UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST VIEWS OF GOD (Part II)

INTRODUCTION

Men and women throughout the ages have tried to describe their experiences of God. Some have looked heavenward and cried, "God, Almighty Father." Some have looked within and whispered, "Om." Others, sensing the awe and mystery of a divine presence, have chosen not to give that experience a name.

Today we in the Unitarian Universalist tradition join this ancient pilgrimage that attempts to label and understand our experiences of transcendence and ineffability. We seek to liberate ourselves from patriarchal and anthropomorphic concepts of God. While our attempts are not always successful, they do reflect an honest appraisal of our efforts to find new dimensions of meaning in the term "God."

The following six essays reflect this struggle to find concepts of God that are dynamic and relevant to the human experiences of our age.

THE HEART OF REALITY

" To me," wrote James Martineau, the noted English Unitarian, "I confess, it seems a very considerable thing just to believe in God: difficult indeed to avoid honestly, but not easy to accomplish worthily, and impossible to compass perfectly; a thing not lightly to be professed, but rather humbly to be sought; not to be found at the end of any syllogism, but in the inmost fountains of purity and affection; not the sudden gift of intellect, but to be earned by a loving and brave life."

I, too, find belief in God difficult, both to avoid honestly or to accomplish worthily. As for gods, I consider them all human creations, and remain unpersuaded of the reality of the supernatural. The term "God" for me, therefore, does not mean a Supreme Being, a Divine Person; it is rather my affirmation that the universe and life have some principle of coherence and rationality. It epitomizes my faith that, despite the tragedies of personal life and the unavailability of any final answers, life is tremendously worth living, and the heart of reality is eminently sound.

All the gods, including the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem, have grown out of the human experience of something divine in existence, our awareness of sacred reality. We may outgrow ancient imagery, but we still know the hunger for truth, the benediction of love and beauty, and the moral imperative within. "God" is the term most generally used to name all this. Its meaning changes and grows with our understanding of its reality; but its many meanings do not convince me to abandon it. Like the word "love," it seems nearly indispensable, for it has gathered unto itself precious cargo. It is the word of devotion. I understand the reluctance of many nowadays to use it. It is difficult to divorce the word from anthropomorphic and supernatural connotations. Nonetheless, we lose more than we gain by abandoning it. If we are to live religiously - that is, in open responsiveness to the whole of life, sensitively, appreciatively, trustingly - we need words that can evoke feelings and give life wings. We need the language of poetry as well as of science. God is not a proposition to prove but a reality to experience; not something to define but to know in the mind's commitment to truth, in the claims of justice, in the prevalence of beauty, and in the sanctities of love.

Arthur Foote, Minister Emeritus
Unity Church
St. Paul, MN

CONTINUOUS CREATION

God is the word I use to allude to that source of wonder and mystery that I experience when I contemplate the fact of my existence. I think and therefore I praise.

As I look up on the procession of miracles lightly known as life; as I experience the continuity of my own consciousness, an elusive "self" that apparently transcends the birth and death of cells in my brain; as I consider the sweep of cosmic evolution, that incredible story of inert matter giving rise to living, feeling, thinking, dreaming creatures... I have a sense of spiritual reality that is always surging onward and outward. I believe that we are bearers of a collective consciousness which, in every instant of time, grows richer and more vibrant, as the universe becomes aware of itself.

This is the process that I call God - the spiritual evolution of the cosmos - creation flowing free. God is the unfolding, the potentiality, the newness. "Everything waits to be a sacrament," says Unitarian Universalist minister Jacob Trapp. I have difficulty using God as a noun, for a noun must point to something: person, place, or thing, I was once taught. A noun must denote, define, delimit. It has a static quality which does not fit my God-consciousness.

To me, God is a verb.

To use a metaphor of punctuation, God is not a period but a question mark or an exclamation point.

God is not the answer to the mystery of life but the acknowledgment of the mystery.

Unlike the deity of most traditions, my God is not eternal but emergent: that process of continuous creation which is the cosmic drama. Each of us is a participant, playing a bit part, improvising, responding to others, inventing the action from moment-to-moment. God, in my metaphor, is neither the author nor the stage manager, but the energy of the actors in the dialogue.

God is the "creative interchange" as renowned theologian Henry Nelson Weiman has put it, the process by which we listen to one another and learn from one another and arrive at new levels of spiritual awareness as a result. Each of us has a unique vantage point on reality. Sharing enriches and enlarges all of us. "The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper," wrote Eden Phillpotts, prolific British author.

This process of expending consciousness must occur among individuals of other species on the earth and wherever sentient life exists. I trust this process as ultimately benign. Despite the eddies of hostility, competition, and violence among individuals and species, there seems to be overall progress toward love, altruism, mutuality, synergy - toward wholeness and holiness.

"Someday after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love," writes the philosopher Teilhard de Chardin. "And then, for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire."

Defying entropy, defying probability, God is, in the words of Samuel Longfellow, the "Life that maketh all things new." When I recognize the presence of God working through me, I live with a sense of high adventure and eternal significance.

