Hope In God

Even in a God that may create terrifically beautiful, deathly poisonous frogs, I have hope.

Theology has always been deeply important to me. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been interested in God’s nature and character. My interest in God’s nature led me into a study of deep ecology, evolution and ethics. The more I wanted to learn about God, the more I moved further and further away from traditional religion, not because God couldn’t be found there, but because the personal God found in most Western religion was such a small part of the God I was coming to know. The God that I understood was so much more complex, so much less bound by human notions of goodness and morality that I had to turn to science and mathematics and to the very study of relationship and interaction to get to the core of what I felt. For me, God was not merely a thing we related to—God was the relating.

This understanding of God has greatly affected the way I choose to live and the way I choose to interact with other people and the ecology. Because in moving away from seeing God as a being, I moved away from seeing God as something wholly external, something which makes demands or requires obedience or is in any way concerned with human laws and morality. One of the reasons this is important to me is because I am becoming more and more convinced that there is no such thing as empirical or absolute “good”. And because of that, the ethics of our relationships are not based on any kind of external force or transcendent value against which we are judged, but rather on what manifests from our relationships and how the people involved benefit (or not) from that interaction. In understanding God more as verb and less as noun, it becomes easier to understand how my action and my method of “being-in-the-world” affects and changes the world long term—spiritually. If God is no something that is, but rather something that is perpetually coming to be, then our moment–by–moment interactions are not meaningless or empty. Each of them is an opportunity to manifest goodness, wholeness, completion, and therefore to “do God”.

Yet, I am an agnostic. More than that, I am a faithful agnostic. I have faith, a deep and genuine, all-encompassing faith. But my faith is not born of external conviction. I do not “know” what I feel. My faith is an active choice—I enter into relationship with my centers of value not because I am certain of their perfection, but because I have hope in them. I am inspired by them.

And that’s the difference between me and “true believers”. Do I believe in God? Absolutely not! I do not experience the beinghood of God to be a certitude, or a necessary reality, or a fact. And yet, I have great hope in God. I choose to live as though there is a God, not because I know it to be true, but because I hope it is true. I have created for myself a world in which my life is part of the landscape of God’s unfolding. I envision myself in a universe crafted of magic and poetry, whose colors deepen based on my fruitful interaction with the rest of creation. I love this envisioned world. I want this envisioned world. Perhaps the difference between belief and hope is the difference between dogma and poetry. If I believe in God, then I have to believe in a truth about God, and I have to be reconciled to the idea of never knowing God as it is. If I have hope in God, I am free to understand God in my own ways, in my own terms, and contribute to its unfolding. If I have hope in God, I am uplifted by its mystery and not intimidated by its invisibility. My hope in God feeds my creative soul.

Admittedly, my spirituality requires a kind of willful suspension if disbelief. Unlike so many of theist compadres, I find no argument sufficiently compelling to secure my genuine belief in God. No theologian has aligned my logical mind to the certainty of God’s existence like so many physicists have secured my belief in gravity, momentum, or heat. And yet, nothing has moved me so greatly as the philosophies of men such as Martin Buber, Aryeh Kaplan, Thomas Aquinas or Ralph Waldo Emerson. The hope I have cultivated from men such as these moves me deeper into spiritual satisfaction that any certitude. Great hope inspiring great love is, for me, much more powerful than obligation ever could be. Choosing to belive in God, despite what my logical self would hold true, is an act of defiance. In my defiance of logic I embrace Mystery. And there, my eyes are opened.

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