What We Talk About When We Talk About God (2 page)

That Easter Sunday was fairly traumatic, to say the least, because I realized that without some serious reflection and study and wise counsel I couldn't keep going without losing something vital to my sanity. The only way forward was to plunge headfirst into my doubts and swim all the way to the bottom and find out just how deep that pool went. And if I had to, in the end, walk away in good conscience, then so be it. At least I'd have my integrity.

This book, then, is deeply, deeply personal for me. Much of what I've written here comes directly out of my own doubt, skepticism, and dark nights of the soul when I found myself questioning—to be honest—
everything
. There is a cold shudder that runs down the spine when you find yourself face-to-face with the unvarnished possibility that we may in the end be alone. To trust that there is a divine being who cares and loves and guides can feel like taking a leap—across the ocean. So when I talk about God and faith and belief and all that, it's not from a triumphant, impatient posture of “Come on, people—get with the program!” I come to this topic limping, with some bruises, acutely aware of how maddening, confusing, frustrating, infuriating, and even traumatic it can be to talk about God.

What I experienced, over a long period of time, was a gradual awakening to new perspectives on God—specifically, the God Jesus talked about. I came to see that there were depths and dimensions to the ancient Hebrew tradition, and to the Christian tradition which grew out of that, that spoke directly to my questions and struggles in coming to terms with

how to conceive of who God is

and what God is

and why that even matters

and what that has to do with life in this world,

here and now.

Through that process, which is of course still going on, the doubts didn't suddenly go away and the beliefs didn't suddenly form nice, neat categories. Something much more profound happened. Something extraordinarily freeing and inspiring and invigorating and really, really helpful, something thrilling which compels me to sit here day after day, month after month, and write this book.

Which leads me to two brief truths about this book before we go further.

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. I realize that for some people, hearing talk about Jesus shrinks and narrows the discussion about God, but my experience has been the exact opposite. My experiences of Jesus have opened my mind and my heart to a bigger, wider, more expansive and mysterious and loving God who I believe is actually up to something in the world.

Second, what I've experienced time and time again is that people want to talk about God. Whether it's what they were taught growing up or not taught, or what inspires them or what repulses them, or what gives them hope or what fills them with despair, I've found people to be extremely keen to talk about their beliefs and lack of beliefs in God. What I've observed is that while we want more of a connection with the reverence humming within us, we often don't know where to begin or what steps to take or what that process even looks like.

So if, in some small way, this book could provide some guidance along these lines, I'd be ecstatic. In saying that, I should be clear here about one point: this is not a book in which I'll try to prove that God exists. If you even
could
prove the existence of the divine, I suspect that at that moment you would in fact be talking about something, or somebody, else.

This is a book about seeing, about becoming more and more alive and aware, orienting ourselves around the God who I believe is the ground of our being, the electricity that lights up the whole house, the transcendent presence in our tastes, sights, and sensations of the depth and dimension and fullness of life, from joy to agony to everything else.

 

Now, about where we're headed in the following pages.

This book centers around three words. They aren't long or technical or complicated or scholarly; they're short, simple, everyday words, and they're the foundation on which everything we're going to cover rests.

These three words are central to how I understand God, and if I could CAPS LOCK THEM THE WHOLE WAY THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, I would; or write them in the sky or etch them in blood (on second thought, maybe not) or graffiti them on the side of your house (let's not do this either, though I'd love to see what Banksy would do with them), because they're the giant, big, loud, this-one-goes-to-eleven idea that animates everything we're going to explore in the following pages.

They've unleashed in me new ways of thinking about and understanding and most importantly
experiencing
God. They've made my life better, and my hope is that they will do the same for you.

But before we get to those three words, we first have two others words we're going to cover. (Nice buildup, huh?)

It's these two words that will set us up for the three words that form the backbone of the book.

First, we'll talk about being
open,
because when we talk about God we drag a massive amount of expectations and assumptions into the discussion with us about how the world works and what kind of universe we're living in. Often God's existence is challenged in the conversation about what matters most in the modern world because haven't we moved past all of that ancient, primitive, superstitious thinking? We have science after all, and reason and logic and evidence. What does God have to do with the new challenges we're facing and knowledge we're acquiring? Quite a lot, actually, because the universe, it turns out, is way, way weirder than any of us first thought. And that weirdness will demand that we be
open.

So first,
Open.

