The Cosmos Own Language

Lake Chalice has been considering the thesis that "god" may be a verb. The verb we have been imagining "god" to be has, so far, been an intransitive verb. Now let’s try supposing god is a transitive verb – the abiding transit between subject and direct object, doer and done-unto. If reality gods, what does it god? To be worthy of being termed god, this activity must take in everything.

The universe gods you, and it gods me. Reality gods the mud and the flowers alike; it gods the Republicans and the Democrats alike. It godded Abu Ghraib, and it godded the government of Burma at the very moment it was murdering its monks and denying aid to its people. There is, in other words, an activity of relationship between all things, an active connection of each thing with all things.

In the fullest realization of God-as-transitive-verb, everything gods everything (else). This reminds us of Henry Nelson Wieman, the Unitarian theologian that Lake Chalice cited a few posts ago. Wieman’s position is that “qualitative meaning is intrinsically good.” (Wieman, The Source of Human Good. 1946. 19). Qualitative meaning is defined as

“any structure of interrelated events, together with their possibilities, when these events have appreciable qualities and when the structure as a whole can be represented by signs.” (Wieman 21)

The “universe becomes spiritual” as

“more events become signs, as these signs take on richer content of qualitative meanings, as these meanings form a network of interconnective events comprehending all that is happening in the world.” (Wieman 23)

It would seem, to carry Wieman to his logical conclusion, that the universe will have attained total, complete and perfect spirituality when everything signifies everything else -- or when, we might say, everything gods and is godded by everything else. Godding, then, would be the activity of building meaning by building interconnection and relationship.

The butterfly in Australia gods the weather in Chicago. You god the stars and the stars god you. Joy gods sadness and sadness gods joy. This use of “god” seems to mean something like “connects with” or “interdependently arises with.” But more. This way of thinking maybe helps us see through the illusion that there are any separate things. It’s not just that everything connects with or influences everything else. It’s that everything is everything else. There are no independent things – just an uncompromising oneness gently unfolding. That awareness is what spiritual awakening is all about, so it seems right to use god to talk about it.

Our grammar itself lures us into assuming that there are separate things, the referents of our nouns. Could we tell the story of life, of creation, in a language without subjects or objects, a language of only verbs, a language that perhaps the Cosmos itself speaks when it whispers to itself -- or in your ear?

Comes, goes.
Runs, jumps, twirls.
Births, grows.
Laughs.
Falls, breaks, cries, rages.
Abandons.
Returns, embraces, loves.
Wounds. Bleeds. Weeps.
Arises.
Works. Plays. Smiles.
Journeys.
Heals.
Dies.

Comes.

"Come, thou fount of every blessing, . . . fount of every vision, . . . fount of inspiration."

What is this fount? It is the founting process itself, which the world-oneness exhibits at every turn.

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This is part 6 of 6 of "God the Verb"
Previous: Part 5: "A Process Reality"
Beginning: Part 1: "The Ambiguity of Ponytails and God"

A Process Reality

To god is to unfold, like an infinite flower opening its petals; to develop through a process of interaction with all the rest of the godding universe. To god is to become transparent to the creativity of the universe shining through you. To god is to fandango across the ballroom of oneness, to trip the light fantastic not “with” but “as” the mountains and rivers and great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars. To god is, in the words of Sufi poet Hafiz, to “laugh at the word two.” It is to swim, fully awake, in the sea of mystery. To god is to quaff from the cup of abundance. It is to lose all sense of yourself as a separate being in a creative project, or the creative encounter, in total freedom, with each moment. To god is to suffice. Whoever you are, whatever your imagined shortcomings, you are enough. To god is to do and be everything that you do and are.

Why would anyone want to call these activities "godding"? We might call them godding to help us remember, to help us wake up to, and attune ourselves to, the fact that everything we do and are is a part of the whole, a part of the dance, the mystery of creativity, the unpredictable unfolding of new things under the sun.

Remembering that “spiritual” comes from the word for “breath” (the "spir" in “spirit” is same "spir" that’s in “re-spir-ation”), we can see that to god is to breathe. To god is to participate, as we constantly must, in the continual flow of change of in-breath and out-breath.

