The G word

The word God makes a lot of people flinch. It makes other people gush. It’s loaded, similar to the word Art. So many many ways that people strike the lightning rod of the word. So I thought it would be worth sharing directly what my own relationship is to the word God.

For me the word God is the ultimate placeholder. It means something like [   ], or that thing we don't know how to describe. Or that thing that you and I want to be able to talk about but may have a completely different relationship to - like everything, but even more so. And so a symbol has been placed on it (like everything but even more so!). And that symbol has become synonymous with it, like the way the dollar bill is a symbol of money that's become synonymous for all practical purposes with money itself and used as such.

The word God is used openly in the monotheistic religions. The big ones: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In certain instances within these three religions - especially the first two -  God is sometimes taken to be  a guy in the sky: Skygod. Occasionally people go mad and start wars over their brand of Skygod over yours. It gets very literal when you believe in your symbols as actual things, and as superior to the symbols of others.

I sometimes do use the placeholder word  God in prayer. For me, it's just the nickname for the very situation, the arising sensory input, the answer to the human brain's endless rant - something outside myself that isn't the little me, with whom to lay a burden down.

As I've said before, there is, as a result of this prayer activity, a deepening experience of this relationship, this contact, and less and less of a way that the brain and language can accurately pin it down, describe it or explain it. It's dynamic, it keeps changing and deepening, in a way becoming more of the foreground.
​
If you are yourself a deep skeptic, this is good! Use your scientific bent to test it out. Try out a prayer from the book. See if you get any juice from it. Not necessarily in the moment, but in the way things play out in the larger situation, as you look back on the day. If you scoff-pray, I don't know how much you'll get out of the exercise. Perhaps you will feel right. Which is it's own kind of booby prize. But if you try it with any degree of openness or curiosity, you might find out what, if anything about it, is useful, practically speaking, to you.