My first blog post is about God I guess

On North Stars and the God confusion

I envy the profoundly and mystically religious. Not the church-goers, though the ritual of weekly pep talks and shared coffee always seemed to me something we blundered in failing to carry forward into secular society. But the mental motions of faith, surrender, and devotion that cultivate in privacy and ring every overtone of a wise person are things I can’t help but revere. The wisdom in holding principles rooted in that which is larger than the self, is larger than all people and society, and is capable of transcending our time and culture, seems essential to humanness and largely culturally lost where I am. Perhaps it simply feels lonely rooting principles in something as small and capricious as a self, but I also don’t think by our nature we are well-positioned for this; we have navigated by the North Star for a reason. More local is more dynamic—more stimulating, more growth-inducing—more distant is the more steady, more capable of true guidance, more resilient to the inevitable localized misdirections and disorientations of living. Of course humanity places ultimate faith in God. Trying to place it in anything else is navigating by any other star.

I don’t have a God, and I never have had one before. As much as I sometimes envy those that do, I ultimately cannot hear any sermonizing about its nature without hearing something that feels irreconcilable with my access to truth. I would be trading my self to build a relationship with any religion I have encountered, and much like in love, to trade in my self for a relationship is to preclude its true possibility. At best we can achieve a simulation that over time will erode both our self and our ability to know God, or love, or whatever it may be.

Being habitually institutionally-minded, it’s easy for me to forget that I don’t need a religion to build a relationship to God, though part of my barrier is that I cannot conceive of God as anything conveniently analogous to humans or anything else my brain has access to in its debilitating dependence on metaphor from the body. I cannot imagine a colour I have never seen. I have always thought God is none of my business.

But lately I read mystical types, spiritual diaries of saints and whatnot, because there’s a humility and a privacy, there’s a conversation going on that feels honest. I read with curious admiration as they describe the divinity they’ve encountered in giving all of themselves to God. Ecstatic devotion, transcendent surrender. Something I, having no God, would hit pavement for.

Anyway so usually I read these things and end up like this

… believing that it seems like an all-or-nothing task, that a half-measure would be an offensive simulation, a half-measure could only summon a half-God. The nature of all of this seems dependent to me in its Bronnerian all-oneness, that it cannot be known in parts.

But it occurred to me today that if I were to devote my entire being to someone I had never spoken to, it might look more like a first date than a wedding, and if I were to devote my entire being to a new instrument it would probably look like learning a single long tone.

I know what I mean when I say God and God is not a guy, not a sky guy, not an entity, not even a nature, but there is something (for lack of a better word) post-conceptual in the overtones and in the mysteries, in the complexities of a miraculously fickle self, in the warmth of sentience when all other thought and feeling goes to rest. Perhaps the closest available pattern is a song. The least sensible thing I could imagine is to seize belief conveniently at the limit of knowable sense. A recent development for me is that I think God, like a musica universalis, can be listened to and spoken to as all things can, and I am warming up to the idea that a transient anthropomorphosis is acceptable. Were my kidney cells to imagine me as a kidney cell in order to exercise trying to know me I would be honoured.

So this week I will sit awkwardly across the table from God. I will show God my favourite bar. I will talk about the weather.

Have a nice day.