For the medievals, to apprehend reality at its most ultimate meant to conceive of changeless eternity. Above this world of corruption and change, God was pure, immutable, outside of time. To think of God as an active verb is to emphasize the time during which the actions take place. It is to put God in time, rather than removed from time. It is to perceive the holy in change, rather than imagine it in changelessness. It calls attention to divinity as spread throughout all of nature, as manifested by the activities of nature.

Verb theology emerged in response to 20th-century advances in the sciences. Those advances took us beyond Isaac Newton’s physics, in which the material of the universe was “atoms and the void”: discrete particles bouncing off each other and attracted by gravity. For Newton, reality was dumb substance. The theological response to Newton was Deism: God was the agent that created matter, put it together, and set the whole vast watchworks to ticking. Today, however, physicists understand

“that reality at the most fundamental level is composed of shimmering waves of probability, fluctuating, intertwining matter and energy.” (Steven Phinney)

A process reality called for a process sense of the holy. Insights from the New Physics were reinforced by understandings in the biological sciences since Darwin. Instead of saying species just are, biologists now understand species as in flux – as media, we might say, for the playing out of unpredictable creativity. God the verb is a response to these developments in both physics and biology.

“God is a verb, not a noun”
by Wild Bill Balding, 1961.

God is a verb, not a noun:
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be.'

dynamic, seething, active
web of love poured out,
given, received, exchanged,
one God in vibrant community

always on the move,
slipping through our fingers,
blowing through the nets we cast
to hold and name,
confine to nouns, to labels,
freezeframe stasis,
pinned like a butterfly,
solid, cold, controlled, lifeless.

'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be' -
not pinned down by names, labels,
buildings, traditions,
or even by nails to wood:

I am: a verb, not a noun,
living, free, exuberant,
always on the move.

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This is part 5 of 6 of "God the Verb"
Next: Part 6: "The Cosmos Own Language"
Previous: Part 4: "Godding"
Beginning: Part 1: "The Ambiguity of Ponytails and God"

Godding

Godding Michelangeloingly

In the last thrilling Lake Chalice (“God is a Verb”), we heard from people like Buckminster Fuller and Jean-Claude Koven on the subject of the divine being a verb rather than a noun. Some of the thinkers drawn toward saying God is a verb also emphasize love, drawing on “God is love” from the Gospel of John. UU minister Stephen Phinney writes,

“I believe that the holy is in the process of giving and taking of the love we have. In other words, the holy or God is the process of interchanging love.”

God is the act of loving, the ever-present possibility of intimacy and compassion.

You might find this perspective radical or exhilarating. You might also have noticed that the God-is-a-verb people are not actually using “God” as a verb. They say, for instance, that reality is more a matter of events than substances. “Events” conveys a more dynamic quality than “substances,” but if we’re talking about parts of speech (which, supposedly, we are), “event” is just as much a noun as “substance” is. They speak of God as “process” and as “creativity” – both nouns. The last Lake Chalice quoted Koven saying God was “unfoldment,” and “infinity,” and “everything,” and “dance” – nouns every one. “Love,” in the context of Phinney’s usage: a noun.

We might also point out that for all that, “verb” is a noun. We might even point out that to utter, “God is a verb” is to commit a sort of performative contradiction, on the order of saying, “I am presently dead.” (After all, what is the subject – and thus necessarily a noun – of the sentence, “God is a verb”?)

Lake Chalice likes these new nouns (well, except for “unfoldment”), and finds them more inspiring than the traditional nouns, creator, law-giver. So perhaps we need not be sticklers for literal meaning. The point is: there is in our life and our experience a cause for wonder, mystery, reverence. This is better thought of as a process, a dance, a creativity, a love than as a person or entity. Calling it a verb is just a way of alluding to its active doing.

But supposing we did want to be sticklers for actually meaning what we said. Suppose we were to take “God is a verb” literally. How would that go?

Dan Moonhawk illustrates, using diseases, what the switch from noun to verb can look like:

“Most of our diseases are nouns, which we most often HAVE: I have a headache, a stomach ache, acne, cancer, mumps, measles, etc., etc. Each of these can also be seen as a verb or process instead of a 'thing', but to talk about them in this way is weird at first: I'm headaching, stomach-aching, acneing, cancering, mumpsing, measlesing. But what a difference: now these are not things you have, but processes your body is going through, which you have more control over than if it's a 'thing' that has nothing intrinsically to do with you.”

That’s helpful. Now: if God is to be the verb, what would be the subjects of our sentences? We might suggest: the universe. Hence:

The universe gods.

