God Is What Love Is

“God” is a word; it is a name for something - not the thing itself. As such, it is a sign, a signifier, and “an outward indication of the existence or presence of something not immediately evident.” Ordinarily, words refer to phenomena, that is, immediately perceived realities, as distinguished from noumena, or realities which are perceived by mediation but cannot be directly known or apprehended. “God,” “Allah,” “Yahweh,” “Jehovah,” and all holy names like these, are signs that point toward, or refer to, the limitless noumenon that underlies all phenomena, that is, “being itself.”

Love is the orientation of the soul that arises in the conscious relation of personal being with being itself. This (“the conscious relation of personal being with being itself”) is also how I have described “the presence of God.” Ergo, God is love, as the Johannine scriptures tell us. Now I affirm this as true myself, not because John said so, but because I have discovered it to be true according to my own experience and reflection. This sheds light as well on Paul’s scripture saying, “Faith, hope, love; these three abide.” In other words, faith and hope, too, are orientations of the soul inherent in this conscious relation. But, as the Apostle avers, “love is the greatest of these.” Without love, hope is faint and futile; without love, faith is brittle and desiccated.

It is notable that in these terms, “God” is a relation, not a thing. I used to speak of God as “being itself,” that is, the ultimate reality “behind” or “beneath” all things, until I realized that I have also come to understand that the human personal consciousness of God is necessary for the “presence” of God. As I once wrote, “If there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known.” Just as the human being - or “personal being” - is an aspect of the ultimate reality I describe as “being itself,” personal God-consciousness can be regarded as the “consciousness of being itself,” something I’ve also said repeatedly. Here, then, is the truth of the religious affirmation that humanity is created by the love of God, and in “God’s image.”

I refer here, as I have again and again through the years, to my first articulation of this, which I wrote twelve or thirteen years ago, when my daughters Anna and Maggie were very young:

“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?”, asked Anna, my firstborn and the more pensive of my two little girls, one afternoon while we sat together on the front porch railing after their preschool day.

“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”

Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.

“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m haaaap-py!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”

Being itself recognizes itself in the aspect of personal being. As this relationship becomes conscious, love arises, the subjectivity of which is called “divine love.” It is all together the love of God for the world and humanity, the human person’s responsive love of God, and love of neighbor. Thus we recognize the “subjective self” in each other, each and every one a being created in the image of God. And thus, God is love, and is located in the conscious relation of God with God’s human image.

And for animal lovers, to the extent that other sentient beings are in conscious relationship with God, love is there too. What about atheists? Well, in my view, they’re no exception. They just don’t like to use the term, “God.”

And what about agnostics? Their difficulty is in the mistake of worrying about the existence of God. God does not exist – God is existence itself, the ground of being, or being itself. To use some fancy verbal footwork, theirs is the perplexity of existents questioning the reality of existence itself, in which they consist.

This is, pretty much, the setup for St. Anselm’s “ontological argument” for the existence of God. The agnostic knows explicitly that he or she exists, and implicitly that all things in existence also exist, but doesn’t know that God is not to be understood to exist in the same way, as an existent, but rather as existence itself in relation with its human aspects which consist in it, and by grace and providence become conscious of their relation with it. As soon as a relational description of God is accepted by them, all their worries will fall away, like scales from their eyes.

What is God? God is not a what. God is not an existing being. God is not an object; God is the ultimate subject. God is being itself. God is. Who is God? God only knows. If God is anyone, God is I and Thou; God is the ultimate subject in the subject-subject relation.

To impute attributes of beings to God, as God, is to speak of God as if God were in being, among other beings. You and I and the lamp post are beings. Attributes, or Names of God, are metaphoric when speaking of God as God: God is good; God is just; God is merciful. Or else they are hyperbolic: God is great; God is all-knowing; God is all-powerful. Any words that can be said of God as God can be said of no thing in being: God is infinite; God is eternal; God is unconditional; God is absolute.

God the Creator and God’s Creation are completely interpenetrated. All Creation is in being; God is being itself. Wherever you are, there you jolly well are, aren’t you? And there God is, too; God always was, is now, and ever shall be, forever and ever, Amen. God’s presence is in us and among us here and now; ours is the consciousness of being itself. In our awareness of being, being itself experiences being itself. With each new generation, God’s faith in humanity is renewed; in each regeneration, humanity’s response of faith is renewed.

Through our consciousness, God apprehends Creation, and we, the fully self-conscious parts of Creation, apprehend God the Creator. This state of God-consciousness is what is called “sanctification” or “redemption.” It is a state of reconciliation with God; it is what is meant by being “in Christ.” When we then act out our lives in congruence with the ethics of Christ, we are “saved.” Salvation means we are saved from the effects of our potentialities for doing evil.

