The Rev. Stan Barrett, Affiliated Minister

Dick and I had been friends for quite a while. We had first known each other in the late 1980’s when attending experiential workshops in a new therapeutic approach called Process Work. Later we were members of the Board of a small non-profit  set up to sponsor Process Work workshops in New England. We traveled together by car from the North Shore to Peterborough, NH for quarterly meetings over several years. We had spent time in each other’s homes. We knew each other pretty well, including our life struggles, but we had never spoken about God, or about what the great mid-20th-Century theologian Paul Tillich called “matters of ultimate concern.”

One day as we returned from NH, I made some reference to God in our conversation. Dick said, without missing a beat, “…if you want to hypothesize a god.” I responded immediately, “Dick, I think it is God who hypothesizes us, not we who hypothesize God.” Just like that, a rhetorical “showdown at the OK Corral,” not crossed swords but crossed worldviews, contrasting starting points for our metaphysics – our sense of what is the context, if any, of the physical world, or what James Fowler called our sense of the largest stage on which our life is set.

My starting point – in math we would call it my axiom, the place where I start without having to prove it – is God. It had been, and still is, a fruitful starting point for understanding the universe and my place in it, and for living my life and supporting others in living theirs. Though my understanding of what I mean by ”God” has changed – and, I hope, become both more expansive and more subtle – over the years, the New Testament book of Acts still speaks to me when it refers to God “…in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Dick’s starting point is harder for me to know, but what seems to be implied in his words is a belief that faith in anything beyond the physical (or natural) world should be subjected to canons of proof like those that guide science, rules of hypothesis, testing, and repeatability.

I wasn’t interested in proving God: minds greater than mine have tried it, with limited success. If I had any goal in bringing up God – and I’m not sure I meant to “bring up” anything – but in retrospect at least, if I had any hope, it would have been to be able to talk comfortably and honestly about our deepest truth, which for me would have meant at some point referring to God. Clearly, if that were to have happened comfortably, it would only have followed a lot of work.

As it was, we dropped it. I don’t even remember our commenting on what had just happened, or saying we would leave it, we just did…and went on with our friendship. Did we miss out on anything by not finding a way to talk about our deepest sense of connection to life? We might have backed off from God terminology and shared in other terms what we believed and why, where that came from in thought and feeling, in experience and personal history. We were both capable of using words in ways that were both true to our individual experiences and convictions and thoughtful of the sensibilities of the other. But we didn’t. Maybe we had just the relationship we needed with each other. Not every relationship needs to involve sharing where we repose our deepest trust in life and in death. In any case, we left it, picking up where we’d left off, and I think that was just fine. I continue to carry real affection for Dick to this day.

I wonder if you have had such experiences? Certainly we all know what it is to be so careful of each other as never to broach the subject or use the language, especially in a faith community of such diverse views as ours. I love the care with which we treat each other here, in this matter as in others. And I think that, as with Dick and me, not every relationship in the beloved community needs to delve into these matters. On the other hand, I think that in the congregation as a whole, the case is different. When the rabbi Jesus – as Susan so aptly refers to him – was asked what was the first and greatest commandment, he replied , “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind…And the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The second of these, in general if not always in details, we can readily get behind here. The first is harder, but vital, I think, for any faith community.

Put in terms which I hope we can all gather around, it calls on us to attend to the perennial and proverbial questions “Who am I really?” “Where do I come from?” “Where am I going?” “What is most real?” “What is the largest context for our life on earth?” I don’t think these questions are any less important than in Jesus’ time. I doubt that many of us come here totally disinterested in them, or having so thoroughly resolved them for ourselves that we have nothing to gain from conversation with those who disagree with us as well as those who agree.

I know that such conversations occur in informal contexts here, in groups like Chalice Circles and Susan’s recent series on God, and in our Journeys of Faith here on Sunday mornings. Still, we have a well-established culture of holding back around these matters. I think we have much to gain in our understanding of and support for each other if we can open ourselves to more sharing of our faith stances and journeys. Much to gain, I think, and with little risk if we bring to it all the intelligence and heart that I know we have. Particularly with respect to God language, we already have an approach that I think works pretty well: we vary the names we use – “God” and “the divine” in the words of covenant we repeat every Sunday, and sometimes “Spirit,” or “Great Mystery,” etc. I don’t have any programmatic ideas about how to go further with this conversation. I’m really just inviting the openness.

