40%. Why 40% of the public have made a mistake. Part 2

40%. Why 40% of the public have made a mistake

Part 2: Look deeper, and you will find a God worth believing in

For me, God is the awareness of the depth and wonder of life, the over-flowing joy in living. He is the call to righteousness, to live according to goodness, truth and love. He is the astonishing ability to judge creatively, cutting through shallow, superficial judgements, and even through profound but limited sound justice, to create astounding life-giving possibilities. He is mercy and forgiveness, all undeserved but given freely and unreservedly, even at great cost to himself. He is compassionate. And before him we fall silent in awe. He is complete, pure simplicity. He is holiness and the call to holiness – that otherness that simultaneously shames and elevates us to a deeper, higher, ultimate and exultant existence – life in all its fullness.

And if you say, “Ah, so what you really mean is that you believe in goodness, truth and love, in deep, creative judgements, in mercy and forgiveness and compassion. Why on earth have you brought God into it to obscure these wonderful principles and entangle them in a fantasy person?”, then I say, “I understand what you mean. But somehow these qualities do not “come at me” as abstract principles; I encounter them as personal, as a person. And if you say, “But there is no person there”, then I agree; I perceive no person to be present in the way that I perceive whether or not a person is present in all other cases”. Yet my experience of these qualities is as though there is a person present who is imparting these qualities to me, and I am not able to say what is the difference between experiencing “as though there is a person present” and experiencing “a person”. In the case of human persons, if I mistakenly imagine that someone is present when really there is no-one, I can answer this question because the presence of a human person is something that I can verify, but I cannot verify if God is present or not. If you want to say that a person is only present when it is verifiable, then we have to agree that God is not present. However, for me, that is what makes God: God – precisely the fact that he is the unique person in the category: “unverifiable persons”.

I am not simply inspired by profound principles. I’m afraid that in my terrible weakness, that is not sufficient. Instead, I meet someone, and I am inspired by that relationship. I am not foolish, and I’m very self-aware, so I fully appreciate how ridiculous this sounds; I understand that according to our understanding of the universe, it sounds impossible. Yet this is how the experience comes to me, and this is what I mean by “God”; this is who I call God; this is who God is – to me. Notice how I continually take something that could be understood as emanating from me, and instead I assert that it is something that comes to me. This could be one of those strange things that the human mind does – reversing the truth so that we are able to “put something out there” so we can see it better as a mirror image reflected back at us. If this is the case, then we are simply incapable of knowing if it is so or not, for if all our normal understanding of reality tells us that we are encountering something outside of ourselves, when really we are encountering something inside ourselves, that we are presenting to ourselves, then we simply cannot tell the difference between the two. And, in fact, even if this experience of God is a self-creation of the human mind, then there is, in practice, no difference between that and the experience of a God who was truly “out there” separate to ourselves.