What is Satan? Satan is said to be the anti-Christ; as such, it is the antithesis of the human potentiality for redemption. If the Christ is the human capacity for reconciliation with God, the Satan is its converse. Neither the Christ nor the Satan is a supernatural person, or divine being, or real entities of any sort. Their names are symbols of the universal human potentials for salvation and damnation, ultimate good and ultimate evil. In Hebrew, the words ha Satan ("the Satan") appear in the Book of Job. These are usually translated as “the Adversary,” understood allegorically to signify the “shadow” side of the human personality.

Between the Adversary and the moral righteousness of the "blameless and upright" human being, a constant dialectic was thought to be acted out in people’s daily lives. The effect of the embodied and unconstrained Satan is to tempt or traduce the human soul to sin, which denies the Christ potential and alienates the person from God’s grace. Deeply infected with sin, people do evil, causing various kinds of harm and damage to others, usually intentionally.

Remember well that the Christ and the Satan are symbols standing for human mental, ideational, and intentional configurations, or “states of mind,” that can become more or less permanently internalized, and consequently affect a person’s conscience, character formation, moral and ethical faculties, and the entire array of human personality factors, for good or ill.

To be “in Christ” is the converse of being “in sin.” In Christ (remember, this is a sanctified state of the psyche, a holy condition of the soul, not a mystical divine being), the “saved” or “redeemed” person is incapable of sin, that is, of doing willful harm to self or others, or to God’s Creation. The sanctified one is relieved of sinfulness by virtue of a capacity for self “disciple-ing” in which one walks in the way of the internalized Christ. The sanctified one “fears God,” that is, conscientiously avoids doing harm to God’s Creation.

To be in sin, in thrall to the Satan, means that the potential of being reconciled with God, of being “in Christ,” is denied or preempted. The human will to do evil, to not refrain from doing harm, is unleashed. In this state, the human person is free to act out diffidence or malice, and to carry out damage, destruction, aggression, and oppression by whatever means will suit his sinful ends or sinful attributes – Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust, among them.

Who is Jesus? “Is” is the wrong tense. Jesus was an itinerant, indigent Jewish teacher and religious reformer, a Rabbi and a rabble-rouser, a prophet of profound religious and social transformation. He was brutally murdered by crucifixion at the orders of the Roman Provincial Authority, as an enemy of the state. He was not, by any means, the only person to have suffered this fate, for the same reasons.

Jesus was not a Christian. He was, however, “in Christ,” awakened, enlightened, exalted, and sanctified. He was truly a saint. He was also not, by any means, the only saint to have been sanctified “in Christ.” There have been multitudes, before and since Jesus, even now there are. Some of them are Christians; many are not. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, for instance, was “in Christ.” Maybe Augustine of Hippo was, maybe Muhammad of Medina, John Wesley, George Fox, Mahatma Gandhi, and John Freeman, to name but a few.

How does Jesus redeem us from our sins? He doesn’t. He died two thousand years ago. “In Christ,” one day at a time, we are redeemed and sanctified by reconciliation with God through our own human conscientious faculties. We are to promote salvation, by proclaiming this gospel and acting out in beneficence toward others, “in Christ,” until we die and are eventually taken up, body, mind, and soul, into the earthly biosphere from whence we came.

Except in Biblical mythology, no one has ever seen or heard God, and no one ever will. This is because the "Supreme Being" is not a being, as human beings are, as every object of human intentionality or relationality is. We are persons; God is not a person. Yet God the Creator and God’s Creation are completely interpenetrated. All Creation is in being; God is being itself. God cannot be known objectively, because God is not an object. The human person can only know God subjectively, as we know our own experience and ourselves.

All I can say about God, qua God, is that God is. God’s essence is to be; in God alone, essence and existence are one. Of this, I can have the same perfect certainty as that I am. Objectively considered, my personal being is contingent, finite, temporal. I was once not in being, and the time will come when I am no longer, subjectively incomprehensible though that is. God’s being is absolute, infinite, eternal, and necessary to my being. That I am is indubitable, if not necessary.

The miracle that I am a conditional being, who can apprehend the ultimate, unconditional reality of being itself, is the gift and grace of God. In this transcendent apprehension, it may be said truly that I manifest the consciousness of being itself. What people call the presence of God is the self-conscious relation of personal being with being itself; and vice-versa, if you prefer - the relation of being itself with conscious, personal being. One key to this understanding is relatedness, but not just in the usual interpersonal sense. God is self-relatedness; God is relatedness itself. In God-consciousness, the dichotomy of subject and object is both necessary and it is self-transcendent.

The American Buddhist teacher Adyashanti says, “Because of an innocent misunderstanding, you think that you are a human being in the relative world seeking the experience of Oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.”