Can we do it without talking about God? Well, of course we can, up to a certain point. But God – or at least wondering about God – is part of the story for many of us, and without sharing that part of the story, it’s not our story! God comes up when we share our thoughts and feelings and hunches about life and its meaning.

The other reason that it would be hard to avoid more talk of God if we decide to speak more of this aspect of faith – and I mean Jesus’ “first commandment” – is that God is deeply embedded in the conversation which has been going on about these matters for thousands of years, not only in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also in some other religions. If we are not to make ourselves spiritual orphans, having to reinvent the wheel as we consider the implications of our own spiritual experiences, and the questions raised in formulating what we believe, it will be hard to avoid talk about God. In some Buddhist contexts, it would be easier to avoid God concepts and talk instead about the Buddha’s enlightenment as the ideal human state, but that’s not home or adopted territory for most of us. In either case, it can be interesting – even reassuring – to know that humans have pondered these things for a long time, and dealt with them with real integrity, and true to the demands of their hearts and their minds.

As my contribution to this conversation, let me offer three perspectives or lenses into the domain of human experience and thought in which the God-idea comes up so often. These three lenses are to some extent idiosyncratic to me, and in fact I thought at one point of entitling the sermon “A Romp with Stan through the Fields of Theology.” I quickly concluded, though, that I was incapable of writing a sermon which lived up to the whimsical promise of that title. Peculiar to me or not, I hope these three lenses stimulate further thought, imagination, and conversation. Before jumping in more deeply, I’ll offer an image and a few words of explanation of each. First, God as beloved: God as most deeply loved and most profoundly trusted reality. Second, God as black hole: God as deeply mysterious origin, essentially unnamable and indescribable, but of which an apt metaphor may be the unknowable core of a black hole, or whatever it was that preceded the big bang. And finally, God as you and me: God as our own deepest and most essential identity.

To start with God as beloved, let me call again on Dr. James W. Fowler, who wrote the book Stages of Faith. The understanding of faith which underlies his theory of faith development is a broad and humanistic one. In addition to speaking of faith as our sense of the largest stage on which our life is set, mentioned earlier, he said faith is a human universal, partaking of the meaning of trust, so that the question of faith becomes one of whom or what we trust most deeply. He also said faith is a verb, our whole way of leaning into life. Further, he refers to faith as “rational and passional,” i.e. a matter of heart as well as mind, not just a question of intellectual assent. Added to this, he related that “believe” comes from the medieval German “belieben”, meaning “to make beloved.” To this I would add that a beloved is quite often a gift we choose to accept – the initiative seems to come from the other side! To believe, then, is to make something – or discover it to be – beloved. It is within this complex of meanings that I offer the lens of God as what we love most deeply and trust most profoundly.

I think this lens facilitates our appreciation of diversity. In a way, it’s the polytheistic lens, acknowledging the gods: yours, mine, and ours, somewhat like a Greek pantheon. It invites valuing our own understanding or imagining of God or non-God and how we came to it: what we started with early on and how that’s changed. It supports believers and non-believers alike to ask: “What God or gods do I not believe in?” It leaves space for focusing on what activities or experiences are mediators of mystery for us, seeming to point to something beyond themselves, whether or not we choose in the end to call that God. It may be music which stirs something deep within us, or art, or running, or nature, or prayer or meditation, or – perhaps most often – another human being. I think this lens also invites asking “what is my deepest yearning?” and following the answer where it leads.

This lens of God as most beloved and trusted can illuminate a lot. Metaphors for God here are rich and human-toned and close to experience, as illustrated beautifully in the hymn we’ll sing in a few minutes: “Bring Many Names.” Yet this is a lens and not the whole picture. It may obscure our unity as it focuses on the diversity of gods within and among us.  Also, God can begin to look like us, which can mean not like those different from us by some characteristic or other! Further, a God made in a human image may be comforting until we begin to wonder, “Why, when my neighbor and I both prayed to be saved from the flood waters, did I survive and she perish?”… Or when we consider Lincoln’s point that both North and South prayed to the same God, but both could not prevail.

