rivka

My church's "Big Questions Letter Exchange" continues. This week I really struggled with my letter.

What are your thoughts about God? Is there a God? By what name (if any) do you call God?

I'm not very articulate on these questions.

The one thing I'm sure of is that there isn't an interventionist God who acts on the world by handing out rewards and punishments, or granting certain prayers. But not others, is the part that usually gets left unspoken, and that's the part I have trouble with. God answered your prayers and cured your kid's cancer, great. Did the mother of the kid in the next bed not pray hard enough, then? Pursuing that line of reasoning doesn't lead anywhere good; if God really did work that way, such a God should be opposed rather than worshipped.

I do, however, believe in a force that is larger than the knowable. (This is where my articulateness breaks down.) The way I think of it is that out of all the vast uncountable forms of life, and the connections between them, and the connections between life and other forms of matter - the part where our bodies and everything around us are made of tiny bits of long-exploded stars - that out of all of those connections and interweavings there emerges something larger. Not outside the material universe, but arising from it, and shaped by everything in it. For lack of a better name, I call that thing "God."

My sense of this force is that it isn't personal, not a being with awareness or consciousness who, you know, notices me and knows who I am. But I am aware of myself as part of it, and I find value in practices which help me feel aware of and connected to the larger force: mindfulness exercises, meditation, prayer. And I see God manifest as well in the things people do to connect themselves to each other and to the world: in kindness, compassion, courage, usefulness.