When I was a child it was common in the UK, where I live, to have Christian assemblies at school each morning, with the singing of hymns, and the saying of prayers. I also went to Sunday School and then Church. So I was very familiar from the start with the practice of addressing God in the second person, albeit in archaic language, using Thou and Thine, instead of You and Yours. The God I grew up with was personal, to everyone. The word for that, I know now, is immanent.
Then of course I became a teenager, questioning and querying, and came across the point of view that whatever 'being' had created such a vast universe, in which our planet is a tiny, tiny speck, there was absolutely no reason why that entity should be the least bit interested in us, let alone in whether we allowed women to be priests, or banned people from having sex with some-one of the same gender. God became something it would be daft to address as 'you'. God, if it existed, was 'it', in the third person. For a while for me God became a remote and transcendent entity, which left the question, debated by humanists, agnostics and aetheists for centuries, how do we decide what 'good' or a moral life is, if God has nothing to do with it? The universe also suddenly seemed a very cold and meaningless place. Reading the French existentialists (one of them in the actual French, thanks to it being in my A-level French curriculum.) intensified that feeling. Not really a good thing if you're prone to depression anyway.
But then I came across mysticism and panentheism (the latter being the belief that God is everything in the material universe, and a lot more besides.) This made it clear why so many mystics down the ages have insisted that they were God - some being put to death for it. I've already gone into more detail about this in a post called 'A Spiritual Cosmology'. As I say there, God is the origin of everything, including you and me. We are made out of God. You and I are God. So God moved into the 'first person' grammatically
As regards getting our moral code from God, if we are God, then can we decide our own morality? (Is this where Aleister Crowley's suggestion "Do whatever thou wilt" comes from?) In our post-modern society, where all values are equal, we are having a particular problem with this one.
Also referring to God in the first person made praying difficult. In praying to God I was praying to myself, which felt extremely wrong. So I prayed to my 'Higher Self',- my more authentic self, beyond my everyday self which is mired in my ego, and pushed around by my id and superego. There was quite a debate on this in the Integral community, a lot of whose members are Buddhists so, being agnostic -because it's unimportant whether there is a God or not- don't have this problem (though a lot of them pray to Buddha, and other Buddhist saints.) You can see part of this debate at http://integrallife.com/member/david-sunfellow/blog/2nd-person-god-active-force-our-lives though it helps if you know something about 'spiral dynamics' to understand the significance of the colours being referred to. See http://integrallife.com/integral-post/overview-integral-theory
Basically the argument for a 'second person view of God' i.e. referring to God as 'you', is that while we are centred in our egos, and most of us are most of the time, it is more appropriate to envisage God as 'other', though it's not actually true. This helps to keep the ego in check, which paradoxically helps us to remember who we really are.(God.)
This doesn't solve the morality problem immediately, but down the millenia mystics have reassured us time and time again that one can define as good anything that brings us closer to 'God', i.e. to the spiritual and Divine aspects of existence, and experience suggests that the golden rule is the absolute foundation of that.
While talking about prayer, I remember reading somewhere that many prayers don't 'get heard' anyway, because angels are the relay transmitters, boosting the signal so that prayers can reach the spiritual and Divine worlds (which of course is the spiritual and Divine aspects of ourselves) from which they can be answered. Angels originate and exist in the psychological/mental zone (and archangels originate and exist in the spiritual realm) so they simply don't hear prayers that are purely about materialistic things!!! I am intrigued by this concept, seemingly made up of a mixture of metaphor, allegory and metaphysics- and am still pondering its inner meaning; but basically the mystics are agreed that you don't need to pray for anything because God already knows what you need. I've said a bit more about this in my post on this blog entitled 'Daily Practice'.
I've also decided to continue referring to God as 'Thou' in my prayers, as a way of acknowledging that the 'second person' to whom I am praying is not any old person.
I'd be intrigued to know others' experience of these first person, second person, and third person views of God.
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