In Search of a Greater God, II

In Search of a Greater God, II
Míceál Ledwith.

Whenever we move house the most obvious thing that strikes almost everyone is the amount of "stuff" we have accumulated since our last move. For any variety of reasons, ranging from sheer sentiment to "it might come in useful some day," it piles up, filling every closet, storage room and drawer, leaving very little room for the stuff we do use. It seems to be very difficult to face the fact that we are very unlikely to ever use any of this stuff again.

At least when we move house there's always the garbage dump, landfill or recycling station to rescue us, and the sense of lightness and freedom we have as we drive out of the dump having deposited a huge load of garbage must surely rank up there somewhere on the level of the most profound experiences of conversion and salvation.

The story is actually not much different in our search for a Greater God! In the first part of this article last month I pointed out how the various images of God we collect on our life's journey accumulate in our minds and memories. Our earliest images of God are understandably linked to the way in which we related to our parents in childhood. If fear, and worse, guilt about that fear, figured in those relationships, then the way in which we relate to God in religions is very likely to hinge on fear and guilt and its assuaging, as the central religious imperative for us. The feeling that a religious service based on fear and guilt and its remission gives is very akin to the sense of lightness and relief when we drive away from the garbage dump. I pointed out last month that people who are morbidly sensitive can have their lives made into a living Hell if they have been persuaded that our all too fickle and malleable conscience is actually the voice of God, instead of being what it really is; the voice of our upbringing.

So in many ways the sets of images of God that we have collected lies uncomfortably close to the major task that confronts us as we move house. But in this case we have been conditioned to believe that to jettison some of these images is perilous, and perhaps gravely wrong. There's no obvious equivalent in the spiritual realm of a convenient dump where the once treasured old garments and possessions of the world of spirit and mind can be dumped definitely and decisively. The clearing up of the labyrinths of the mind is a slow, painful and tedious process, which usually hinges on dumping it all on Christ Jesus.

The collection of images that form how we thing of God range from seeing God a some sort of parental hangover, or a nagging voice of conscience that prods us very reluctantly onto the uncomfortable path of virtue. We saw in Nazi Germany how perverting the moral sense could be brought to a fine art by propaganda, so that a loyal Nazi could very easily feel pangs of conscience if he did not hate the Jews.

If we believe that the character of Christ Jesus is an accurate portrayal in time and space of the character of a God who lives utterly outside both, then we really need to pick our steps carefully. Most of what we hold dear in religion comes only remotely from dogmas and official teachings: the main vehicles that hand on the ways of traditional religious thought and catch the imagination and the memory when they are at their most fresh, are rituals, customs, the associations of music, the wonderful atmosphere of Christmas, the cribs, the angels, the gifts and the signing of hymns. These are the agencies, far more than any doctrine, that has always shaped the views of the man and woman in the street about religion.

But if the character of Jesus is supposed to depict the character of an eternal God incarnate, then as J.D. Phillips pointed out long ago, we can only regret in the deepest terms the inadequacies of the English language in which there are so few words that rhyme with "child." If there were more words we might have been spared that awful couplet that was drummed into so many millions down the centuries in their childhood to rest in those backroom closets of the mind:

"Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look on me a little child."

"Meek and Mild" what a travesty to apply those terms to an individual of such power of personal character that he could walk through a bloodthirsty mob intent in stoning him for blasphemy? Or who did not hesitate to level the ultimate insults at both King Herod and the entrenched religious leaders of the day. Herod he called "a fox." Death would have been a small punishment for that. The Pharisees got the worst insult "a brood of vipers," not easy to swallow for the first century serpent-hating Jews. Meek and mild? Is this what caused his name to live for twenty centuries in the hearts of all those who cherish the divine within? I don't think so.

And if Jesus is supposed to reveal a God who is outside time and space, within the time and the space of a human incarnation, do we not then reduce God to a meek and mild state of embarrassing sweet tenderness, which completely undermines the central and constant assertion of what he was when it is said that God is Love? That form of love is as far from sentiment and emotion as could be imagined, and strikes no answering chord in the hearts of human beings today who want more, much more.

So maybe one fine day we will realize that we are going to make no meaningful progress of any kind in our spiritual journey unless as a basic prerequisite we realize that our pictures of God are a set of images we accumulated on the various stages of our journey through life.

All to infrequently we come to realize that just as when we move house, what is old, tired and long unused should go to the garbage dump and that includes God as the parental hangover, the supervising cosmic policeman, the old man in the clouds recording all our faults and failings, and few successes.

We often project on to others, blame, and a plethora of other emotions that actually tell us more about ourselves that the people we revile.

Ultimately we have to recognize that we have reduced ourselves in the religious traditions to picturing God as a magnified version of ourselves. If this has happened then our search for a Greater God has stopped, and in all our glorious pageantry, symbolism and ritual all we are doing is worshipping ourselves.

Miceal Ledwith
February 2008

Míceál Ledwith appeared in the hit move "What the Bleep Do we know" and its sequel "Down the Rabbit Hole." He is co-author of "The Orb Project" published by Simon and Schuster/Beyond Words in November 2007, and has published three DVDs so far in his projected series, "The Hamburger Universe," 2005, "How Jesus Became a Christ," 2006, and "Orbs: Clues to a More Exciting Universe," February 2008. He has lectured extensively all over North and South America, South Africa, Australia, Europe and Japan. He is a long-time member of the Ramtha School of Ancient Wisdom

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