Then we'll talk about talking, because when we talk about God, we're using language, and language
both
helps us and fails us in our attempts to understand and describe the paradoxical nature of the God who is beyond words.

First
open,

then
Both.

And then, after those two words,

we get to the three words,

the words that will shape how we talk about God in this book. The words are (I feel like there should be a drumroll or something . . .)

With,

For,

Ahead.

With,
because I understand God to be the energy, the glue, the force, the life, the power, and the source of all we know to be the depth, fullness, and vitality of life from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and everything in between. I believe God is
with
us because I believe that all of us are already experiencing the presence of God in countless ways every single day. In talking about the God who is with us, I want you to see how this
with
ness directly confronts popular notions of God that put God somewhere else, doing something else, coming here now and again to do God-type things. I want you to see both the irrelevance and the danger of that particular perspective of God as you more and more see God all around you all the time.

Then
for,
because I believe God is
for
every single one of us, regardless of our beliefs or perspectives or actions or failures or mistakes or sins or opinions about whether God exists or not. I believe that God wants us each to flourish and thrive in this world here and now as we become more and more everything we can possibly be. In talking about the
for
ness of God, I want you to see how many of the dominant theological systems of thought that insist God is angry and hateful and just waiting to judge us unless we do or say or perform or believe the right things actually make people miserable and plague them with all kinds of new stresses and anxieties, never more so than when they actually start believing that God is really like that. I want you to see the radical, refreshing, revolutionary
for
ness that is at the heart of Jesus's message about God as it informs and transforms your entire life.

Then
ahead,
because when I talk about God, I'm not talking about a divine being who is behind, trying to drag us back to a primitive, barbaric, regressive, prescientific age when we believed Earth was flat and the center of the universe. I believe that God isn't backward-focused—opposed to reason, liberation, and progress—but instead is pulling us and calling us and drawing all of humanity forward—as God always has—into greater and greater peace, love, justice, connection, honesty, compassion, and joy. I want you to see how the God we see at work in the Bible is actually ahead of people, tribes, and cultures as God always has been. Far too many people in our world have come to see God as back there, primitive, not-that-intelligent, dragging everything backward to where it used to be. I don't understand God to be stuck back there, and I want you to experience this pull forward as a vital, active reality in your day-to-day life as you see just what God has been up to all along with every single one us.

All of which leads us to one more word to wrap it up:
so.
So what? So how do we live this?
So
is the question about what all this talking has to do with our everyday thinking and feeling and living.

To review, then:

Open,

Both,

With,

For,

Ahead,

and
so.

One more note about notes: all of the places where I cite Scripture verses, as well as credits for other sources for information and suggestions for further reading, are included in the endnotes, organized there by theme or key phrases.

It's a fair bit of ground to cover, and my hope is that by the end you will say,

“Now
that's
what I'm talking about.”

CHAPTER 2

OPEN

One time I was asked to speak to a group of atheists and I went and I had a blast. Afterward they invited me out for drinks, and we were laughing and telling stories and having all sorts of interesting conversation when a woman pulled me aside to ask me a question. She had a concerned look on her face and her brow was slightly furrowed as she looked me in the eyes and said, “You don't believe in miracles, do you?”

As I listened, I couldn't help but smile, because not long before that evening I'd been approached by a churchgoing, highly devout Christian woman who'd asked me,
with the exact same concerned look on her face, complete with furrowed brow,
“You believe in miracles, don't you?”

It's as if the one woman was concerned that I had lost my mind, while the other woman was concerned that I had lost my faith.

There's a giant either/or embedded in their questions, an either/or that reflects some of the great questions of our era:

Faith or intellect?

Belief or reason?

Miracles or logic?

God or science?

Can a person believe in things that violate all the laws of reason and logic and then claim to be reasonable and logical?

I point this either/or out because how we think about God is directly connected with how we think about the world we're living in.

When someone dismisses the supernatural and miraculous by saying, “Those things don't happen,” and when someone else believes in something he can't prove and has no evidence for, those beliefs are both rooted in particular ways of understanding what kind of world we're living in and how we know what we know.

Often in these either/or discussions, people on both sides assume they're just being reasonable or logical or rational or something else intelligent-sounding, without realizing that the modern world has shaped and molded and formed how we think about the world, which leads to how we think about God, in a number of ways that are relatively new in human history and have a number of significant limits.