Ann Fields, Religious Educator
former UUA Children's Programs Director

DIFFICULT TO EXPRESS

All religion begins in experience, and religious symbols are an attempt to express this experience. Since the beginning human beings have created gods to personify the heights and depths, the joys and disasters of human life. The characteristics ascribed to a god usually reveal more about the believer than about the divine. When we examine the contrasting theological views of John Calvin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, we learn much more about the two men than we do about God. Individuals and religions have stretched and shaped the meaning of God since first the word emerged. Yet, I find that I cannot easily use this word.

Hearing and speaking of God evokes many fearful and foolish images out of my childhood and, I suspect, out of the childhood of many with whom I speak. Using the word confuses more than it clarifies. Do we mean the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob or the god of cosmic process? Do we mean a good god struggling against the evil within creation or a god encompassing all, creative and destructive alike?

When I attempt to express what I have experienced in the frontier moments of my life, I sense that I am close to what others call God. Out of the devilishly difficult struggle to accept with joy and amusement the me behind my masks, there are moments when I can break through into relationship. I have a sudden sense of the unity among myself and nature and the human family. There is in me the acute awareness that the same energy that exists within stars, storms, and seabirds exists also within myself.

In each of these moments I experience a vitality at the heart of existence that encompasses all. I am part of a gigantic process, sometimes glorious, often destructive. Although ultimately it will destroy my personal identity, I sense that nothing is ever finally lost, that every act is linked inextricably into the great chain of being. Whatever we call God exists for good or ill within myself. I am free to choose, yet I am responsible for all.

Religion, when it freezes experience into authority - to cloak human decision with divine sanction - does humanity a fundamental disservice. Too often names and creeds become a substitute for experience, rather than an impetus. The reality which we have personified into gods lives not on high altars and in ancient texts. It is the eternal stillness beneath change and the creative energy of the cosmic process. Would that we might pass beyond the word into the experience.

Richard A. Kellaway, Minister
First Unitarian Church
New Bedford, MA

HUMAN EXPERIENCE

I once wrote a chancel drama in which the principal character could not pray, though he very much wanted to. His own intellectual standards would not accept his only conscious concept of God. Yet he unselfconsciously used the word of God as an expletive - God! - all the time. The frustration of this character resolved first into humility and then into insight and joy after he admitted that the existential meaning expressed when he said, "God!" was undeniably his own. That existential meaning was hard for him to get at. It differed just enough from what he had been able to accept to make it difficult to see. The drama was my representation of the honest, but confused and spiritually famished, mind of our age, which looks futilely for God - until the locus of the looking shifts from what we cannot believe to what we already live but do not credit.

Much God-talk is confused and meaningless because it has been disconnected from its experential content. If it is to become meaningful again, we have to retrace its roots in subjective human experience. No human experience can be" proved." Its interpretation, though, can be tested for consistency with our experience and with that of others. With rational rigor, we can then say, it is reasonable to believe that there is an objective pole to subjective experience of the holy, the sacred, the divine life of our life.

I would describe the kinds of concrete experience in which meaningful God-talk is rooted in this way. First is awe, the sense of utter dependence upon that nourishing mystery of being within which we live. We may forget this mystery, to our impoverishment, but there is no separation from it. It is given.

Second is awareness that reality does lay upon us some moral imperatives. These imperatives have many qualifiers: historical relativity, social conditioning, biological stimulus-response mechanisms, libido, and more. But ultimately we experience the commands of conscience to seek and speak truth, to create beauty, and to do justice with the mercy of affection as imperatives of the nature of human existence. We did not create these imperatives nor have we the power to manipulate them beyond a certain flexibility, else we are manipulated into the chaos of psychic and/or social
disintegration. They are given.

Third is the experience of freedom. Whether we have many or few, our options are real. We are free to respond to those impulses to be nourished in worship and to strive for fulfillment of the commands of conscience. This freedom we did not create and have not the power to manipulate, though we can use it or abuse it. It is given.

Fourth is the experience of liberation. We are innately social creatures. We are always to some degree trapped in the consequences of our own and others' abuses of freedom as well as by the consequences of finite understanding. Yet again and again personally and historically, we have known the redemption of inspired freedom that overcomes these consequences and enters into new, creative, constructive forms of thought and social order. Notions of God's purposefulness in human history derive from the sense of direction inherent in the experience of liberation. The sense of direction, along with the knowledge of its possible betrayal, is given.

For me there can only be one response to all these givens of human experience - a reverent expletive - Thou, my God!

Alice Blair Wesley, Unitarian Universalist minister, has served churches in Maryland, New Jersey, and Texas.

