Skeptic – thoughtful, inquiring. a person who believes in or practices philosophical skepticism, a person who habitually doubts, questions, or suspends judgment upon matters generally accepted, a person who doubts religious doctrines.
Hmmm….seems I might be defined as a skeptic, too.
A few days ago, I posted
Elissa Elliott’s blog post on my Facebook page and one of my friends commented: “I couldn't agree more. I am a skeptic at heart. What she described is not only agnosticism, but true skepticism. And I hate that the word skeptic is used in such a negative manner among society. A good question to ask would be, " what kind ...of evidence would you need to believe in God?" What people don't seem to understand is that the evidence they are presenting to the atheist is purely subjective, therefore, not evidence at all to another person.”
I have come to appreciate honest skepticism—and skeptics. Didn’t use to—used to really blast the skeptics, that is until I found myself doubting it all.
A friend of mine had a dream a few years back—it was one of those dreams that I knew in my knower was for me. (Dreams can be that way you know—anyone can claim another’s dream for themself. It’s the way of dreams.) She dreamed that she found a fish, almost dead, on the bank of the creek. It was tangled up in knotted fishing line, and still had the hook in its mouth. She sat about trying to free the fish without killing it.
I just knew in my knower that I was the fish, and I was also the one trying to free the fish. In my lifetime, I have swallowed a whole lot of things hook, line, and sinker. This dream came before I entered my season of doubting, but that’s what I realized during that dark night. And I was tangled up in the knots of a lot of religion’s dogma and doctrines that no longer made any sense to me.
One of my favorite nuns at the Cenacle commented in class one day: “One of the things the Church needs to ask forgiveness for is not allowing the questions.” Amen! How the heck does anyone grow to adulthood without asking questions?
It seems that human beings were created, or are programmed, with what might be referred to as a binary operating system (Cynthia Bourgeault). And it works great for most of life. It’s what allows us to sort into categories, organize, define, and prove. But it doesn’t work well for all of life, especially the inner experiences of life. And I think that’s where some of us get all tangled up—we want proof of an experience. We want to define Something indefinable.
A couple of years ago, I realized that the doctrinal view of Trinity that I had always accepted seemed to small for what I had experienced, so I took the liberty of coming up with my own expanded view of trinity: God Beyond, God Beside, and God Within.
God Beyond – what the Buddhist describe as “nothingness”, or “no-thingness”. God before we humans defined “Him” as the old white man in the sky that moves creation around like a puppeteer. God before Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God before the Big Bang. God before Adam/Eve, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
My experience of God Beyond is like the Energy that bursts open a seed bringing it to life and causing it to grow, the cosmic Energy that flows throughout all creation, flowing in, out, around and through all things, making us all one. It’s what we live, move, and have our being in. Another friend pictured it as a wave and an ocean—the ocean can exist without the wave, but the wave cannot exist without the ocean. The ocean gives life to the wave, and the wave is an experience of the ocean. It’s the nebulous, indefinable, beyond all knowing God. Paul Smith, in his book,
Integral Christianity, calls it the Infinite Face of God. This is the God my brain loves to zzzzzzt out to, as I ponder and reflect on Infinite God.
God Beside (or the Intimate Face of God) is the God most of us have experienced as Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Community—it’s the God I was introduced to about the age of 3. God Beside for me most clearly goes by the name of Jesus. This God is the one I talk to, walk with—it’s my Friend and Confident, my Companion. Most recently I’ve experienced this God often in the faces of members of my communities – God defined with a face, a voice, a word, and a gift. With this God, I am never alone.
God Within (or Smith’s Inner Face of God) is I suspect the God that a lot of Christians find almost blasphemous. It’s that Divine Spark within each of us—our Essence made in the image and likeness of God—it’s the Buddhist “Namaste”. I am the Light of the world, the Salt of the earth. I am the reflection of God—at my deepest core, I always have been and always will be. It’s God that speaks with my voice, and even shows up sometimes in my paintings, no matter how hard I try not to paint her there. Perhaps she’s the one I need to spend time getting to know, because for most of my life, I thought I was rotten at the core—a dung heap, sinful by my very nature. But my experience of God has taught me that I am beautiful and holy in spite of my propensity to appear different. I’m the acorn pretending to be an oak tree. Or as Meister Eckhart pointed out, “the apple seed producing an apple; a God seed growing into the fullness of God. Peter tells me that I have the Divine Seed in me, and that I partake of the Divine Nature. Paul Smith calls it “baby divinity”. That’s pretty heady stuff for a mere human to take in, but take it in, I believe we must.
So, here I am again, thinking about my “skeptic” friend—grateful for her skepticism, and even grateful for my own. That’s part of our evolutionary call. We are all spiritual beings on a human journey, and our call is to be transformed. How can we fulfill our calling if we refuse to question, if we swallow everything hook, line, and sinker, if we never live our lives beyond the Answer Man.
You know, I still haven’t proved God, but I can invite you into an experience of all that is Love, all that is Beautiful, and all that is Holy. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Mmmm….very, very good.
