Is your God too small? (or, Let God be all that God Is)

So here's where things stand. (Somehow that makes me think of the part in "Peter and the Wolf" when the narrator steps back a moment and describes the situation--where all the characters were in relation to one another: Peter, the bird, the cat, the wolf. Although this post has nothing to do with that!)

Here's where I am discovering that blogging can get more interactive. Out of the comment box and into the blog.

There have been some conversations brewing in some blog comments of late, and I am delighted that some new readers of the blog are entering and in some cases starting those conversations. Thank you!

This morning I read the following provocative comment from my friend Meredith:

Count on me to jump in and muddy the waters by saying things people may not be ready to hear. But let's try an idea on for size (and I know I may sound a little Michael Dwinell-y* in saying this, but someone has to carry the part of the Questioner).

What if...whatever we call "God" also wants to renounce who or what (we think) God is supposed to be? What if God is chafing too, finds it too confining to be (our idea of) God? What if God needs to throw off the robes so God can grow into all parts of its God-Self, just as you, Sukie, need to be faithful to ALL parts of your greater Self?

Perhaps it's not just priests who are too confined by what we expect of them, but "God" who is too confined by what we expect of God? And in being true to your call, you are reflecting for all of us that it's time to let God be all that God is, which may not look at all like what we believe.

In the end, I still draw the same conclusion: God is Mystery, and the only thing we can do is bow before it.

As always, Sukie, I honor your courage to speak your truth and be faithful unto it, for that is where the Mystery is most alive in you.

Blessings,
Meredith

To which I wrote the following reply, which will now become the rest post: 

Well now there's something to chew on! Thanks, Meredith, not so much for muddying the waters as for stirring them up a bit.

I do believe that I wasn't just trying to be witty when, in my poem about cutting myself loose from "the ball and chain called God"(that link takes you to my other, currently inactive, blog, called "Freedom Diaries") that God and I would "both be better off this way"--that is, unshackled. But I didn't push that idea further--at least not in terms of how God might be better off. And what the unshackling might really be about, beyond my letting go of my understanding of God which eventually led to letting go of my life as an Episcopal priest.

I remember a book title (not sure I ever read the book) back in my college and/or seminary days, called "Your God is Too Small". Whatever/whoever "God" is is certainly way way bigger than our minds and our language can ever fully encompass or adequately describe. Hence, Jesus' tossing questions back to questioners and his wacky, puzzling parables; and the tradition of Zen koans to confound the mind into "breakthrough", and a mystic poet like Hafiz doing everything he can to stand our ideas of God on their heads, to break all our quaint definitions and ideas and stand us on our heads, too--"to shake all the nonsense out"!

(My current best efforts at "naming God" are: Mysterious source of all that is; or Big Reality; which leads me to . . . Big Mama!)

Maybe that's one of the key messages in all the searching, spiritual and otherwise, that is going on these days, assisted by the internet and global communication and awareness of so many varieties of religious and spiritual traditions: that "God" truly can't be fully comprehended, boxed in, defined, "owned" by any one of us, nor by any one tradition.

T. S. Eliot spoke of "only hints and guesses". That's a modest, humble appraisal of the glimpses we are given to experience and enjoy-- of this Big Mama!

*You can read the colorful description and tribute that I wrote to Michael, who died last year, at this link, "Remembering Michael Dwinell."