So before we talk about the God who is
with
us and
for
us and
ahead
of us, we'll talk about the kind of world we're living in and how that shapes how we know what we know.

First, we'll talk about the bigness of the universe,

then

the smallness of the universe,

then

we'll talk about you and what it is that makes you
you,

and then

we'll talk about how all this affects how we understand and talk about God.

This will take a while—so stay with me—because the universe is way weirder than any of us ever imagined . . .

 

I. Welcome to the Red Shift

The universe,

it turns out,

is expanding.

Restaurant chains expand, waistbands expand, so do balloons and those little foam animal toys that come in pill-shaped capsules—but
universes
?

Or more precisely,
the
universe?

It's
expanding
?

Now the edge of the universe is roughly ninety billion trillion miles away (
roughly
being the word you use when your estimate could be off by A MILLION MILES), the visible universe is a million million million million miles across, and all of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from all of the other galaxies in the universe at the same time.

This is called
galactic dispersal,
and it may explain why some children have a hard time sitting still.

The solar system that we live in, which fills less than a trillionth of available space, is moving at 558 thousand miles per hour. It's part of the Milky Way galaxy, and it takes our solar system between 200 and 250 million years to orbit the Milky Way
once
. The Milky Way contains a number of smaller galaxies, including

the Fornax Dwarf,

the Canis Major,

the Ursa Minor,

the Draco,

the Leo I and the not-to-be-forgotten Leo II,

the Sculptor, and

the Sextans.

It's part of a group of fifty-four galaxies creatively called the Local Group, which is a member of an even larger group called the Virgo Supercluster (which had a number of hit singles in the early eighties).

And happens to be traveling at 666 thousand miles an hour.

(So be careful out there, and look both ways before you cross the supernova.)

Back to our original question:

Expanding?

Around a hundred years ago, several astronomers, among them Edwin Hubble, he of telescope fame, and Vesto Slipher, he of awesome name fame, observed distant galaxies giving off red light. Red is the color galaxies emit when they're moving away from you, blue when they're moving toward you—hence the term “red shift.”

Fast-forward to 1964, to two physicists working for the Bell Telephone Company, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. These men were unable to locate the source of strange radio waves they were continually picking up with their highly sensitive equipment. As they searched for the source of these waves, cleaned the bird droppings (which Penzias called “white dielectric material”) off their instruments, and shared their findings with other scientists, they realized that they were picking up background radiation from a massive explosion.

An explosion, it's commonly believed, that happened a number of years ago—13.7 billion, to be more exact.

Apparently, before everything was anything, there was a point, called a
singularity,
and then there was a bang involving inconceivably high temperatures, loaded with enough energy and potential and possibility to eventually create what you and I know to be life, the universe, and everything in it.

The background radiation from this explosion, by the way, is still around in small amounts as the static on your television. (And you thought it was your cable company.)

Now when we get into sizes and distances and speeds this big and far and galactic and massive, things don't function in ways we're familiar with. For example, gravity. Jump off the roof of your house, drop a plate on the floor in the kitchen, launch a paper airplane and you see gravity at work, pulling things toward our planet in fairly consistent and predictable ways. But in other places in the universe, gravity isn't so reliable. There are celestial bodies called
neutron stars
that have such strong gravity at work within them that they collapse in on themselves. These stars can weigh more than two hundred billion tons—more than all of the continents on Earth put together . . .

and fit in a teaspoon.

And then there's all that we don't know. A staggering 96 percent of the universe is made up of black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. These mysterious, hard to see, and even harder to understand phenomena are a major engine of life in the universe, leaving us with 4 percent of the universe that is actually knowable.

Which leads us to a corner of this 96 percent unknowable universe, to the outer edge of an average galaxy, to a planet called Earth. Our home.

Earth weighs about six billion trillion tons, is moving around the sun at roughly sixty-six thousand miles an hour, and is doing this while rotating at the equator at a little over a thousand miles an hour. So when you feel like your head is spinning, it is. Paris is, after all, going six hundred miles an hour.

Earth's surface is made up of about ten big plates and twenty smaller ones that never stop slipping and sliding, like Greenland, which moves half an inch a year. The general estimate is that this current configuration of continents that we know to be Africa, Asia, Europe, etc. has been like this about a tenth of 1 percent of history. The world, as we know it, is a relatively new arrangement.

