I once heard someone described as “deeply and widely religious.” I wondered if that described me. I still wonder if that describes me. I hope to be a person who has deep faith - not just faith that “believes” things, but an abiding faith that trusts in a Higher Power and lets that trust affect the rest of my life. And I also hope to be widely religious - I hope that I will not become so completely entrenched in one type of religious experience that I forget other ways to connect with the Divine. I also hope to be widely religious in that my faith paints a wide brushstroke across my life - not touching one day each week but smearing across and through every decision that I make. Not only what I wear, whether I drink coffee or alcohol, whether I swear, but every single decision I make. What kind of peanut butter I buy, what kinds of things I hang on the walls of my home, how I travel to work and school, how I spend my free time. I worship and believe in a god who is in and through and beneath all things, so it makes sense that every time I touch something, I’m touching God. And I care about how I treat my God.
I have a fairly complicated faith, perhaps. I’m an eclectic mix of traditions. Sometimes I say I’m Mormon, sometimes Methodist. A little bit Buddhist, a little bit Hindu, and little bit Catholic.
I’ve found something I love in every tradition I’ve studied. And I can’t see any good reason to not incorporate the truth I find into my personal credo.
I’m not sure how to describe my view of God.
Can anyone, though, really describe God?
In The Faith Club (https://www.thefaithclub.com) Priscilla Warner wrote about how she had a religion, Judaism, but no faith. She belonged to a people but didn’t believe in a god. In one of my favorite scenes in the book, she sits in an airplane taking off. She looks out the window and feels awe. The sky extends out beyond as far as she can see. The airplane glides and she remembers, or realizes, that she is at the mercy of someone else. She realizes that she is so small in this great big world and even greater, bigger universe. She is overcome with awe. She’s not scared or frightened by this realization. It takes a weight off, actually. She is not in charge of the world. She realizes that there are so many things in this world out of her control. And she realizes that she’s got to stop pretending like she’s in control of everything. She’s got to stop stressing about being the boss of everything. As she describes her thoughts to her friends later, she uses one word to describe how she felt: surrender. She said, “I think that’s faith.” Knowing that you’re not in control and surrendering to that truth.
That is what faith is for me. Recognizing that I am NOT in control, and aligning my self with Whoever or Whatever is. Sometimes I call this God, sometimes fate, sometimes tao, sometimes (if I want to be real personal with this force) Jesus.
The name Jesus is the Latin variant of a Hebrew Yeshua or Ya’hashua. We are more familiar with the Greek rendering of this name - “Joshua.” This Hebrew word translates to “salvation” (similar to how we name children Hope or Faith).
The root of our English word salvation is “salve.” A salve is “an ointment used to promote healing of the skin or as a protection” or “something that is soothing or consoling for wound[s]” (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/salve). This is what God is to me and does for me. God is a salve. When I am hurt, I turn to God. I turn to something that is bigger than myself. I turn to something that is unchangeable, something that cannot be hurt by anything I do, something that is eternal. Salvation. Jesus.
I also admire the Hindu concept of what “God” is, what the ground of being is. In the Hindu religion, adherents honor many deities. The greatest, or the One that lies beneath every other deity, “the breath behind all of existence," is called Brahman (“Living Religions,” Mary Pat Fisher, 83). This Absolute is formless and impersonal (it is not a personal being, it does not have personhood or a personality). The gods and goddesses worshipped in Hinduism are seen as manifestations of Brahman, as a window through which some of the light of the Absolute can be seen. Some Hindus will worship one deity with intense devotion, while others will honor several.
Unitarian Universalism sometimes uses the couplet, “One Light; many windows.” This is meant to acknowledge the single Source of all faith and recognize the differences between traditions. I love this. I believe that everything Divine originates from the same source - Allah, Jesus, Saraswati, Ganesh, the Mother Goddess. I think that all these names and personalities are descriptions of what we have seen through the window. When the Light comes in through the window, when we experience the divine, we can’t experience and comprehend it all. If we could, then we’d be God. But we are not, each one of us, God. God is bigger than all of us. So, logically, no one person would be able to fully understand God. So we take these experiences and encounters and try to put them into words to share with others. We try to understand. And the result, I believe, is these varied portraits of the Absolute. We see different parts of God, and we express what we’ve seen in different ways.
This post is part of a three-part series. Come back next Sunday for the next post!
