What God Truly Is?

This past Christmas Eve, I went to a celebration of mass at midnight with a friend of mine, who is a formidable intellectual and doesn't usually attend church (neither do I- as a rule). As we were walking out, both stating that we felt uplifted and inspired by the service, I asked her why she thought that was. And I asked her (in a purely curious, non-challenging way) what she actually believed- because I didn't know - as she didn't know what I believe- (neither of us wear it on our sleeve).

She said, "I believe that God is Love." She continued, "I believe that when you bear witness to kindness and compassion from one human to another, as exemplified by the way the world gathered round to support the victims of the tsunami, that force enacted through humans is God.

I really liked her explanation-because it made sense to me and probably also because it echoed what I'd learned all those years ago in Sunday School - so elegant in its simplicity - "God is Good(ness)"-"God is Love".

And it led me to think about what I believe to be true about God and religion in general. I've collected some interesting quotes that I'd like to share - because I think they all are true...whatever else I may believe.

The dangers of focusing on religion instead of God or Love:

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." (Anne Lamott)

"My Palestinian intellectual friend tells me that he might be willing to admit that God said the Jews could have Israel in Hebrew. But, he said, Allah did not say it in Arabic to the Arabs." (Arthur Hertzberg)

"Each drew his sword/on the side of the Lord." (Phyllis McGinley)

"Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is." (Jean Anouilh)

"Christianity was meant to be good news, not good advice." (Dean Inge)

"They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered exactly what those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness." (Louise Erdich)

For me- belief in God is like:

"...driving a car at night. You can never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." (E.L. Doctorow)


"When you want God as much as you want that next breath, you will see God." (Bo Lozoff)

"I felt the wind on me, I felt the birds in me, all separation was completely gone." (Bernard Tetsugen Glassman)

"God is no white knight who charges into the world to pluck us like distressed damsels from the jaws of dragons, or disease. God chooses to become present to and though us. It is up to us to rescue one another."
(Nancy Mairs)

"True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes...When the true myth rises into consciousness, there is always a message: "You must change your life." (Ursula K. Le Guin)

"The place to imporve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. (Robert M. Pirsig)

"Wandering reestablishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe." (Anatole France)

"It was on that road and at that hour that I first became aware of my own self, experienced an inexpressaible state of grace, and felt at one with the first breath of air that stirred, the first bird, and the sun so newly born that it still looked not quite round." (Colette)

"Suppose that some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body- he would at once see the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further still and find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law, and then where he found a heart on the left side, would deduce that there was another on the right. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong." (G. K. Chesterton)

"One has to be willing to surrender to a condition of awe, to the astonishment of the soul, to bewilderment, bafflement, humility. Or, as Emerson neatly put it, "Let the bird sing without deciphering the song."
(Denise Shekerjian)

"The world is still full of divinity and strangeness. The scientist stops, where all men do, at the doors of birth and death. He knows no more than you and I why a seed remembers the oak of 20 million years ago, why dust acquires the form of a woman, why we behold the earth in space and time. He hasn't yet solved the secret of a single atom upon the earth. We may pluck the nymph from the river, but we won't pluck the river from ourselves: this coiled divinity is still all murmurous and strange. There are sacred places everywhere." (Ross Lockridge)