As Alan Watts put it, “Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” (I have put it this way: “We are being itself experiencing itself being experienced.” Experienced by whom? By itself, of course.) Watts explained further, “God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it – just what he wanted to do.”

In the ancient Hebrew myth, God’s presence is revealed to Moses, appearing symbolically, in a burning bush that is nevertheless not consumed. It is significant that this realization is made by a human being. It could not be otherwise. It is said we are made in God’s image, because it is in human reflection that God the Creator recognizes himself, or herself, and remembers that the Creation was no accident, after all.

Sometimes this realization occurs to us when we recognize ourselves in other beings, other people. It is in shared awe and in praise of this incomprehensible reality that we worship together. If you would see the face of God, look in the faces of women, men, and children. If you would see the hands with which God works in the world, the feet with which God walks in the world, look at your own hands and feet. If you would hear the voice of God, listen to your own silent voice in prayerful reflection.

As Jesus taught, all the Torah and the Prophets are summed up in this single greatest commandment, “you shall love the LORD your God with all your soul, and all your heart, and all your mind,” because God is ever present within us and among us. Jesus taught another commandment like it, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” because every person – the inner conscience in every person – reflects the image of God, whether we recognize it or not.

This is the good news. The presence of God is reflected, brightly or dimly, in six billion human souls’ mirrors, everywhere in the world. These are God’s images. These are our neighbors. Jesus’ ministry called us to love them, and ourselves, for our brightness and our dimness as well.

Reflections on War and Poverty

I had been thinking that perhaps the two highest-order material evils of our time, and all times, are war and poverty - conventional enough thinking - when I realized how deceptively framed these ideas have become in ordinary public discourse.

Take, for instance, the huge and perennial evil of poverty. It occurs to me that poverty itself is not the primary problem. Poverty has a primary cause, and that is – wealth. Wealth, the obsessive accumulation of it, and the misdistribution of it, are the root causes of endemic poverty in our world.

Throughout the history of human civilization, wherever great excesses of wealth have been amassed, great poverty has existed not far away. This is no mere coincidence. Excessive wealth and extreme poverty are directly correlated by causality, not by accident. Neither social condition can exist without the other. In fact, the existence of one is the definition of the other. Wealth cannot be seen to be excessive except by contrast with a co-existing extreme of poverty. Poverty, by conventional definition, is the deprivation of sufficient wealth for human well-being. Excessive wealth, by my definition , is not only the condition of more than sufficient wealth, but that condition which also entails the objective insufficiency we call poverty.

I have sometimes put it as follows, and as no economist without an ideological axe to grind will ever dispute: At any point in the process of an economy, there is a finite quantity of created wealth in existence. There is a certain distribution of this wealth among its owners. Some have more than others. However “enough” is defined, when some have much more than enough, others will necessarily not have that excess. If there are many who, in fact, do not have enough, then those who have more, have what is needed by others who have less. The “have-mores” have their excesses at the expense of those who have less than they need.

Republicans, libertarians, and apostles of the “prosperity gospel” will take umbrage at this. But their protestations notwithstanding, I am here to tell you that theirs is bad philosophy and bad religion. The Hebrew prophets of the ages, straight on down to Jesus of Nazareth, had it right, distorted though their prophecies have become in popular parlance. You cannot serve God and Mammon. You may worship one or the other, but not both, unless you are a fool or a hypocrite. To parallel Albert Einstein’s famous saying, “You cannot simultaneously work for peace and prepare for war,” I say, “You cannot dispel poverty while accumulating excessive wealth.”

Furthermore, excessive wealth and concomitant poverty are the root causes of war. Let me explain myself: Poverty consists of deprivation. Excessive wealth entails deprivation. What constitutes war? Violence carried out by people against other people. People act violently against others when they have been objectively or subjectively deprived of something which is of worth to them.

A simple instance: An insecure person responds violently to an insult, because in a state of personal insecurity, the insult deprives that person of his or her sense of self-worth. Another instance: A person needing or wanting something takes it from another person to whom it belongs and to whom the thing taken has value. The person deprived of something of worth responds violently against the other. Yet another instance: A person acting violently causes bodily harm or injury to another person, or threatens to do so. Thus the other is deprived of well-being, or the sense of security, and responds violently.

These instances of interpersonal violence can serve as analogues for international violence. Such violent personal acts, acts of deprivation, greatly compounded, are the constituents of war. Every act of war directly or indirectly deprives people of some or all of their lives, liberties, happiness, health, and homes. Thus, the function of war is to impoverish those against whom it is directed. And acts of war are also the ultimate resort of national or subnational groups of people who have been likewise impoverished, or deprived of what they value, by those whom they will regard as their enemies.

Most significantly however, in the modern world, it must be recognized that war engaged in by powerful nation states has another important function. War always enriches those who declare it and direct it, and those who profit by the provision of the economic factors involved in the production of war. Thus, once again, the interests of amassing excessive wealth, in this case for purposes of waging war, are the efficient causes of abject poverty.

