Defining God, continued

Hi Reader,

I’ve had a lot going on the past week, and I’ve spent a lot of mental cycles ruminating on some of those things. You probably know me well enough to know this is something I tend to do.

Sometimes rumination isn’t a problem, and sometimes the impetus behind that rumination is a feeling that something is wrong. That if I can just figure it out, I’ll be able to fix it.

A year ago that would’ve driven me up a wall, but I’ve learned something: there’s nothing wrong with the feeling that something is wrong. I can be with it. Sometimes it stops me, and sometimes it doesn’t. I go through cycles.

I occasionally hear people say I’m beating myself up when I express that it feels like there’s something wrong. I might be, to some extent, in some cases. And, there’s nuance there; I don’t want to shy away from saying that it feels like something is wrong, because if I can’t say it, or look at it, I can’t be with it.

So that’s what I really wanted to write to you about when I sat down to write today. And then there’s the thing I promised you last week:

So I had that ridiculous early morning thought about how we (whoever “we” is) define God.

And then I remembered this experience from high school. I was supposed to write an essay, and I just got fed up with how it seemed so pointless. So I just let myself off the leash and wrote something ridiculous. I vividly remember this experience of giving myself over completely to my inner vocab nerd, and just started writing sentences made up of every five-dollar word I could dredge up from the depths of my brain. I thought I was writing nonsense. I was trying to write nonsense. But at least it sounded pretty.

The next thing I remember is my teacher, Mr. Frank, talking to me, holding the essay in his hands. I thought he would be angry. He wasn’t. I thought he would be confused by this unintelligible thing I’d written. He wasn’t. It’s not that he liked it, exactly, but he seemed to be treating it seriously (something I had definitely not done). Now I was the one who was confused. Could I have accidentally written something comprehensible? Was my grasp of vocabulary better than I realized? Was he just being nice?

Writing this now, another possibility occurs to me, which is that maybe he picked up on my jadedness and opted to respond with honey instead of vinegar.

Whatever the explanation, high-school-me’s takeaway was that I had discovered a kind of superpower. I could actually wield language in this unusually fancy—or fanciful, at least—way. And that got down so deep into me that I even do it first thing in the morning, before I’m fully awake.

As a reminder, my thought went 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.”

I wonder now how much of this kind of writing and thinking I do without even realizing it. Like, how much obfuscation am I putting in your path? And what word could I use instead of obfuscation?

What’s funny to me now is coming to the realization that, for all the mountains of words I might write in an attempt to get clear on something, when it comes down to actual being (or beingness, maybe, to make it clear that’s a noun and not a verb), everything is pretty dead simple. Whatever complexity there might be takes care of itself. When I glance out my window, for example, everything is there. It’s all working just fine, the trees and grass and birds and fences and buildings and sunlight and shadows and wind. Not a single malfunction or confusion or breakdown. And, it would take me lifetimes to figure out what all of it’s doing and describe it in language, no matter how florid. But reality just does it all in the blink of an eye with no apparent effort.

And, in a way, so am I. And so are you. For all the effort I put into writing these words to you, there’s a hidden mountain of effort I’m not even aware of. My heart beats, my blood pumps, my lungs breathe and exchange oxygen with the carbon dioxide in the red blood cells passing by. My stomach processes breakfast while my fingers tap the keys and I don’t give either thing a second’s thought. Even thinking is to a large extent unconscious. I’m not the one orchestrating trillions of neurons to fire in intricate combination to generate the ideas in this sentence. On balance, I’m a tiny background figure in everything that’s happening to get these words to you.

The rest of it is the purview of (who else but) the one I mentioned in my last email, and in this one’s subject line: God, or reality, or the Tao or the universe or whatever you want to call it. It’s the astonishing fact that everything works, all the time, without interruption. That even things that appear to be mistakes and failures and breakdowns are miraculously transformed into more of what works.

I can throw all the five-dollar words I want at it (and, trust me, I will continue to do so), but I’ll never even get close to the truth. All I will ever be able to offer is paltry commentary on this amazing existence.