Karen Armstrong, in A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Ballantine, 1993), notes that concepts of God have changed over the centuries in response to the social and political needs of the adherents of those three "religions of God," and that they continue to change. In her final chapter, she observes that the idea of a personal God is increasingly unacceptable, and she speculates about what may replace it.

When I began writing and sharing these "Musings" my attention was primarily on my unhappiness with the concept of a personal God. Gradually I shifted the emphasis toward a cosmology that would be scientifically acceptable, and I was able to find, by analogy, some aspects of spirituality in that cosmos. Now I am ready, after restating why I find concepts of a personal God unacceptable, to suggest a fully spiritual alternative cosmology to fit a scientific age.

What's wrong with a personal God?

1. I understand a belief in a personal God to be an expression of a sense of communion with a divine presence, and I honor that experience, but I find an anthropomorphic view of God -- however metaphoric -- to be a very limited view of ultimate reality and one better suited to a pre-scientific era.

2. When belief in the existence and nature of ultimate reality is expressed in terms of a God as a being with human qualities, it suggests to me a God who may choose at any time to set aside the order that sustains our natural world in order to accede to the wishes of individuals or groups who have some favored status with God. Implicit in the belief that God hears and responds to individual prayer requests, decides who will die and when, causes rain to relieve drought, and threatens California with another earthquake, is the assemption that God can be controlled by believing the right things, saying the correct words, or performing the prescribed rites -- that God can be persuaded, as it were, to place certain individuals or groups in some favored status. This view portrays Ultimate Reality as a cosmic bellperson or a compulsive meddler.

3. The identification of God as person or parent is further complicated by the gender issue and by the paucity of good parental models in today's society.

4. A belief in God as person places God out there, close perhaps, but Other. It defines a relationship in which human beings are placed over against an example of perfection, and can only feel diminished and powerless in the comparison. A concept of God as personal Other may fit a doctrine of original sin for which a redemptive human sacrifice is required, but it does not, in my view, support a belief in original blessing. I have come to believe in oneness-wholeness-unity rather than the dualism of God/humanity, divine/human, perfection/sinner, sacred/profane, inner/Other.

Bridge

I believe that I have now settled that issue for myself, and I do not expect to revisit it. I do not believe in a God who can be portrayed in human terms or who acts as an individual consciousness to make judgments or decisions that set aside, for any reason, the natural order. Because that view of a personal God has been such a stumbling block for me, I am attempting to construct (or discover) a cosmology that is no less spiritual but that does not need a personal God as its centerpiece. Paul Tillich and Teilhard De Chardin have offered their formulations, as did Lao Tzu some 2,500 years ago, and now I am in the process of formulating mine. (This is a process that I wish every church would foster.)

Many years ago I heard "God" defined, generically, as that which is "supremely significant and ultimately real." I believe that each of us, in our quest for empowerment, for a Self, needs a frame of reference. We can be grounded, centered, connected only insofar as we have a sense of how the universe works and where we belong within it. For our own health and wholeness, we each need to know what is, for us, supremely significant, ultimately real, and integral to the way the universe works. Whether we refer to that reality as "God" has nothing to do with the degree of spirituality we can experience in the universe.

No religious formulation, no statement of faith, including mine, is factually true. All are metaphor, poetry, analogy, myth -- attempts to put into words and into minds some awareness of an ineffable reality that defies definition. I suggest a concept that acknowledges what we know from modern science but is not limited to what we can see, smell, touch, taste and hear, either personally or through scientific instrumentation.

My Cosmology

1. Energy is the essence of life, the prime characteristic of the universe. Everything that we experience as matter, including ourselves, consists of tiny energized particles moving in space. Matter is illusory.

2. There are certain universals -- forces like gravity and electromagnetism, processes like evolution and photosynthesis -- that are embedded in the nature of the universe, and in us. One may envision the entire universe as being alive with these and other forces and processes that scientists have identified.

3. I envision, additionally, the entire universe energized, virtually humming, with the energy and intelligence of love and its correlates, creativity and healing. These energies may be pictured as existing and moving in the spaces between the particles, along with the other universals. The cells of our bodies, for example, communicate the need for physical healing to one another and activate the healing process from within. (Two M.D.s have just won a Nobel Prize for expanding on that idea.)