While the foregoing are universal economic verities in the modern world, there is one unique special case which ought to be considered. In all of history until September 11, 2001, only the United States among powerful nation states was able indefinitely to wage war and to cause widespread foreign impoverishment (along with its corresponding domestic enrichment) beyond its borders with impunity, except for military casualties. Other than in the case of the U.S.A., acts of war and political and economic exploitation against other peoples have always before long resulted in retaliatory warfare against the enemy population. So war and poverty continued to be reciprocally engendered, and the interests of wealth – Mammon – have been their progenitor. The terrorist attacks of 2001 on the World Trade Center signaled that the specially privileged people of the United States are no longer invulnerable.

Whoever the instigators of the terrorist crimes of 9-11 were (and, despite conventional public wisdom, this has not been established with certainty) their evil was not done because “they hate our values,” as the Bush regime insists. To the extent that the perpetrators were Islamic militants, it is more probably because they hate the desolation and deprivation we have wrought against their values, i.e. the impoverishment of Muslim peoples in the “third world” by the people of the “first world,” preeminently in the United States and the United Kingdom.

In a sign of our times, a 1985 pastoral statement circulated in churches of Johannesburg, South Africa, is as timely as tomorrow for us here and now:

"We now pray that God will replace the present unjust structures of oppression with ones that are just, and remove from power those who persist in defying his laws, installing in their place leaders who will govern with justice and mercy . . . The present regime, with its structures of domination, stands in contradiction to the Christian gospel to which the churches of the land seek to remain faithful . . . We pray that God in his grace may remove from his people the tyrannical structures of oppression and the present rulers in our country who persistently refuse to hear the cry for justice . . . We pledge ourselves to work for that day."

Gustavo Gutiérrez writes that, for the fulfillment of the prophetic imperative, “the support of the community [of saints, the religious community] is essential . . . community life [as in the basic ecclesial communities of Latin America] cultivates receptivity for God’s reign and also proclaims . . . the special call to overcome . . . oppression, injustice . . . and to struggle for the values of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.”

The life work of Gustavo Gutiérrez (and liberation theologians following him) consisted in a synthesis of ethics and theology, politics and religion. Politics and religion meet, if they meet at all, in the personal. If the personal is political, then for the religious person, religion is political. I believe that all persons are both – we are inherently religious and political. A society of persons in which the religious and the political do not meet is in deep trouble, for it is either in error or it is in denial. Recognizing that a society is nothing but a complex of inter-relationships among persons, I think it must be true that in a just society the realms of religious ethics and political ethics would be coterminous.

Even in a religiously pluralistic society, the golden rule necessarily applies as the supreme ethic: I will not do unto others as I would not have done unto me. Don’t pee in my pool, and I won’t pee in yours. What, you may ask, does this rule of social reciprocity have to do with religion? For one thing, it is the first ethic of all religions in all cultures known to have ever existed – that is, the ones which were sustainable for more than a few generations. As Paul Tillich said, “Religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion.” Religion informs culture. The key to understanding Tillich’s bon mot is that, in his terms, religion is not simply identical with theology and ecclesiology; it includes within its meaning secular religions, the profane as well as the sacred. For, as we know, one person’s sacrament is another’s profanity.

This is not to say, as some young people do, “It’s all good.” Certainly not all that is done is good. Some is absolutely evil, unpalatable though that term may be to moral relativists. What is evil? It is the antithesis of good, and good has consistent objective meaning when considered inter-relationally, as all ethical considerations ought to be. What is considered good for one, or some, ought to be not other than what is good for all. As I suggested with reference to the golden rule, this should be no big news. Among other things, it was the core ethic of Plato’s philosophy concerning the just society. (By the way, there is good reason to suppose a direct connection in the history of social thought between the golden rule of the Hebrew Bible and the ethics of Plato and Aristotle.)

As usual, the devil is in the details. I think this is because of the recurrent ethos of what Rabbi Michael Lerner calls selfish individualism, which is what you might call sin. (Or you might not – I do.) Is sin original, inescapable, and inherent in humankind? I don’t think so. Endemic, perhaps, but not incurable. Did Jesus want to redeem us from sin? It certainly appears so, but not by getting crucified. I imagine that was John the Baptist’s objective, too. Unfortunately, he got murdered for his efforts as well.

How could a holy teacher’s words redeem us from sin? You have one big clue already. That’s right – the golden rule. An informed and conscientious application of it in praxis throughout our society would save us. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics would be helpful, too. And Plato before him had a similar take on the subject. Speaking in Socrates’ voice (and identically with the ethic of Jesus) he wrote, “It is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice unto others.”