Friday, April 23, 2010

Divine Truth

I used to think that truth about divine reality was simply too big for us humans to grasp in its entirety. As I saw it then, we were each like the blind men in the parable who each feel and describe part of an elephant. One man, feeling a front leg, describes it as an upright pillar. Another man under the belly describes it as an expansive ceiling. A man at the back being flicked by the tail describes it as a fan that brushes him lightly.
Each man captures a piece of the truth, but none can see the whole truth—the whole elephant.  
I used to think that the religions of the world were like this: blind attempts to describe a reality beyond our grasp—each partially right, but all incomplete. No one ever saw God in God’s entirety.
But in this metaphor, it is assumed that there is a truth to be known—it is just too big for any of us to grasp. This truth is the Elephant.

Now, I am not sure that the elephant is really present in any kind of objective sense in which a statement about it could, at some theoretical level, be judged to be right and a wrong. Rather than an elephant, I now consider God to be more like you and I in that moment right before we come to a decision. In that moment of unrealized pregnancy of possibilities, we hold mutual exclusivities in the same compartment. (I could go to the store. I could make dinner. I could take a walk.) At that moment I am all these possibilities and none of these objective truths. I wonder if this is the way God is at all times.

In quantum physics light is described as having properties of both a wave and a particle. Each of these states is mutually exclusive. It cannot be both. Yet, prior to observation it seems to be both. Then along comes a scientist running an experiment that forces the light to make a decision: wave or particle? I need to know right now. Then, as a result of that observation (that perspective) the pregnancy of possibilities that is the light in its natural state is forced to make a choice. Sometimes it chooses particle, sometimes it chooses wave.
I wonder if God is like this too: a reality, not just too large for any of us to grasp (like the blind men who cannot see the entire elephant for what it is), but like you and I prior to a decision, or like light prior to observation. Perhaps divine reality is not yet an objective fact, but a plethora of possibilities offered to the world.

So long as you remain in that moment prior to a decision, I cannot know you. I have to wait until you act, then I know you as the one making dinner, or the one taking the dog for a walk. Prior to your decision, there is no objective fact to be known about that decision, for it has not yet happened. I now think God is like this: a host of possibilities not yet concrete.

What would it be like if God came to a decision? What would it be like to see God as an object of our perception? The writers of the Bible seem to realize its danger. “No one can see God and live” they caution. The Messiah would wipe out the world as we know it.

Our lives are a fluctuation between a moment of indecision followed by a moment of expression. We see the expressions of others—the indecision, the holding of mutually exclusive possibilities, remains hidden in the other’s interiority. What if God is like this moment of the other’s interior indecision: not something to ever be witnessed second hand; not something objective about which one could utter something true or false about, but forever possibilities for us to make actual?

Did God speak to Moses from a burning bush? Is Jesus God’s begotten son? Did God bring Mohammed up to heaven? Does God play hid and seek with “himself” in creating multiplicity? Is any single truth to be found here, like the single elephant beyond each of the blind men’s reach? Or is God all of these at once: both particle and wave, both the God of Christians, and the God of Islam, both the God who lead the Jews out of captivity, and the Hindu God who plays hide and go seek with himself?

Some will demand that it has to be one to the exclusion of the others. I suspect that God is none of these in any concrete sense, and all of these in a potential sense. God is a God of the future, calling creation into existence by the lure of possibilities. We must not look to the past to find God as a concrete object, but to listen to God’s call, drawing us to something beyond where we are right now, to something better.