The God in Whom I Believe

The word, “God.”  Do people mean the same thing when they use it?  Could it be that people, even in the same religion, have different understandings of God? In this video, I’m exploring some of the ways I understand and experience God.

The following is a text version of this posting.

I understand spirituality as a dimension of who we are as people.  Spirituality is about the human spirit and the ways we discover or encounter meaning, purpose, and value in life.  In turn, spirituality enhances our lives by enabling us to find that our lives are meaningful, purposeful, and valuable.  From this perspective, I don’t view a belief in a deity, higher power, or god as an essential aspect of spirituality.  But I do affirm a belief in God for myself. 

Acknowledging that belief, I want to explore a question that I’m sometimes asked:  who is this god that you believe in?  In exploring this question, I want to be very clear that I have no expectation or desire that anyone else shares my own faith or beliefs.  I’m simply hoping to explain some aspects of my own experience of faith.

I grew up in Western Pennsylvania.  There are more cloudy, rainy days there than sunny ones.  Behind my family’s home was a large field.  At the bottom of the hill from the field was a stream of water.  On many mornings, dense fog would rise from the stream and cover the field.  My experience of God in prayer is like walking into that field covered by fog.  When I’m wrapped in that fog, I don’t know what’s really there.  Yet, I sense a presence that envelopes me.  There’s an important text from English mysticism called The Cloud of Unknowing.  My experience of the Divine is something like that, but it’s about a cloud of both unknowing and knowing.  The presence I encounter is beyond my ability to grasp, so it is “unknowing” for me.  But it’s real and tangible, so in that way it is “knowing.”  That forms one aspect of my belief and experience of the Divine.

Growing up in the Christian tradition, of course, I was taught that the nature of God was three persons – the Trinity.  That’s a doctrine I thought about but it didn’t make sense to me for a long time.  But in time, I came to understand the idea of the Trinity in a very different way.  As I sat in meditation with an icon of the Trinity, an Eastern Christian image of three angels seated at a table sharing a simple meal, I began to understand that the heart of the Divine isn’t about the three persons but about the relationship among them.  It’s a relationship of unity and wholeness.  I thought of the times I shared meals with others and experienced that deep connection of something more than just individuals eating together.  It was in the nourishing relationship among those at the meal that something more emerged.  What’s curious to note about the icon of the Trinity is that the table is open for a fourth person to join the meal.  I understand that as an open invitation to share in the deep life of the Trinity, to join in that nourishing relationship.  That is another aspect of how I understand and experience the Divine.

A sacred story from the Bible that’s very important to me is the second story of the creation of humanity found in the Book of Genesis.  The first story portrays God creating the cosmos over a series of days.  But the second story is focused on God creating humanity out of clay, molding us from the Earth.  Then God breathes life into the human form.  The word used in the story is “ruah.”  It means life, breath, and spirit.  What I understand from this sacred story is that our very essence as human beings is the life, breath, and spirit of the Divine.  The life and spirit of God is in us.  The essence of who we are is Divine.  The process of our growth calls us to grow more and more into that Divine essence.  That’s another dimension of how I understand God.

My understanding of the Divine is rooted in my spiritual experience.  In some ways, dogma was a jumping-off point, providing me a way for me to consider what I experienced. I find many common threads between my experience and what mystics in many traditions have written about their experiences.  Of course, no one else needs to share my beliefs.  But I thought it may be helpful to explain some of the ways I understand God.  Perhaps in doing so, you’ll be able to reflect further on your own experience of the Divine and draw out your own beliefs.