There’s the vast cosmos, quietly, grandly godding along through the ages. Reality gods.

Actually, anything and everything is the subject. I god, you god, he she it gods, we god, you god, they god. All God’s children…god.

And what sort of activity is it “to god”? Following the lead of the process and the creativity theologians, to god is to unfold, like an infinite flower opening its petals; to develop through a process of interaction with all the rest of the godding universe. To god is to become transparent to the creativity of the universe shining through you. To god is to fandango across the ballroom of oneness, to trip the light fantastic not “with” but “as” the mountains and rivers and great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars. To god is, in the words of Sufi poet Hafiz, to “laugh at the word two.” It is to swim, fully awake, in the sea of mystery. To god is to quaff from the cup of abundance. It is to lose all sense of yourself as a separate being in a creative project, or the creative encounter, in total freedom, with each moment. To god is to suffice. Whoever you are, whatever your imagined shortcomings, you are enough. To god is to do and be everything that you do and are.

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This is part 4 of 6 of "God the Verb"
Next: Part 5: "A Process Reality"
Previous: Part 3: "God is a Verb"
Beginning: Part 1: "The Ambiguity of Ponytails and God"

God is a Verb

From “No More Secondhand God,” by Buckminster Fuller, 1940.

Here is God's purpose –
for God to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law,
not academic dogma, nor ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.
Naught is lost.
Only the false and nonexistent are dispelled.

As I was saying, in the last century a large number of scholars have written a great number of books and papers laying out meanings of 'God' very different from traditional theism. I'm thinking particularly of process theologians and naturalist theologians. They have produced such an extensive body of work that I think we have to say they’ve shifted the English language: the meaning of the word "God" is not limited to the traditional theist conception. These theologians have developed a notion of God not as a noun – not as a person, place, or thing – at least not some specific object thing, some entity. They have made it possible to think of God as a verb – as the active, creative principle in the universe.

A tenet of process theology is that “reality is not made up of material substances that endure through time, but serially-ordered events.” Rather, God is an unfolding process. Theologians such as the Unitarian, Henry Nelson Wieman and Mennonite Gordon Kaufman work out in detail a conception of god as creativity – serendipitous creativity says Kaufman, to emphasize the unplanned, unpredictable nature of creativity. The traditional notion of God as creator wasn’t entirely off-base, they say. There really is a connection between the function of creating and the deep mystery, awe, wonder and sense of reverence that goes with the notion “God.” God the creator wasn’t entirely off-base – but God isn’t a person-like creator. Instead, God is creativity itself.

“God is indeed a verb. He is not the creator. He is the ongoing unfoldment of creation itself. There is nothing that is not a part of this unfolding. Thus there can be nothing separate from God. God is infinite and infinity is One. . . . When we perceive God as a noun, we envision him as the creator, the architect of, and therefore separate from, his creation. Identifying ourselves as part of that creation, we see ourselves not only separate from our source but separate from each other and all other manifest things as well. . . . Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life shifted. Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was only God. When someone spoke to me, it was with God's voice; when I listened, it was with God's heart. As you begin to view God not as the creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself, you'll discover God in everything you see – including yourself.” (Jean-Claude Koven, 2005)

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This is part 3 of 6 of "God the Verb"
Next: Part 4: "Godding"
Previous: Part 2: "Communication Enough"
Beginning: Part 1: "The Ambiguity of Ponytails and God"

Communication Enough

Have you felt awe? Have you ever felt a fulsome beauty that stopped you dead in your tracks? Have you felt grandeur in the world, the planet, or the space in which it floats – and have you felt a deep humility in the face of that grandeur? Have you ever felt a oneness with another being – perhaps watching a hawk soaring across the sky felt that you, too, were soaring there – that the boundaries of your self expanded, or dropped away entirely? Have you ever felt mystery and wonder?

Certainly there are tragedies and atrocities: the holocaust, genocide in Darfur, needless starvation and malnutrition. Have you ever felt that the entirety, the whole enchilada, the full catastrophe – the stuff we judge good and the stuff we judge bad – all of it together -- the laughter, the tears, and heartache, all added up -- all fit together somehow into a whole that, even with its tragedy and pain, is good and beautiful and true?

