A Letter From God by the Rev. Kenneth Reeves
Reading:
"1 hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that whereso'er I go
Others will punctually come for ever and ever."
-- Walt WhitmanSermon:
I found this letter dropped in the street. It reads:
Hi everyone. How's everything going? I know, I know, but I'm always asking. It's my way of communicating with you: curious, fascinated, ready to listen.
How about this spring? I love spring. Everything starts opening again. Trees bud, creeks flow, and people open to nature and breathe and are reborn. All winter I nurse the slow pulse of life. In spring, when the pulse quickens, I dance.
Well, where to begin? The past few decades have seen lots of changes in me. For one thing, I'm beginning to symbolize the oneness and interdependence of life. It's a new wrinkle on being the source of life. I've always been the source, but people are now finding this source in the connections.
You're beginning to see the world as an interdependent web of connections, and that along these connections life flows. From all your infinite relations, you receive life. It comes through you, like the air you breathe, and you pass it on. From water, trees, animals, each other, everything you receive life.
You can pretend not to receive from your relations; you attempt to separate from the water, the trees, each other, but as you break your connections to them, you separate yourself from all the life coming to you and extending beyond you. And the ultimate end of separating from life is death. Your connections are such a source of life that you find me in them, and rightfully so. I am the source because I connect you to all, and through these connections you come alive and know that you belong to this infinitely connected cosmos.
I like this new sense of connections, but being involved in oneness is old hat to me. Mystics and primal people have always seen me as such. As one Hindu put it, in the presence of God one obtains "all-penetrating insight that enables one to become conscious of the absolute oneness of the universe." (Ashvagosha)
What's new is bringing that oneness to other people: environmentalists, theologians, physicists; I love boggling the minds of physicists. They have realized the universe is not a machine composed of separate cogs, but a network of interacting energies. One wrote about me saying, "The world appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole." (Werner Heisenburg) Connections of different kinds, that's me.
Being the oneness brings back memories of when people were just beginning to be people, half a million years ago or so. It seems like just yesterday I watched you walk upright and say your first words. When you began to speak, you became aware of yourselves, and, with self-awareness, you found yourselves separate from the earth and the water and the animals. Lonesome for a dimly remembered preconscious oneness, you began to think of me.
You told stories of a time when all was a formless oneness; how all was water -- the sea -- and how there then emerged out of the oneness: earth, trees, animals; each separate, distinct; and how you were one of the many distinct things. To reconnect with water, earth, trees, and animals, you remembered in stories when all was one, and thought of me.
Of course, you credited me with creation -- a flattering thought, but I was never into the hard sciences or engineering. I studied hard but only got a B- in organic chemistry. Just a joke; I knew it all, but still, I am more interested in the intangibles. I am the source of life because I am the connections, and in those connections, life and meaning occur. I am not what makes creation, but I am the something that makes creation meaningful.
So it feels like I have come full circle with people seeing me again as the oneness of things. I like consistency, but I also like change. Like I told the process theologians: Everything changes, including God. Imagine, the ultimate ground of being, the place where everything rests, the eternal, the reliable, God, changing. But I change to become more present, more reliable.
I'm a pragmatist. I do what works. I'm ready to take any form that can best provide my love and support to a time period. I also custom make myself for each person on the planet. Each one of you knows me in a different way.
Over the eons I've made lots of changes and tried lots of forms. I remember being the Great Goddess, warm and soft as a mother. As Demeter I walked the earth urging crops to grow. As Dionysus I drank wine, and as Zeus I philandered. But the Hebrews put an end to that. They made me moral. They had me straighten up and get religion. They also made me one being, a male, a father, and placed me up in the sky.
As God of the Hebrews I was judgmental and mixed up. On one hand I was calling the Hebrew prophets to advocate for justice and peace. On the other, I was the Hebrew god of war and helped them commit violence.
Not just the Hebrews, but lots of aggressive people saw me as male and co-opted me to assist their wars. I shudder to think of all the killing in my name. It's like having a job you know is unethical, but have trouble quitting. Those warriors gave me lots of power, and power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I had absolute power. I was dangerous.
After being a war god I felt grief stricken and confused, so I took a new form, became human, to see how it feels to have a body and to hurt. I let myself be punished to atone for the violence in my name and to show people that I was on their side in their pain, that I did not want to hurt but to love. I wanted people to relax around me again. I wanted to reconcile you to me.
Some people understood, but many kept seeing me as punitive and as sending people to hell. What a notion: that the ultimate source of meaning and life would create a torture chamber for people who did not believe in an ultimate source of meaning and life who tortured people.
I told the Universalists, please, tell the people I love you all. With every breath I say, love and life. It hurts when you think of me and think, judge and death.
To bring myself yet closer to people and to heal our relationship further, I'm making another full circle: reminding you of when I was the Goddess. Taking the form of a man and letting myself be punished for my violence did not do enough to help people see me as pacific and loving, and still left the feminine under-represented by the divine, so the beard is off, the hips on.
I remind people of when I was feminine, nurturing and warm 10,000 years ago, and they celebrate my loving quality. Women in particular sense their feminine spirit valued and feel belonging and importance.
In truth, I have qualities you call masculine and others you call feminine, and I'm a genderless transcendent spirit, but if being female brings women closer to me, I'll be female.