PERSONAL CHOICE

Because Unitarian Universalism is a non-creedal religion, all Unitarian Universalists must decide whether or not the concept of God is a central part of their personal religion. In the Judeo-Christian tradition God was a supernatural, personal being with whom one could communicate and who intervened in the physical laws of the universe. That concept, however, has long been abandoned by sophisticated theologians. God, in effect, has been redefined in ways compatible with the naturalistic view of the world. Theologian Paul Tillich calls God "the ground of being." For Tillich, God is the structure of everything that exists, or, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead puts it, "the principle of concretion." Henry Nelson Wieman, Unitarian Universalist theologian, conceived of God as the principle of creativity functioning in all things. Some Unitarian Universalists say that God is nature. Individuals who find a theistic terminology helpful can use all these different definitions of God (and many more) constructively. Sometimes such redefinitions go so far as to make God simply a human ideal, as in the case of John Dewey, who talked about God as "the sum total of human idealism." There are many reasons for keeping a concept of God - tradition is maintained; contact with traditional religions is easier. Most of all, the theist is apt to feel that the use of the God concept is emotionally sustaining and intellectually satisfying.

To the contrary, many Unitarian Universalists simply do not find the concept of God helpful to religious life. They think that theistic religions work, not because traditional metaphysical views are correct, but because human nature has certain basic needs and capabilities that can be met by many different religious formulations. Feuerbach and Freud, early humanists, thought that gods and religion are projections of the human psyche. The humanist develops a religion or a concept of life without using the God concept.

To humanists, every emotion experienced by a theist has its counterpart in the humanist frame of reference. When the theist talks about God's providence, the humanist talks about fate; when the theist talks about grace, the humanist talks about serendipity; when the theist is moved by emanations of the Holy Spirit, the humanist has "peak experiences." Each Unitarian Universalist uses those terms which seem most helpful to describe his or her personal religion. Much of the joy of a non-creedal religion is the meaningful dialogue that occurs in the sharing of different religious symbols and their function in people's lives.

After many years of searching I have become more committed to humanist terminology in religion, primarily for two reasons. First, the concept of God, in spite of reinterpretations, carries too much of the past with it. God, for me, is a word that has outlived its usefulness, and reinterpreting it no longer seems worth the effort. Second, the concept of God is not easily integrated into the information constantly flowing to us from today's researchers and thinkers.

Psychology, sociology, biology, anthropology - these are the raw material for building a modern religion. Theologians seem to feel compelled to put science on the procustian bed of the God concept. I would rather build my faith around people and our situation on this planet, as interpreted by expanding knowledge, than on a theology that carries elements of an intellectual world too dated to integrate fully modern knowledge.

Paul H. Beattie, former minister
First Unitarian Church
Pittsburgh, PA

THE INNER STRUGGLE

However each individual thinks of God, it seems true that the concept of God had greater wisdom for many of our predecessors and still has for many of our neighbors on this planet. If God is not a meaningful word for some religious liberals, then we must at least find ways to talk again about the truths and insights - once associated with God - that still remain valid for us. It is the union and active relation between the ideal and the actual - a union that some call God - that must be kept before us. Our scientific, rationalistic desire to know all the facts must be coupled with an acceptance of mystery and the reality that there are things we do not know. When we take the experience of God seriously, we affirm that our humanity grows somewhere between confronting knowledge and mystery, doubt and belief.

We must each ask our own questions, and we each emerge with our own unique concepts of that which is ultimate. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "God enters by a private door into every individual." The reality for me is that the inner struggle - the one that goes on ceaselessly with my own dragons, dreams, self, and with God - cannot be denied. The journey involves shaping the raw, crude matter of self and world into something meaningful and true. The journey involves crossing the dark spaces between the stars and transforming them into light. The journey involves going deep into the whirlwind - eyes open and arms outstretched - until the center can be claimed as one's own. God, for me, is the journey.

God is inspiration. God is the image of perfection, wisdom, holiness, and wholeness ever before me toward which I must stretch and direct my soul. The God who calls me is not so much a god of tradition or laws and contracts or rhetoric, but rather a god of essence and presence. This God, while seeming to touch us from a realm beyond, lives at the heart of all that is most alive in the human experience. Seeing past the separations that divide us is moving closer to the healing light that is the unity of God.

How do you prove God? How do you prove love? It can only be proved by the evidence of its presence; by the witnessing acts that convey the assurance that lets one feel loved. One feels God... and then one knows.

Marni Harmony is a Unitarian Universalist minister who has served churches in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Recommended Readings

Some of these resources are available from the UUA Bookstore (1-800-215-9076 or www.uua.org) or from your local bookstore or library.
Building Your Own Theology Volumes 1 and 2. Richard S. Gilbert. In two ten-session volumes, adults begin the challenging process of understanding and interpreting their religious values.
A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism. John Buehrens and Forrest Church. Imaginative outline of the main ideas behind UUism. Includes a useful chronology of UUA history.
Unitarian Universalist Pocket Guide. William F. Schulz, Editor. Six essays by contemporary UUs provide an overview of UU beliefs, practices, and history.
The Challenge of a Liberal Faith. George N. Marshall. Popular introduction and study guide to UUism.

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©1995 Unitarian Universalist Association
UUA Pamphlet Commission Publication
Pamphlet Commission Contact: John Gilmore
Originally Printed in USA #3039