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Religious Epiphanies
Where in God’s Name Did We Go Wrong?
by Jean-Claude Koven
When people ask me if I am religious, I tell them I love God far too much to be
religious. “Oh, then you must believe in God?” they inevitably ask. “Of course
not,” I reply with a smile, “does a fish believe in water?” For me, God is all
there is. What’s to believe?
Although the world’s major religions all agree that God (however they define the
term) is omnipresent, it seems that very few of their followers – including
their clerical hierarchy – actually understand what omnipresence really means.
And therein lies the source of the world’s ills.
For a start, we take our relationship to God far too seriously. We bring so much
solemnity to the way we view God – awe, veneration, obedience, and the like –
that we end up creating distance between us and the object of our worship.
Expressions such as “God is my judge,” “God forbid,” and “God bless you” creep
into our language, and consequently our thoughts. People are actually proud to
call themselves God-fearing folk. For too many of us, God is somewhere out
there, watching and judging us as we struggle through our imperfect lives.
And consider this: Some religions consider the name of God so holy that it is
never pronounced. Instead they create a litany of substitute terms so they can
talk about God without having to commit the blasphemy of actually using his name
– much as many of the characters in the Harry Potter novels avoid pronouncing
the name of Lord Voldemort lest they unleash some fearsome effect. When
practitioners of these religions write about their deity, they are instructed to
omit the vowel: G-d. Other religions take the opposite tack. They encourage
their devotees to chant or meditate on the name of God for hours at a time. To
their way of believing, focusing on God leads to a state of bliss that opens the
door to transcendence and enlightenment. But if God is truly all that is, what
can possibly make one of his names more powerful than any other?
For that matter, what is the purpose of naming him (or her or it) in the first
place? Naming anything creates a subject/object relationship between you and the
thing named, and that in and of itself means a separation. Every name of God, no
matter how holy, drives a wedge between the creator and the created – which
includes you and me. This separation is the primal breeding ground for fear, for
we then see ourselves as tiny beings, abandoned (or evicted from Paradise) and
living on the fringe of an incomprehensibly huge cosmos. It’s no wonder most of
humanity takes this whole God business so seriously – it appears to be no less
than a matter of life and death.
But what if the phrase “God is all that is” were literally true? This is what R.
Buckminster Fuller must have understood when he said, “God, to me, it seems, is
a verb not a noun.” His words, when I first read them, lodged in my mind. But I
didn’t get their full import until many years later, during my first visit to
Findhorn, the renowned spiritual community in northeast Scotland. It was there,
sitting in a circle with my fellow newbies, that the penny dropped. One young
man in our group, Peter, suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, wow, I finally see it. It’s
not that God is in all things; it’s that God is all things.”
His exclamation triggered two remarkable realizations for me. First, the obvious
is obvious only to those who are sufficiently present to see it. The delivery of
Peter’s life-changing epiphany had virtually no effect on the rest of the group.
Our facilitator was so consumed by his orientation agenda that he missed the
moment completely. Thanking Peter for his contribution, he simply asked the
group if anyone else had anything to share.
Second, what Peter said is literally true. In an instant, Bucky’s words became
crystal clear. God is indeed a verb. He is not the creator. He is the ongoing
unfoldment of creation itself. There is nothing that is not a part of this
unfolding. Thus there can be nothing separate from God. God is infinite and
infinity is One.
From that moment, everything in my life began to change. It wasn’t immediate; it
was rather like a giant oil tanker slowly making a U-turn. As if I were facing
in a new direction, I looked at the world in a new way “How,” I asked myself,
“do we dupe ourselves so completely? How come so few people see what Bucky and
Peter see? How could I myself have been so blind?”
When we perceive God as a noun, we envision him as the creator, the architect
of, and therefore separate from, his creation. Identifying ourselves as part of
that creation, we see ourselves not only separate from our source but separate
from each other and all other manifest things as well. This is the fatally
flawed axiom underlying virtually all of the world’s faiths. They may
collectively call for love and peace, but the rampant divisiveness, greed, and
competition that currently pervade human culture are the only inevitable
outcomes of their separative philosophies.
Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life shifted.
Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was only God. When
someone spoke to me, it was with God’s voice; when I listened, it was with God’s
heart. I invite you to try it. The small shift from noun to verb may well be the
antidote to the forbidden fruit that banished us from Eden. As you begin to view
God not as the creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself,
you’ll discover him in everything you see – including yourself. The old you –
that fish swimming blindly in search of water – fades away as you dissolve into
the simple meaning of it all. Perhaps, when your vision finally clears, you will
find yourself living in the Promised Land that so many others are still praying
for.
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Jean-Claude Koven is a writer and speaker based in Rancho Mirage, CA. He is the
author of Going Deeper: How to Make Sense of Your Life When Your Life Makes No
Sense, the Allbooks Reviews editor’s choice for the best metaphysical book of
2004. Recipient of USABookNews.com best metaphysical book award. For more
information, please visit www.goingdeeper.org
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