I Cannot Tell You Who God Is. I Can Only Describe My Experience.
This wonderful quotation from Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong is one with which I can almost completely resonate. (Spong is one of the leading proponents of what some call the New Christianity, a clarion call for Christian faith to move beyond the boundaries of the first century and become relevant and important to today's world.) Emphases are mine. "Alfred North Whitehead conceived of God as a Process. Paul Tillich experienced God as the Ground of Being. The problem is that we use the language of time and space to give form to an experience and a reality that is not bound by or within time and space. When I use the word "God" I am not talking about a being. I am describing that sense of transcendence that I believe I have encountered within time and space. I believe I experience God as life fully lived, as love wastefully given, as being completely realized. I cannot tell you or anyone else who or what God is. I can only describe my experience. I may be delusional. Lots of religious people are, but I don't think so. "I join the mystics in saying that I think I am part of what God is. God lives in me, loves through me and empowers me to escape that drive to survive that is in every living thing in order to give my life away. That is the Christ role and I think it is also the role that his disciples are called to model. "So I am drawn by God beyond my boundaries and I perceive that God becomes real when I enter into the task of living and loving and being. This makes me rather a deeply infused, God-intoxicated human being who no longer has the words to describe the God in who I live and move and have my being, but it does not even occur to me to doubt the reality of that which I experience, but can never define."
