Skip to main content

God is wherever we allow God in

When I was ten, I discovered there were people called 'atheists'. I was surprised. How was it possible that people could not be touched by presence, presence that enfolded and gifted the world and addressed you, drawing you on into meaning. They were, obviously, using now a word I did not know then, 'obtuse'!

Also they required you apparently to believe (or not) in God. God was not a question of belief. I did not believe that the fabric of the breakfast table furniture bench was blue nor that my parents loved me. They both simply (or complexly) were part of the fabric of reality just as that fabric was woven on the weft of God's presence.

I was reminded of this reading Kenneth Paul Kramer's 'Martin Buber's I and Thou: Practicing Living Dialogue', one of a series of books where Kramer explicates and makes practical the thinking and spirituality of this great, Jewish, teacher. This book focuses on the meaning and purpose of his seminal text.

In the course of the book, Kramer has Buber retell a critical incident. Buber has been visited by an elderly pastor friend and as he escorted him back to the railway station, the pastor turned to him, laid his hand on his shoulder, and asked, 'Dear Friend! We live in a great time. Tell me! Do you believe in God?' Buber reassured him that he should have no concern about him on this point. The pastor leaves but as Buber returns from the station and reaches the exact spot at which the question was asked, he pauses. 'Had he told the truth?' he asks himself.  Does he believe in the same God as whom the pastor assumed his reassurance was about? Buber tells himself if it means a God about whom one can talk in the third person, then the answer is no. If it means a God to who one can speak in a living dialogue of call and response, out of one's joy and one's suffering, the answer is yes.

But a better word than 'belief' is trust. God is one in whom one can trust, dwell and live in fullness, a reality shaping presence, not a concept or an object, however, exalted.

This is why, when I first read Buber, at university (though not for university) I was touched deeper than by any other author (except possibly Hesse, who nominated his friend, Buber, for the Nobel Prize for literature for his Tales of Hasidim). It was because he responded to God in the way I imagined was the fullest way possible - as the presence that asks you, continuously, 'where are you?' as he asked Adam in the Garden. Meaning what account can you make of yourself in the invited journey to be ever more fully human. An act of grace and work that completes creation, brings the divine sparks contained within it to a bursting light in their redeeming.

A rabbi was asked where God was and he replied wherever a human being lets God in. We let God in when we hallow every thing as an end in itself, a particular of unfolding glory, and where we stop talking about God (good) and entrust ourselves, vulnerably, to living in God. That I do this all too rarely is undoubtedly true but Kramer's book is a happy and challenging reminder to stay on the trail of it - of finding God in a vulnerable, open dialogue with the world that allows everything its unique voice.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev