I Found God in the Spaces Between My Teeth

Oy, a month of unsuccessful updating. I apologize, to myself (mostly), due to the fact that this is really more of a journal than something of public broadcast. My existence is momential and very often fleeting, I find lately, so I should do well (indeed, better) to actually update when the mood strikes me, instead of allowing the notion to slip by amidst a hundred other thoughts and/or fairly empty endeavours.

I suppose that last statement is kind of funny because my main endeavours have included, 1) School work and 2) Video-gaming. Now we must ask, which is the empty endeavour!? Or, is it both? My schoolwork is currently heavily, heavily steeped in post-modernist themes. I am convinced, somehow, that the openness of language and all other symbolic structures in our societies is a good thing, but I must admit I am hard pressed, and currently at a loss for a strategy to pull good moods from the knowledge that comes from these ponderings (or doesn't come?).

But one thing is certain (I think?): I know why people crave simplicity, and create simplicity through faith in God.

I have a certain terrifying and frustrating duality when it comes to this issue. This is likely partly because it is an issue that is nearly impossible to talk (or write) about accurately, and efficiently. God is indefinable (even moreso than everything else is!). I could ramble on for hours, weeks, even years, in epic volumes of scrolls, scribblings and etchings, and still, it would never make 'good sense'. It would be illogical, contradictory, vague. If God (whatever it is) has 'chief' attributes, I'd say these are likely to be them. But, for the sake of attempting to have something resembling content here, I will commit the crime of summarizing poorly.

In short, we have God, who:

Helps you.
Helps you when you help yourself.
Helps you when you can't help yourself.
Helps you in the ways you need.
Helps you recognize that you don't need the things you think you need.
Works in mysterious ways...

That's the positive side. There's also the God who:

Punishes bad behaviour (according to some equally indefinable standard).
Will leave you hanging until you perform certain prescribed actions.
Punishes you (or simply, causes suffering) for no apparent reason, but it really is for the greater good, if you could only understand The Plan.

These are the characterized poles of our modern, North American God(s). Even within just the poles themselves, you can see the potentially confusing contradictions. I'll admit, there's a part of me (a trained part, no doubt) that, in thought, chalks these conclusions up to a simple human psychology of coping. I really, really just think that a lot of the time. That explains away the contradictions in God because the contradictions are now located within us, humans, what with being the numerous and varied creatures we are, contradictions are to be expected. That somehow makes it make some sort of sense, and it somehow feels a little better.

Then I am reminded of yet another contradiction: I believe in God.

Now, describing God is never something I really want to do. I am even more hesitant to describe my God (which would mean, describe my understanding of God) because my understanding understands that no single understanding is the whole thing understood, and there's this crazy idea that if I can't speak to the whole, don't speak at all. A predilection for expertise, you might call it (and I'm not sure how healthy a predilection that is). But, if I followed that strictly, I could never speak about God, and I'm convinced that would be worse. So, here is "my God" and maybe talking about that will reveal why I wrestle with some of these contradictions.

God is.
God is not.

I realize, I could ramble for pages and pages, eating up bits, bytes, and a hundred thousand terrabytes more trying to articulate it, but essentially, it comes down to this simple dichotomy, and no amount of writing can make you pull the necessary implications out of these two sentences, but I still do hope that maybe, just maybe, you will.

For me, it is both why it is so hard to reconcile all God-things, and why they are the absolute most amazing tool for reconciliation, ever. If something exists (a sound, a thought, a feeling, an object, an experience, anything or things in any category or categories, real or imagined), it is God. God is the all-comprehensive adjective, the only category.

But wait. Wai-wai-wai-waitwaitwait wait. What about all the BAD stuff? God just can't be a part of those... a God that's a part of, in charge of even, murder, both individual and genocidal, rape, disease, and all destruction, well, that's just too much to handle. We can't put people who do those sorts of things in charge, we can't have a God who's a part of those in charge, either.

Begs the question: Who put God in charge?