If your answer to all those questions is “no,” then if you want to identify yourself as an atheist, I don't think anyone will quibble. If your answer to even one of those questions is “yes,” then if you still want to self-identify as an atheist, a quibble or two may be in order. To wit:

Why not call that feeling a feeling of God?

You might rejoin:

“Why not? Because that’s not what the word means. If I say ‘God,’ people will assume that I mean a superhuman person up in the sky with a big beard who gets angry and punishes us for our evil ways by sending the AIDS epidemic.”

Whoah. We don’t have to let those who do believe in that define the word for the rest of us.

“No, but we want to communicate when we use words. If I say ‘mayonnaise’ I need to mean that white stuff that goes on sandwiches and in dressings because that’s what people will think I mean. If I don’t mean that, then I’m misleading people by saying that.”

But look. We all have different associations with words. No two people have exactly the same sets of associations with the word “cat.” No two people will finish reading this blog entry and get quite the same message from it. The question is: is the shared meaning enough to make the word worth invoking?

Maybe one person defines God as simply the universe – the universe with nothing in it except what scientists describe. Meanwhile another person defines God as a superpowered person with desires and feelings. Two such people can have a conversation about God. For all their differences, they’re both invoking what is of ultimate concern, what is awe-inspiring, what is the source of life – that toward which an attitude of reverence is appropriate.

Isn’t that enough overlap of understanding so that communication occurs?

Sure, if what you meant was “universe,” you could just say “universe.” But if you want to convey your own feeling of standing in relationship to that all-encompassing reality with a sense of awe, humility, abundance, mystery, or of affirmation even in the face of tragedy, then “universe” doesn’t quite cut it. “God” comes closer.

Moreover, in the last century a large number of scholars have written a great number of books and papers laying out meanings of 'God' very different from traditional theism.

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This is part 2 of 6 of "God the Verb"
Next: Part 3: "God is a Verb"
Beginning: Part 1: "The Ambiguity of Ponytails and God"

The Ambiguity of Ponytails and God

In one of our hymns, we urge:

“Come, thou fount of every blessing, . . . fount of every vision, . . . fount of inspiration.”

What is this fount? To whom are we singing with our request that our hearts “sing thy grace,” that our lives be turned to higher ways? Some of us would hesitate, and others of us would not hesitate, to say it is God whom that hymn addresses. The living tradition we share draws from many sources, one of which is:

“humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

The humanist strand in our living tradition has often resisted using the word God.

It has occurred to me that God is kinda like a ponytail. For seven years I had a ponytail, and I was aware that a ponytail makes a certain statement, and a ponytail on a man makes a different statement than a ponytail on a woman makes. But what statement? What does a ponytail say? After I’d had it a while I was so used to it that I wasn’t consciously saying anything at all. And what meaning it had for other people must have widely varied. Forty years ago a ponytail meant “hippie.” Nowadays a man with a ponytail is more likely to be driving a pickup truck than a VW microbus with flowers painted on it. And if he’s holding something that’s smoking and is illegal, it’s more likely to be a gun than a drug. Times change. I don’t know what my ponytail was saying to people – different things to different people, I’m sure.

What does the word “God” say to people? It says something, though it’s not exactly clear what. Whatever it is, does it need to be said? If it does, can it be said as well, or better, without using “the G-word”?

A lot of Unitarian Universalists do identify themselves as atheists. I’m not sure how many. It’s a label I used to claim – and sometimes, though not as often, and rarely without prompting, still do. If I don’t know what “God” means, then I don’t know what “atheist” means either. Declaring you’re an atheist makes some kind of statement – I’m just not sure what.

Sometimes I want to reclaim the word “God.” It’s a powerful word, and Jerry Falwell (may he rest in peace), and Pat Robertson (may he just give it a rest), don’t get to define the word for the rest of us.

There’s a pretty stock move which I sometimes make when someone tells me she or he is an atheist. I say:

“well, tell me about this God you don’t believe in, because I probably don’t believe in that God either.”

If someone identifies themselves to me as a theist, I could say something very similar --

“tell me about this God you do believe in; I probably don’t”

– though that wouldn’t be so polite. Those who choose either the label “theist” or the label “atheist” seem to know – or think they know – what the name “God” names. The traditions of using and invoking that word, “God,” though, allow possibilities of meaning beyond what the usual self-defined “theist” or “atheist” typically has in mind.

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This is part 1 of 6 of "God the Verb"
Next: Part 2: "Communication Enough"