Gathered in Mystery

Dec 14, 2009

Ellsworth, Maine

Leela Sinha

What if there is a god?

What if all the skeptics are off track and all the atheists are wrong, and there is a god, or gods?  What if that god is really a god who listens, a god who responds, a god who hears and is heard?

What kind of god would you have, if you had a god?  What kind would you claim?  Where would you find your god, or gods?   Would you lie with them, sleep with them, eat with them?  Would you argue with them?  Would you have fireside chats?  Where would you find them, or where would they find you?  If there were a god or gods, and if you could choose, what kind would suit you best?

Fiddler On The Roof’s Tevya likes to pace, and shout and shake his fist at the sky; Mary Oliver goes walking; more than one biologist has found god at the end of a microscope; in the movie Contact, Jodi Foster’s character finds something so beautiful it brings her to tears on her way to another universe.  As humans we have been seeking the divine for thousands of years; what we have found has filled volumes, transformed careers, caused the rise and fall of empires.  We all crave contact with the divine.  We all want to be united with that which is precious, special, delightful, holy.  How we understand that divinity varies, and ways to encounter the divine are almost limitless.

In the end it’s much simpler than everything we have built up around us.  Here, we believe in direct access to god or that which is holy—no priest, minister, or saint needs to intercede for us.  We are all we need and have all we need to be in the presence of infinite love and to be infinitely loved.  But none of us are expected to be infinitely loving.  We are human, just human, deeply and intensely loving but with limits of time and place and body and spirit. 

When Tevya paces, wants to know why he’s not rich, why his daughters have chosen unsuitable men, who decided he should have five daughters and no sons, he is arguing into a long line of traditional argument, shouting at the sky like his father and his father before him.  But that’s okay.  His god can take it.  His god is capable of infinite love and infinite patience, of the kind that no human can give.

How, then can all of us receive such love if none of us can provide it?  The too-easy answer is that god gives us that love.  But that answer depends on the existence of a god and that god’s willingness and ability to be that which we are not.  For many of us that’s too much to believe, too much imagining and not enough proof,  too much faith for a faith built on rational thought and transcendent connections of earth and sky.  None of this universe shows intense and regular compassion; none of the world is nice or sweet or giving, not the way humans understand it—none except humans ourselves, and we have our limits.  if we are to believe in love that overcomes and transforms everything, we need to see it somewhere, to know that it exists already, somewhere outside of fairy tales, holy books, and our own fertile imaginations.  We need to see it somewhere here, in this world, in this time.

When the Genesis creation story begins the god of that time and place says let there be light, and there was light, and he separated the light from the darkness, and then there is an earth, and plants and animals and every living thing and finally humans, who are instructed to go forth and multiply.

Go forth and multiply.  Have sex and have children and let them have children until the world is richly populated, which since before the five billionth human arrived we have been questioning as a survival strategy since we seem to be using resources faster than we can make them.

But there’s something about the infinity of life; there’s something about the boundless capacity of beings to make something from not much of anything: where there is one or two there can be more, and where each one is, there can be everything they are.  So where we have two humans[...]