What animates the robes
For the last few months I’ve been making my way slowly through Stumbling Toward God, a memoir of a woman’s journey from atheism toward faith. Her path ultimately led her to join and participate actively in two congregations, alternating weeks–each providing nourishment for different aspects and expressions of her spiritual and psychological and relational lives. One church was Unitarian Universalist, the other Episcopalian.
I recommend the book not only to those on a similar journey to hers, but also to those already situated in a particular religious tradition, but who are growing uncomfortable with it, and having conscious or unconscious theological questions nagging at their insides. Margaret McGee (the author of the book) has a wonderfully disarming way of naming the kinds of questions that many religious people feel, and, without ego, sharing the story of how she’s tried to address them.
Sitting in the doctor’s office this morning, I read some paragraphs about her efforts at trying to understand who she was praying to when she began, after years of atheism, praying spontaneously to an unknown God.
"I never felt closer to God than when I turned my compost pile. Forking over the compost, smelling the dark, sweet material, looking close to see the material come alive and move, a worm shining in sunlight, a millipede crawling toward shadow, a slug burrowing into a grapefruit rind. The sense of awe, the strange mix of pride and humility that filled me. What did I pray to? Was I praying to the source of that awe?
"Yes, in a way.
"I prayed to what all things hold in common. I prayed to what makes life. I thought about the elements of the universe, the rocks, the stars, the air, other living things. I tried to get the perspective of what’s behind all that. I prayed to the force that brings things into existence. I thought this force encompassed all it created. My God was transcendent, and my God was also immanent. God ran in my veins. God lived and died and lived again in every atom of the universe.
"When I prayed, I tried to feel that I was part of God, and God was part of me. Through that feeling, I tried to grasp what I could do, how I could change to make a whole life, a good life.
"By stripping away God’s personality, I had revealed what was essential to me about God. God was no longer blank [a frustration she had in prayer that spurred her to try to discover, in the first place, what seemed most essential about God ]. God made all things, caused all things to change into other things, and inhabited all things.
"Everything else about God was a mystery. I could live with that mystery."
A little later, under a subheading titled "Dressing the Emporer," she says this:
"It’s hard to talk about God. And when you strip away personality and characteristics, it gets a lot harder. After struggling to be coherent about something that is, in its essence, a mystery, it occurred to me that religions were just trying to put a bit of clothing on the unknowable, so that we could see a shape and talk about it. Shiva, the Buddha, the Trinity, the great web of being–all these images were metaphors for what is truly unspeakable. All religions use substitute names for God, and we get in serious trouble when we think we’re using the real name. I had mistaken the clothing that religions put on their Gods for the God that animates the robes.
"It isn’t that God is a human creation, any more than gravity is a human creation. Our definitions of God are human creations, though, just as our definitions of gravity are human creations. Our attempts to describe gravity are flawed not only because we still have things to learn about gravity, but also because we can perceive gravity only through our human mind and senses. We’ll always know only a human idea of gravity and not gravity itself.
"Once I saw God in this light, the outfits that people put on God began to look less stupid and more useful. The Hebrew God, who had repelled me all the time I was an atheist outside the church, turned out to be a surprisingly accurate human representation of the forces of creation and fate: arbitrary and powerful; by turns just, unjust, nurturing, vengeful, forgiving, and unforgiving; and above all, always with us. I was still mad at the guy, but at least I had some glimmering of how he got his reputation."
I guess that gives a taste of McGee’s honesty and candor (admittedly taken out of broader context; scandalized readers, please note). I’m looking forward to hearing more of her story. (…or is it mine?)