"Who is this God person anyway?"

‘God’ – as in ‘Do you believe in God?’-  is a hard worked little word, and can be taken to mean many different things.

I mostly use it in this blog to refer to an unseen sacred numinous principle, an ultimate reality; not a being, and certainly not possessed of any qualities that we could imagine. But I’m aware that I do also use the word to refer to the aspect of this numinous principle to which I pray. (For more on this see the post 'Full Circle - Thou, It, I, Thou')

Karen Armstrong, (whose book ‘The Case for God’ should be given free by the Government to everybody attaining the age of 35, and anybody younger who asks for it,) maintains that in earliest times many humans were well aware that no ‘being’ could be responsible for all they experienced, but worshipped and respected ‘Being’:  “a fundamental energy that supports and animates everything that exists…. You could not see, touch or hear it but could only watch it at work in the people, objects and natural forces around you.” Whatever this was, it was impersonal and transcendent.

Perhaps this is why the natural forces thus animated were themselves anthropomorphised as gods and goddesses in many societies, for example: Agni, the god of fire, Apollo the sun god. I used the term ‘gods’ in this way in my post ‘Honouring the Gods‘, and modern psychotherapy makes much use of these as a way of identifying the unconscious driving and pulling forces within human nature. Buddhism, which is unconcerned as to whether there is or isn’t an unseen sacred numinous principle – Buddhism is an agnostic religion- nevertheless makes reference to the ‘realm of the gods’. These gods are powerful superhumans, enjoying a life of luxury, rather like most the Greek gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus. Like them, they can interfere in the life of ordinary people but, also like the Greek gods and many other pantheons of gods, they are neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

When I was taught Christianity, I was taught that those who worshipped pantheons of gods, or one in particular of a pantheon of gods (Zeus, for example) had got it wrong, and that only monotheism was right. However, one couldn’t help noticing, as one made further investigations into this, just how like Zeus or any other ‘sky god’ or ‘high god’ the Christian God seemed to be. 

Unlike ours, many societies did not (and do not) have a problem worshipping a pantheon of gods, while being absolutely clear that these gods do not represent ultimate reality. To quote Karen Armstrong again “There was no ontological gulf separating these gods from the rest of the cosmos; everything had emerged from the same sacred stuff.” 

I should say here that I do think that Christianity in this country, the UK, tends towards fundamentalism (inclined towards a literal reading of the bible). I remember the outcry when an Archbishop expressed the view that it really didn't matter whether Jesus was born to a virgin or not. However, I consider myself a Christian, because I use Christian symbolism and myths in my meditations and prayers, and I'm completely happy to pay my dues to any number of  'archangels' representing various principles such as 'truth', 'compassion', 'courage' and 'serenity' without ever getting these confused with the sacred unseen numinous principle; the ultimate reality. I think that fundamentalists have completely failed to grasp the actual point of religion.

Millenia ago it seems the "Upanishadic sages [in India] were among the first to articulate another of the universal principles of religion....The truths of religion are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed and self-preoccupation that, perhaps inevitably, are engrained in our thoughts and behaviour but are also the source of so much pain." (Armstrong.)

I would be very interested to know to what others reading this are referring when they use the word ‘God’.

Honouring the gods

Life, like a pantheon of jealous gods (take the ancient Greek or Roman Gods for example) makes many and conflicting demands upon us. To deal with these conflicting demands it helps to view these gods and goddesses as representative of the deep urges embedded within us.   

According to certain psychotherapies these urges, mostly unconscious, are an integral part of our soul. Many of us feel a void at the middle of our existence because we have become disconnected from, or 'educated' away from, these urges. Others feel torn by conflicting urges.

Writers like Thomas Moore (see his book ‘Care of the Soul’) concentrate on what these dilemmas can tell us about what our soul needs. (Transpersonal psychotherapies are particularly concerned with this.  Therapies like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, NLP and hypnotherapy, while extremely effective and useful in their place, are more concerned with alleviating symptoms.) So rather than see envy, for example, as a feeling that we have to overcome and conquer, it would be better if we stepped back for a while and consider what our soul is attempting to resolve, or gain, or draw our attention to.  To begin with, such a step allows us to detach from the envy. Secondly, it can remove the guilt and denial that stops us from exploring these feelings in the depth needed. When we are attached to something we see as unpleasant, unworthy, or shameful, we tend to deny it, which precludes working constructively with it.

Envy, like all emotions, exists for a reason. All emotions, even those deemed unworthy or dangerous, or which are banned by one of the ten commandments,  are indicators that we are paying insufficient attention to something of importance.

If we accept from the start that our emotional and spiritual lives are, by nature, contradictory and paradoxical, we are in a better position to deal with the problems that this throws up. This goes further.

We may think, for example, that all we need is a healthy relationship, somebody to love us who treats us properly, and consider ourselves bereft and incomplete, without this. But, deep down, when we reflect, we know that to love, to experience security in the affections of some-one we love in return, is to risk. Who knows what life might throw up to tear us apart? Or what we might be called upon to sacrifice for this relationship? When I was a counsellor, I had many clients who declared that all they wanted was to love and be loved. But further investigation revealed that that their feelings were actually very ambiguous. This is understandable. Having discovered the conflict, those clients could then go on to make a conscious decision about how much they were prepared to risk, and the price they were prepared, or not, to pay.

And it goes further.

Our soul needs to find some way to hold and honour all the paradoxes within us. Our soul knows that to love is to risk. It wants to expand and hold within itself the dichotomies and the paradoxes. Take for example the demands of two very powerful gods; between Apollo – rational, sober, constructive, light, male, yang; and Dionysus – intuitive, intoxicated, destructive, dark, female, yin.  Consider also that our soul needs to honour both Aphrodite - sexual, sensuous - and Artemis - pure, asexual.  If we repress one, if we ignore it and do not give it the attention and/or the respect it demands, and do not examine it as a signpost to an area of emotional or spiritual inattention/lack of respect, it may well destroy us.  Greek, Roman, Viking and many other mythologies abound in stories of how destructive the gods and goddesses can be if they’re not receiving the attention or respect they think is their due.

 “'In every corner of my soul stands an altar to a different god.” (Fernando Pessoa). If we can accept this, that with every impulse that we have there will be a conflicting impulse, and that in every impulse there is the seed of its own opposite (see the yin/yang symbol,) perhaps of its own destruction, we would not feel so short-changed by our lives. Indeed, we could use that very fact to enrich our immortal souls.