I'll take whatever form attracts you to what is ultimately meaningful and liberating in your lives. When you move toward that source, your hearts are filled, your needs met. You are whole and at peace. You know you are loved. You know you belong.
I like taking the form of a woman, but I am also breaking out of forms all together. I am breaking out of being a being. I'm more mysterious than the picture of me on the Sistine Chapel or even than the goddess sculptures of me, though I don't mind looking that good.
I told the Jewish theologian, Martin Buber, that I'm not a being, that I can't be defined, but that I can be found in connection. With my grace people connect, they transcend the borders between each other. They say, "you," to each other with their whole beings. In that moment they do not teach each other, use each other, change each other, impress each other, earn money from each other, compete with each other. They do nothing with each other except encounter each other. They stand with nothing happening but contact between their two beings, and I am there like an eternal telephone operator. I love bringing people together.
In that moment of encounter, with their hardly being aware of it, people experience actual life. The tempests of causality cower at their heels and the whirl of doom congeals. I helped Buber think of that line, and am still proud of it. Though I am not a being any more, I am serving a divine function: providing grace that brings people together.
So I am found in nature's connections, I'm a oneness, a human, female, and an eternal telephone operator. I'll take whatever form shows you how close I am to you. I am within each of you as a vitalizing spirit, as a healer and support, as that which is most trustworthy, as your links to everything. All you have to do is open to me, and you'll realize I'm there.
I want closeness, but not to be idolized. How do I make myself a warm personal inviting form without being limited by that form? When people worship my form, my shell, as if that were the be all to end all, I want to say, I'm more mysterious than that.
This reminds me of the joke from 3,000 years ago: "The problem with Yahweh is that he thinks he's God." Yahweh was just a form; the hand that points to the moon; the gateway to the real me that transcends form and word and thought. Paul Tillich understood when he said, "God is not God." My form is not me, just a way for human minds to wrap around the mystery of me.
But when I eschew forms, and someone like Tillich says that I am "the ground of being" or humanity's "ultimate concern," people complain that I'm cool and aloof. You don't feel warmed by an abstract ground of being or ultimate concern. I care about you and don't want to appear cool and aloof, but I don't want you stuck on a nice form and a pretty face. I want you to find the real ineffable me.
So I become the source of life found in connections. I become a man. I become female. I catalyze human encounters. Can these forms and ideas beckon you beyond them to experience the mystery? I am busy beckoning.
I have cut back on some chores, though. I used to manipulate events in the world. That was too much work and never really yielded the spiritual results I had hoped. Trying to take care of people's needs by giving them every little thing they wanted, made me into a sort of cosmic bellhop. I was co-dependent. Now I let the world run on its own.
Though I don't make the world right for everyone, when the world wounds, I heal them. Remember in your darkest hour beginning to see a ray of light? That was me. And furthermore, I give people strength and courage for them to heal the world. I stand as ally to individuals healing and to world healers.
And I try to heal the relationship between myself and you. Memories of my old violence and judgment linger, so I heal our relationship by taking new forms or offering new ideas about who I am: the oneness, a man, female, an eternal telephone operator. And new ideas about me can heal our relationship, but ideas can also hurt.
They hurt when people think they have a wrong idea about me. They then consign themselves to the bottom of a spiritual hierarchy where they imagine me punishing them. I don't want to punish; I want to accept people and heal.
Ideas also hurt my relationship with people when someone thinks they have such a good idea about me that it's better than other people's. They place themselves on top of a spiritual hierarchy. Good ideas about me bring people closer to each other and to me. They do not create something as divisive as a hierarchy. I value everyone equally and infinitely. My cosmos is not a pyramid, but an interdependent web of equals.
A third problem with ideas about me is that they are not me. This is not really a letter from God. It's a letter from an idea about God. I could not write a letter. I could not use words. As the Hindus put it, I am the one from whom all words recoil.
Words create a world of ideas in which each thing is distinct from each other. Start speaking words, and you have defined separate things and created boundaries and categories. But I am the oneness, the formless ocean before the world is created, and oneness has neither boundaries nor categories and as such defies words. When I am defined by a name or an idea, that makes me just one more object in a world of objects. But I am not an object; I transcend objects.
On the other hand, the ultimate can only become actual to people through the concrete; through words, ideas, images, and forms. I hope they work. They do if they heal the relationship between us and bring you to know in your heart how loving I am. I remember your first words. I loved you when you started to walk. And if you knew how much I love you, you could say, yes, to me, and open to me and trust me.
And when you open to me you might sense me in moments where you have no words. In the cool night air, I am whispering to you -- in the infinitude of stars; in the warmth that comes over you in the presence of one you love; in the surprise, a-ha!, of a new insight; in your sense of well-being and peace; in your healing and slow wholeness. You might sense me in the mysterious coming together of your church community. You might hear me in the silence, see me in the darkness, taste me on your palate as you breathe. You might see me in another's face and know me when you love another person. You might see me in your own face in the glass.
You might sense my face turned toward you. My face always turns toward you. There I am smiling at you, curious about you. And when you are lost, you might sense my hand groping to find your face. Your face will be wet with your tears, and I will find you then, and tell you, I love you.
And it's signed with God's name...
The Rev. Kenneth Reeves
May 20, 2001
Unitarian Universalist Community of Lake County
PO Box 1433; Kelseyville, CA 95451 • tel. (707) 587-4243
Email the UUCLC | Join the UUCLC Google Group
www.uuclc.org