Defining God

Hi Reader,

I wasn’t very happy with last week’s email. This new weekly cadence is challenging, and I didn’t spend as much time as I’d like polishing. Still, it seems to have provoked some things in some people (including me, apparently). So it wasn’t a failure, even if it wasn’t what I was aiming for. Let’s see if we can tease a little more value out of this with a specific example of one of those sleepy thoughts I did pursue.

I woke up one morning last week with a great one. It had to do with the way the definition of God has changed over time (the fact that my sleepy thoughts often seem to be about God is probably something worth looking at). This change has been going on a long time but the most recent development I can point to is moving from the idea of God as a superpowerful dude in the sky to God as the substance and animating force beneath and throughout fundamental reality.

Side note: the trick with languaging these thoughts is that my language-using brain isn’t fully online when I’m half-awake, so when I talk about these things there’s really two different things going on: me recalling what I thought, and me trying to write what I thought. Even when I don’t think in words, I can only write in words. So it’s murky. Like the muck from last email (which was the part of that email I was most satisfied with). That’s what we have here: muck. Let’s rinse it off with more words (what else?).

In simpler language, I think I’m referring to the difference between God-as-apart and God-as-a-part(-and-the-whole).

But—and this is the muck—this morning’s thought wasn’t “in simpler words.” Rather, it was something like: “is all we’re doing coming up with definitions of God that are simultaneously more esoteric and more concrete? Like our idea of God keeps getting refined but in opposite directions. It’s stretching. Our idea of God is becoming both less comprehensible and more immanent.”

What kind of weirdo’s brain comes up with this stuff right after waking up?

Anyway, this is where it gets interesting (and maybe not actually about this thought I had) because right after I had the thought, a memory from high school came back to me.

But I’m saving that part of the story for next week, due to the aforementioned time challenge!