My theology of God

God is the mystery nobody wants. What people want from God is not mystery but certainty, the very element in ourselves that binds itself so often to making sure that nothing ever changes, that tomorrow never comes. Not because we are so sure that the Now is the acme of perfection but because we fear to let go of God’s will for today in order to grow even greater ourselves by being willing to allow the new, the future, the possible to become.

 

What it comes down to is this, I decided: I can either believe in the greatness of God or not believe in God at all. But there is a price for that choice. Not to believe in the immensity of God in such an immense astral history is to believe only in myself and what I see around me. Without a God, I am God.

 

I make myself the god of my own world, I worship gods of my own making—money, power, prestige, approval, things and things and more things. I insist that I will worship nothing I cannot seek, and so instead I worship all the things I do see, with all their limits, all their limitations, and all the limiting they do to the expanse of my soul. It is a very sorry sight.

 

It is an even skimpier definition of humanity, of myself. Without God, human dignity itself—is in danger. What else imbues human life with value, what else confers on a person an inalienable dignity, if not the fact that they, too, if there is a God, are more than they seem? That they are stardust, aglow in the dark and certain that they are not alone.

 

No God, no meaning. No God, no purpose. No God, no cosmic quality about us at all. We are simply sand flowing through a corruptible hourglass.

But I cannot go there. To watch a painter paint and a musician play a symphony of their own creation, and a poet capture in 200 words the meaning of life, and a writer break open beauty and reasoning and possibility and meaning and throw it into the night sky, a blessing wherever it falls, is to know that we are here as Words of God.

We are here to shout the name and praise the glory and trust the love that the Creator brings daily to us as creation. Then, we may make our own glories and give them recklessly away so that like the stars breaking open and spewing more and more life and love, reason and care, knowing and wisdom into the air, is to understand that we are the stardust of the Creator and we are made to burn and light, to sparkle and shine, to be warmth and fearlessness as tonight fades into all the tomorrows of our lives.

 

The point is this: God is indeed a major theological problem, a major question. But God is a major answer, as well. Or otherwise, we would be left with no answer but ourselves. What a pity that would be.

               from An Evolving God, An Evolving Purpose, An Evolving World (My Theology Book 10) by Joan Chittister

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