Every day there are on average two earthquakes somewhere in the world that measure 2 or greater on the Richter scale, every second about one hundred lightning bolts hit the ground, and every nineteen seconds someone sitting in a restaurant somewhere hears Lionel Richie's song “Dancing on the Ceiling” one. more. Time.

Speaking of time, here on Earth we travel around the sun every 365 days, which we call a year, and we spin once around every twenty-four hours, which we call a day. Our concepts of time, then, are shaped by large, physical, planetary objects moving around each other while turning themselves. Time is determined by physical space.

No planets, which are things,

no time.

We have calendars that divide time up into predictable, segmented, uniform units—hours and days and months and years. This organization into regular, sequential intervals that unfold with precise predictability has deeply shaped our thinking about time. These constructs are good and helpful in many ways—they help us get to our dentist appointments and remember each other's birthdays, but they also protect us from how elastic and stretchy time actually is.

If you place a clock on the ground and then you place a second clock on a tower, the hands of the clock on the tower will move faster than on the clock on the ground, because closer to the ground gravity is stronger, slowing down the hands of the clock.

If you stand outside on a starry night, the light you see from the stars is the stars as they were
when the light left them
. You are not seeing how those stars are now; you in the present are seeing how those stars
were
years and years and years
in the past
.

If you stand outside on a sunny day, you are enjoying the sun as it was
eight minutes ago.

If you found yourself riding on a train that was traveling at the speed of light and you looked out the window, you would not see things ahead, things beside you, and things you had just passed. You would see everything
all at once
. You would lose your sense of past, present, and future because linear, sequential time would collapse into one giant NOW.

Time is not consistent:

it bends and warps and curves;

it speeds up and slows down;

it shifts and changes.

Time is relative, its consistency a persistent illusion.

It's an expanding,

shifting,

spinning,

turning,

rotating,

slipping and sliding universe we're living in.

There is no universal up;

there is no ultimate down;

there is no objective, stationary, unmoving place of rest where you can observe all that ceaseless movement.

Sitting still, after all, is no different than maintaining a uniform approximate constant state of motion.

There is no absolute viewpoint; there are only views from a point.

Bendy, curvy, relative—
the past, present, and future are illusions
as space-time warps and distorts in a stunning variety of ways, leading us to another matter: matter.

The sun is both a star that we orbit,

and
our primary source of energy.

It is a physical object,

and
it is the engine of life for our planet.

The sun is made of matter,

and the sun is energy.

At the same time.

Albert Einstein was the first to name this, showing that matter is actually locked-up energy. And energy is liberated matter.

Perhaps you've seen posters of the Swiss patent clerk sticking his tongue out, with the wild hair and the rumors of how he was supposedly such a genius that he would forget to put his pants on in the morning. And then there's his famous E = mc
²
formula, which many of us could confidently write out on a chalkboard even if we couldn't begin to explain it.

Beyond all that, though, what exactly was it that he did?

What Einstein did, through his theories of general and special relativity, was show that the universe is way, way weirder than anyone had thought. I realize that
weirder
isn't the most scientific of terms, but Einstein's work took him from the bigness of the universe to the smallness of the universe, and that's when a string of truly stunning discoveries were made, discoveries that challenge our most basic ideas about the world we're living in.

 

II. Who Ordered That?

For thousands of years people have wondered what the universe is made of, assuming that there must be some kind of building block, a particle, a basic element, a cosmic Lego of sorts—something really small and stable that makes up everything we know to be everything. The possibilities are fascinating, because if you could discover this primal building material, you could answer countless questions about how we got here and what we're made of and where it's all headed . . .

You could, ideally, make sense of things.

Greek philosophers—among them Democritus, who lived twenty-five hundred years ago—speculated about this elemental building block, using a particular word for it. The Greeks had a word
tomos,
which referred to cutting or dividing something. Out of this they developed the concept of something that was
a-tomos,
something “indivisible, uncuttable,” something that everything else was made of. Something really small, of which there is nothing smaller. Something
atomos,
from which we get the word
atom
.

Imagine what we'd learn if we could actually discover one of these atoms!
That was the quest that compelled scientists and philosophers and thinkers for thousands of years until the late 1800s, when atoms were eventually discovered.

Atoms, it turns out, are small.

About one million atoms lined up side by side are as thick as a human hair.

A single grain of sand contains 22 quintillion atoms (that's 22 with 18 zeroes).

An atom is in size to a golf ball as a golf ball is in size to Earth.