So What Exactly Do You Believe Then

Hee hee - its a question I seem to be getting asked quite a bit these days.

And the answer is - I do not know. I am a seeker, not a believer!

I think it takes more faith in "God" to doubt God than to simply suspend our critical faculties and believe what our religion says we ought to. To doubt means we doubt our own faith and our own beliefs and trust Truth to guide us. If God is Truth then the only way to find God is to put questions on our own little versions of the truth and be willing to risk the loss of faith, the loss of God in order to find God.

The problem with beliefs is that they are definable and understandable, the problem with doctrine is that it can be neatly written down in books. God cannot. I am afraid I am going to disappoint my Christian friends as much as I am going to disappoint my atheist friends. I will disappoint my Christian friends by saying I do not believe God is like how our doctrines and theologies have painted him to be. And I will disappoint my atheist friends who want to know what it is exactly they don't believe in. Because the problem is I do not think God is understandable. To ask if he exists perhaps misses the point!

I don't know if there is a personal being out there who goes by the name of God/Allah/Yahweh. But as Karen Armstrong put it so nicely...

"This is God become politicised, God taken over by a purely human system of thought. I don't think God has anything to do with thinking or concepts or even images. Its much more a sense of mystery, in the fullest sens of the word. God's not a nut that you can crack and say: "Eureka! I've found him! Now I understand!" If we can understand God, He's not God."

If God had made it all perfectly clear, what a boring world we would live in. Perhaps, we are intended to use our brains, our minds and our creativity to construct reality in a way that is life affirming and therefore God affirming? Perhaps God is to be found in the search? Jeannette Winterson wrote "the pillar of cloud became a fog, perplexing and impossible". I think this experience will ring true with anyone on a spiritual search. Because as we search, we realise that the old strong realities aren't so real after all, the systematic theology falls down, the statements of faith disintegrate and the pillars of clouds that once seemed so solid disperse, leaving us with a perplexing fog of doubt and questionning - but perhaps also, we touch God as we grapple through the fog and are open to finding new things.

If we did not doubt, we would never be open to anything new. What could we learn if our beliefs were engraved on stone? Why did Jesus replace the old law written on tablets on stone, with the inner law of love in our hearts? Perhaps its because the rules don't really matter that much - but if we look within ourselves and treasure those things in the world that remind us of what we love and value we enter into God in a new and fresh way.

Maybe, just maybe, the day we find God is the day we loose him.

"Cast all your thoughts or preconceptions about God under a thick cloud of forgetting and approach Him as He is." (The Cloud of Unknowing)

Origin: wiccancommunity.blogspot.com