My second image or lens, the black hole, is further from everyday experience. Astrophysicists talk about the event horizon of a black hole: the point beyond which we can’t see into a black hole because the gravity is so great even light can’t escape. Regarding the similar concept of the big bang, one idea is that the universe began in a singularity, a state where gravity is infinite and space and time do not yet exist. This is a metaphor, of course, and has its limits, but provides a useful perspective. It sounds amazingly like the classical understanding of God as, not “a” being among other beings – only a lot bigger and more powerful, with an invisibility cloak! – but pure being or pure potential – being itself – existing outside time and space, and from which everything originates – lending being, as it were, to all particular beings. Meister Eckhart called this God beyond God. The Qur’an uses a body metaphor to point to the relationship between this Reality and the universe: “Wherever you turn, “it reads, “there is the face of God.”

You might call this the monotheistic lens, or the lens of unity. Shorn of markers of race and class, of gender and ethnicity, of personal history, self-interest, and national identity which can encumber our images of God, perhaps this view can offer a more expansive tent under which to gather for sharing across differences of experience, perspective, and conviction.

I also find it significant that mystics of various traditions describe a point on the spiritual path where what one experiences can seem on the one hand to be full of the divine presence, and on the other hand to be absolutely empty: fullness or emptiness, God or no-God, either or both. The corresponding spiritual practice is called the via negative, the negative way, in which one says of every thought or image that arises about God – no, that is not God, nor is that…not God, not God, not God, ad infinitum. The purpose and hope is to find God beyond all our limiting thoughts and images, but if what we find is indeed God, it may be so far beyond our conceptions as to just as well be called No-God.

My third lens I call “God as you and me,” God as our own deepest and most essential identity. According to the Biblical book of Genesis, we bear the divine image. This contrasts with the almost universal tendency to think that when we talk about God, we’re talking about “out there,” not “in here.” Yet the traditions I know best have within them – half-hidden but there to be discovered – a perspective which holds that who we know/think ourselves to be is at best a pale shadow – even a distortion – of our deepest, original self, which partakes of divinity. Similarly, the transcendentalists suggested we were sparks of the divine. Classically, this truth was usually whispered, because of course it means anything but that “I am God” in any usually accepted meaning of that statement.  In fact the path to knowing our deepest selves is understood to be a path of radical humility, a path of exploration requiring a willingness to sacrifice again and again our present understanding of who we are for the sake of uncovering another layer, and approaching closer to our deepest truth.

This perspective brings together the close-toexperience view of God as Beloved and the beyond-the-stars view of God as Black Hole. It says that the Beyond-the-Beyond is the Deepest Within, that the still small voice issues from the same Reality that spreads out the Milky Way. Philosopher David Bentley Hart says that the concept of God as pure being which gives being to all particular beings answers a question seldom put in contemporary philosophy: Why is there anything rather than nothing? It’s not selfevident, after all, why anything exists at all. He grounds this rarefied philosophical question in a common human experience: our observation of a child’s wonder when it sees something it hasn’t seen before, and the younger the child and the fresher its experience of discovering things, the more striking it is. The child isn’t asking why?, but is wide-eyed in wonder at what there is there. As life goes on, says Hart, we lose that sense of wonder and awe. Out there, in here. Far away, and in a child’s – or our – experience: when we talk God, we’re talking about all of it.

My friend Dick and I kept a nurturing friendship without talking about God. I know that some of us are more inclined – just by our natures – to talk about these matters of faith, some less inclined. And I know that probably some of our hesitance about such talk is shyness, sensing that in fact these conversations are intimate ones. We make ourselves vulnerable when we share our deepest yearnings, our most profound love and trust. It’s understandable that we’re cautious. So let us be careful, but let us be bold. Please consider this an invitation.