4. The mind-body connection is such that we create, or at least affect, our own reality by the ideas that we hold, the beliefs that we affirm. Quantum physics teaches us that there may be no objective reality, that what we observe is always affected by the presence of the observer. It also teaches us to think of reality, not as a structure of building blocks, but as a network of interrelationships. I can envision, then, a connectedness in which my mind is part of universal mind, and my consciousness is part of universal consciousness, as, perhaps, my unconscious is connected with universal archetypes through my participation in the collective unconscious. What I think and who I am -- my being -- is interrelated with all being through what Sam Keen calls "a universal principle of unity." I affect all and all affects me. I am one with all.

5. I may think of myself as a spiritual being learning to become human (rather than a human being trying to become spiritual), and if that image is helpful, then I can see myself as partaking in the totality of divinity, affecting and being affected by all spiritual activity. I become co-creator with all creativity.

6. It may not be necessary to this view of ultimate reality to think of oneself as eternal in some reincarnational sense, but it helps me to think of myself as a soul who appears periodically in earth-school to learn lessons that move me toward a state of development in which I may become a spiritual guide and teacher to those who are open to that guidance. In this view, I find support in the writings of Brian Weiss and Gary Zukav, in the literature on near-death experiences, and in pre-Nicean beliefs of Gnostic Christians.

7. Everything comes to me as a gift (grace) for my learning and development. I need only to open myself to the vast riches that are all around me and within me.

8. The appropriate response to grace is gratitude.

9. The appropriate expression of gratitude is to chop wood and carry water, that is, to find and to express the spiritual in the ordinary, to be grace for others.

10. In my participation in the whole, I share in the wisdom of all. That wisdom within me is accessible through meditation, receptive prayer, dreams, intuition, and other ways of non-cognitive knowing that may be thought of as the voice of the Christ within or the Buddha self. Within me is the wisdom to find abundant life in the Kingdom of God (New Testament), walk in harmony with The Way [Tao Te Ching], find peace in every step [Thich Hnat Hanh], and live in beauty with all that exists [Navajo].

11. There is a gestalt to this that I begin to experience, not as loss of individualism but as an identification with all nature, all life, all humankind, and with those ultimate energies and forces that nurture and sustain and give meaning to life. When I become immersed in the unity of it all, I sense the need to express that oneness with all in art, poetry, music, and dance because the total reality is beauty more than it is theology. It sings in me; I dance it.

12. In all this, I feel kin to those elder brothers and sisters who are examples for me -- Jesus, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, selected saints of all religions and of none, shamans, healers, and you contemporary good people who read this.

13. All of the great religions counsel to look within for wisdom, and within me I find the presence and power of the forces, processes, energy and intelligence that pervade and activate the universe. I also find in here the darker facets of my experience that hinder me from being the authentic Self that I have the potential to be. I can more easily place all humankind in my big story of cosmic possibility that I can cope with my own story and let myself be transformed into the person I could be. Yet the task is not to be perfect, but to be perfectly me, flaws and all. The flow of abundant spiritual life is mine to experience insofar as I become open to it all.

14. Implicit in our connectedness, in our identity with all, is an ethical imperative. It is not enough to find individual spirituality (an oxymoron, I think); my expression of gratitude for the grace that I experience must be played out in an ecological commitment to leaving to those who follow us a planet that is enhanced in its beauty and liveability. The current paradigm of progress and pollution is antithetical to spiritual growth.

Concluding Comment

We stand in a long tradition of personifying the forces that affect us. Whether out of the need to explain mysteries, or to placate and control sources of potential disaster, or to find a recipient for the gratitude that wells up in the heart, or to account for experiences that feel transcendent, humankind has named gods and goddesses. Not all cultures, however, have gone this route. Taoism offers The Way -- a path to be followed -- without a God to create it or to be worshipped along the way. I draw that concept from Taoism; I draw Jesus, as teacher and example, from Christianity; and I draw the meditative practice of mindful awareness from Buddhism. I find great overlapping in the world's religions, and I sense even more than I have yet found. My commitment to Oneness requires a cultural and religious inclusiveness that is an additional source of enrichment.

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What I've been reading lately:

Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (Ballantine, 1993)

Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit. (William Morrow, 1994)

Joan Borysenko, Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism. (Warner, 1993)

Anthony de Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality. (Doubleday, 1992)

Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God. (Bantam, 1994)

Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe. (HarperCollins, 1991)

Gary Zukav, The Seat of the Soul. (Fireside, 1989)