(Disclaimer: Bloviated musings about God are to follow. I have no qualifications to talk about God. And even if I did, using words to talk about God is like trying to do cross stitch with oven mitts on. But I persist in doing so, even if it is at least in part by request. So if you’ve no interest in my peculiar ideas, skip this post and you will have missed nothing.)
So I was unsuccessful in defusing the blog drama before it grew. But it did get a very thoughtful post out of Veronica. Something she wrote stuck with me:
“I am part of God, and I am. I am part of the Universe, and I am. But, I am.”
Yes we are part of God and the Universe. I see it as a “both” and not an “either/or” thing.
My recent correspondent, Ben, stated somewhere in my comments that he preferred to see things as they really are instead of how he wants them to be. I couldn’t agree more.
In fact it was looking at things they really are that gave me a way of apprehending the concept of God. (Notice I didn’t say “knowing God.” Very big difference.) Looking at the way things are put together revealed a lot to me about my own nature, the nature of the universe, and the nature of God.
How’s *that* for a grandiose statement?
In my humble view of things, reality is made of relationships. Everything is made up of smaller stuff. The way that stuff is arranged is at least (and I suspect more) important than the stuff itself. Move one carbon atom in a glucose molecule and you have a cellulose molecule. One is digestible, one is definitely not. Same amount of “stuff”, different arrangement. The arrangement gives the molecule its “identity.”
Likewise, I see that relationships suffuse everything with identity, with observable properties. One could say that “qualities” of stuff come from the relationships that comprise them. Relationships as Quality.
Look at this from a hierarchy of function. The more complex the organization of a thing, the more “advanced” or “useful” or “interesting” we consider it to be. Alloys have more robust properties than simple metals. Our feet and hands — very versatile and subtle pieces of engineering that are probably directly responsible for our species’ dominance on this planet — are made up of tiny bones in a complex connection. Contrast that to the appendages of “lower species.”
Everywhere you look, connections are what lend richness to the world around us and make it so interesting and wonderful, IMO. The more subtle, dextrous, and numerous the connections that make up something, the “better” the thing is.
I see the same on an inter-organism level too. One bacteria doesn’t make someone sick, millions do. They work in packs. Social animal species seem more “advanced” than non-social species. And I have seen with my own eyes how people can come together and accomplish incredibly good things.
Yeah, people can come together and do incredibly bad things. Mob mentality and all that. Not all connections are good ones.
But image the vast collection of all of the “good” connections in the Universe. Totally incomprehensible in size and scope, but conceptually imagineable. Imagine every instance where, at any level from the sub-atomic to the macrocosmic, smaller individual things come together and give up some of their individuality and autonomy to make something bigger and better than themselves.
That is the stuff of spirit. I don’t believe matter and spirit are separate. Matter and spirit are embedded in each other. There is no “supernatural” and “natural” world to me. Only the world, which is fascinating enough for me, thank you very much.
So how do we get a “Being” from all this? I dunno exactly. Look at me and you. How the hell do you get a conscious being from this collection of cells we call our bodies? (Yeah I’m making the assumption that our consciousness is real. But like Veronica said, all I know is that “I am.”).
If you organize all matter from simplest and smallest to most complex, you start with inanimate matter. At some point there is a “leap” that goes from inanimate matter to “life.” No one can pinpoint what exactly makes something animate, but we can all tell a fake plant from a real one. Who can say exactly how we got from “protein soup” to “living cell?” We’re getting closer to the answer with biological science, but as with all good science, we are creating more questions than we answer.
There is a similar “leap” from regular life to consciousness. We’re even more clueless about what exactly makes a living thing conscious, but most of us have no problem seeing the differences between us and the monkeys in the zoo. (Okay, I said “most.”)
So I imagine another “leap.” Can’t say exactly what it is. I can contemplate a being like God about as well a rock can contemplate what it’s like to be “alive” or about as well as an insect can contemplate being “conscious.” But it is nice, for me at least, to imagine that mere conscious beings like humans are not the last teleological “leap.” Yeah, I choose to believe in the next level of Being. And I understand it is a choice.
I can imagine the vast collection of “Good” connections in the universe — from the ones that make one molecule behave differently from another to the ones that we “conscious” humans make when we form real “Love”, real “Community” — as God. I am in God, and God is in me. I particpate in God when I make good connections and nuture relationships, when I “make” things that are good. It gives me context and purpose and orients my life in a way that is productive and constructive. I am quite happy to be a smaller individual thing that comes together with others and gives up some of my individuality and autonomy to make something bigger and better than myself.
And so there you go, Ben. I’ll look back in twenty years on this bit of writing and laugh at myself and my ignorance. But that’s where I am for now.
What I get from all this God talk is that:
I am a little thing.
My nature is such that I need to connect to others.
There is something bigger and better than me that I can participate in.
And that’s enough for me.
