Names

“Out of all the words I have heard in my time, ‘God’ is in my view the one most grievously abused by humans; the one most deserving of a careful unsaying.” (David James Duncan, God Laughs and Plays)

I met Eva Soltes in Joshua Tree, California. “How do you define ‘God’?” she asked—echoing a question I hear often and surfacing one of the most difficult challenges of my journey.

“I don’t usually talk about ‘God,’” said Eva. “I can relate to ‘Creativity,’ to ‘Creation,’ to ‘Life,’ to ‘Life force,’ and to ‘Nature.’ It’s all the things we’re born into and surround us in the world.”

Eva brings to light the intrinsically futile attempt to capture a reality that transcends words. “The word God,” writes Eckart Tolle in The Power of Now, “has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something… Neither God nor Being or any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word… So the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience that toward which it points.”

Language is limited; God is not. That’s hard for us to reconcile—perhaps because we’re not entirely comfortable with mystery. So we continue struggling for ways to adequately convey our experience of the Divine.

Duncan calls God the “fathomless but beautiful Mystery Who creates the universe in you and me, and sustains it and us every instant, and always shall.” Martin Buber comes at it from a slightly different angle. “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly,” he writes, “God is the electricity that surges between them.”

If forced to answer Eva’s question today, I’d describe God as an essence beyond knowing that is the source of all being, manifest in countless ways and forms. But here’s the rub. The path to God—by whatever name you use—isn’t intellectual. It’s experiential. We don’t come to understanding through our minds, but rather through our hearts and senses. So a better question might be, “What does God feel like?” Some words used to characterize the feeling of God by people with whom I’ve spoken: peace, tranquility, oneness, connection, comfort, joy, love, and resonance.

“In the end,” writes Krista Tippett in Speaking of Faith, “the reality of God is most powerfully expressed not in ideas and proclamations but in presence.”

If one were to accept that conclusion, the key to finding God would be to simply remain present and open. Unfortunately, in a world so full of distraction, that takes some doing!

(Sedona, AZ)