Well, we did. We do.

Now, understand (if you will), this does not mean that God does not exist. It means we put God in charge. But really, I think it's the other way around. God put us in charge. Or, alternatively, the nature of God, and our role within it, places us in charge of our role within it. Our role is our entire experience, our choices and the causes and effects that interplay unimaginably within that collective experience, of all our experiences.

Even if an illusion, we experience choice. We have more choice than we typically imagine. We choose to imagine God as all perfect, beautiful, caring, altruistic, powerful, loving. We also have chosen for many hundreds of years now to prefer cold hard facts, clear, concise explanations, and absolute categories. Objectivity, and the 'objective truth'. With this latter obsession, and in recognizing the state of the world, a conflict arises: God cannot be solely this beautiful loving things and be the creator of the universe or the universe itself (which is also full of horrible and terrible things), and at the same time be our leader. This is an outrageous contradiction and we simply can't have it.

I say, we don't need either. God is not solely beautiful and loving. Nor is God (solely) our leader.

What God is, is all of it. The disgrace, the laughter, the horror, the tenderness, the bland, the vague, the trivial, the overarching, the neglected, the stupendous. The stolen moments, forgotten ones, ones that are being waited for, ones that replay themselves, ones that there's no accounting for. Moments of unconsciousness and moments, of choice.

We choose what God is for us (because What God Is makes it that way), and I find it encouraging that we choose to make it all the most beautiful things we can think of. Of course, any and every choice is but a part of the whole, but the whole is inaccessible to us in these forms, so I say, let us pay it little to no mind. Let us choose and play our parts.

Now, in a sort of typical tragedy, we choose the best in our God of imagination, but rarely choose even the 'mostly alright' in our God of The Wide World. We choose the God of fear and anger in The Wide World, and then choose not to call that God (but don't be fooled, it still is).

This is too much responsibility. It means everything bad in the world is our fault.

Well, it is, but that's not the only way of looking at it.

Everything bad in the world is our fault --> everything good in the world is our doing. Responsibility for everything means the power to affect everything.

This is the gift of God. In dwelling within the nature of God, this is our power, our burden, our curse, our freedom.

Still, the responsibility in this can be stifling, like staring upwards at an impossibly tall tower, and shrinking back and weeping at the sheer immensity of this thing that extends beyond the reaches of our perception into the sky, seemingly threatening to topple down in a nearly apocalyptic toppling at any moment.

It is in the ever-lasting moment before that dreadful moment where we need to feel like we're not alone. The good part is: We're not alone.

Whether you conceive of it as some distant, ever-watching, benevolent force, or simply the fact that we are all interconnected through natural relations and processes, you are correct in knowing that we are never really alone. This is 'just how things are'. This is 'God'.

And 'things' being how they are means: 'God' is here to help. Help is found in the ability to choose to know that you are being helped. This is not a personal delusion, diverting power and responsibility away from the individual, but an acknowledgment that there exists in the world every resource, be it material, mental, emotional, conceptual, or mostly unknowable (or anything between all of these), to help, if we so choose. And we must continue to try and choose as we have imagined to be best: in the most loving ways possible. This is what we can improve on.

Of course, at any particular moment, you will never get the whole of everyone, or even a significant portion of that whole, to agree on exactly what the truly most loving choice would be. But that is one of the complications we choose to consider (and I know I choose to consider many such complications). From here, though, I must think: In what cases is choosing to consider the complications loving, and when is it not? If choosing to consider complications is preventing me from loving, then I should be able to choose to ignore them without berrating myself about failing to consider, and potentially better serve, the 'larger picture'.

'We are not alone' is both a statement of comfort and one of responsibility. If my small picture, which connects to the chain of other small pictures that make up the whole, is not in the Wide World as loving as I choose for it to be in my imagination, then I am doing little in the way of contributing to the larger picture well. So it is my comfort and responsibility to remember: All our pictures are connected, and God is found in them all, so I can find anything I want within them, and I can be found as well.