Friday, September 23, 2022

Understanding God

Megan Glenn

I have been having trouble with the personification of God because people are so limited. How can I understand God as a "being" of power and might and also that God is...(everything, everywhere). That if we are fish and God is the ocean, we are both supported by, surrounded by, and breathe God in. That our beings and all of our movement and the beings and the movement of others are inextricably connected by the waves and the space between us?

This passage from The Log From the Sea of Cortezby John Steinbeck has stuck with me, and when I think of these questions, this is always one of the pages I look back to:

Our own interest lay in relationships of animal to animal. If one observes in this relational sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence...one merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it... And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them is his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things--plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tidepool to the stars and then back to the tidepool again.