental level is composed of shimmering waves of probability, fluctuating, intertwining matter and energy” (Phinney). Instead of saying species just are, biologists now understand species as in flux. That hard truth can be a building block in cultivating spiritual awe and wonder at the playing out of unpredictable creativity all around us.

I have been imagining God as an intransitive verb. But let’s continue to be playful – yet at the same time heartful. What if God were a transitive verb? If reality gods, what does it god? Perhaps we could say the universe gods you, and it gods me. Reality gods the mud and the flowers alike; it gods the Republicans and the Democrats alike. It godded Palestinians and Hammas and it godded Israel and its militant leadership. It godded despotic governments at the very moment they were disappearing their own people and turning away aid.

There is an activity of relationship between all things, an active connection of each thing with all things. In the fullest realization of God-as-transitive-verb, everything gods everything (else). Unitarian theologican Henry Nelson Wieman, said that the “universe becomes spiritual” as

“more events become signs, as these signs take on richer content of qualitative meanings, as these meanings form a network of interconnective events comprehending all that is happening in the world.” (Wieman 23)

It would seem, to carry Wieman to his logical conclusion, that the universe will have attained total, complete and perfect spirituality when everything signifies everything else -- or when, we might say, everything gods and is godded by everything else.

Godding, then, would be the activity of building meaning by building interconnection and relationship. The butterfly in Australia gods the weather in Chicago. You god the stars and the stars god you. Joy gods sadness and sadness gods joy.

This use of “god” seems to mean something like “connects with” or “interdependently arises with.” But more. This way of thinking maybe helps us see through the illusion that there are any separate things. Everything IS everything else.

Verbs need a subject -- that is, I said, if we’re going to speak in sentences. But what if we dispensed with sentences? Could we tell the story of life, of creation, in a language without subjects or objects, a language of only verbs, a language that perhaps the Cosmos itself speaks when it whispers to itself -- or whispers in your ear? Because it is timeless we need verbs with no tense (past tense or present tense or future tense). And because it is both one and many, we need verbs that are neither singular nor plural. Because it is infinite, the Cosmos speaks in the infinitive. So in the pursuit of poetic truth, I offer, in closing, this poem consisting entirely of infinitive verbs.

To come, to go,
To run, to jump, to twirl.
To birth, to grow.
To laugh.
To fall, to break, to cry, to rage.
To abandon.
To return, to embrace, to love.
To wound, to bleed, to weep.
To arise.
To work, to play, to smile.
To journey.
To heal.
To arrive, to arrive, to arrive.
To bless.

Amen.