WHERE IN GOD'S NAME DID WE GO WRONG?

 By Jean-Claude Koven
 
 WHERE IN GOD'S NAME DID WE GO WRONG?
 
 When people ask me if I am religious, I tell them I love God far too 
 much to be religious. "Oh, then you must believe in God?" they 
 inevitably ask. "Of course not," I reply with a smile, "does a fish 
 believe in water?" For me, God is all there is. What's to believe?
 Although the world's major religions all agree that God (however they 
 define the term) is omnipresent, it seems that very few of their 
 followers - including their clerical hierarchy - actually understand 
 what omnipresence really means. And therein lies the source of the 
 world's ills.
 
 For a start, we take our relationship to God far too seriously. We 
 bring so much solemnity to the way we view God - awe, veneration, 
 obedience, and the like - that we end up creating distance between us 
 and the object of our worship. Expressions such as “God is my judge,” 
 “God forbid,” and “God bless you” creep into our language, and 
 consequently our thoughts. People are actually proud to call 
 themselves God-fearing folk. For too many of us, God is somewhere out 
 there, watching and judging us as we struggle through our imperfect 
 lives.
 
 And consider this: Some religions consider the name of God so holy 
 that it is never pronounced. Instead they create a litany of 
 substitute terms so they can talk about God without having to commit 
 the blasphemy of actually using his name - much as many of the 
 characters in the Harry Potter novels avoid pronouncing the name of 
 Lord Voldemort lest they unleash some fearsome effect. When 
 practitioners of these religions write about their deity, they are 
 instructed to omit the vowel: G-d. Other religions take the opposite 
 tack. They encourage their devotees to chant or meditate on the name 
 of God for hours at a time. To their way of believing, focusing on God 
 leads to a state of bliss that opens the door to transcendence and 
 enlightenment. But if God is truly all that is, what can possibly make 
 one of his names more powerful than any other?
 
 For that matter, what is the purpose of naming him (or her or it) in 
 the first place? Naming anything creates a subject/object relationship 
 between you and the thing named, and that in and of itself means a 
 separation. Every name of God, no matter how holy, drives a wedge 
 between the creator and the created - which includes you and me. This 
 separation is the primal breeding ground for fear, for we then see 
 ourselves as tiny beings, abandoned (or evicted from Paradise) and 
 living on the fringe of an incomprehensibly huge cosmos. It's no 
 wonder most of humanity takes this whole God business so seriously - 
 it appears to be no less than a matter of life and death.
 
 But what if the phrase “God is all that is” were literally true? This 
 is what R. Buckminster Fuller must have understood when he said, "God, 
 to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun." His words, when I first read 
 them, lodged in my mind. But I didn't get their full import until many 
 years later, during my first visit to Findhorn, the renowned spiritual 
 community in northeast Scotland. It was there, sitting in a circle 
 with my fellow newbies, that the penny dropped. One young man in our 
 group, Peter, suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, wow, I finally see it. It's not 
 that God is in all things; it's that God is all things."
 
 His exclamation triggered two remarkable realizations for me. First, 
 the obvious is obvious only to those who are sufficiently present to 
 see it. The delivery of Peter's life-changing epiphany had virtually 
 no effect on the rest of the group. Our facilitator was so consumed by 
 his orientation agenda that he missed the moment completely. Thanking 
 Peter for his contribution, he simply asked the group if anyone else 
 had anything to share.
 
 Second, what Peter said is literally true. In an instant, Bucky's 
 words became crystal clear. God is indeed a verb. He is not the 
 creator. He is the ongoing unfoldment of creation itself. There is 
 nothing that is not a part of this unfolding. Thus there can be 
 nothing separate from God. God is infinite and infinity is One.
 
 From that moment, everything in my life began to change. It wasn't 
 immediate; it was rather like a giant oil tanker slowly making a U- 
 turn. As if I were facing in a new direction, I looked at the world in 
 a new way "How," I asked myself, "do we dupe ourselves so completely? 
 How come so few people see what Bucky and Peter see? How could I 
 myself have been so blind?"
 
 When we perceive God as a noun, we envision him as the creator, the 
 architect of, and therefore separate from, his creation. Identifying 
 ourselves as part of that creation, we see ourselves not only separate 
 from our source but separate from each other and all other manifest 
 things as well. This is the fatally flawed axiom underlying virtually 
 all of the world's faiths. They may collectively call for love and 
 peace, but the rampant divisiveness, greed, and competition that 
 currently pervade human culture are the only inevitable outcomes of 
 their separative philosophies.
 
 Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life 
 shifted. Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was 
 only God. When someone spoke to me, it was with God's voice; when I 
 listened, it was with God's heart. I invite you to try it. The small 
 shift from noun to verb may well be the antidote to the forbidden 
 fruit that banished us from Eden. As you begin to view God not as the 
 creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself, 
 you'll discover him in everything you see - including yourself. The 
 old you - that fish swimming blindly in search of water - fades away 
 as you dissolve into the simple meaning of it all. Perhaps, when your 
 vision finally clears, you will find yourself living in the Promised 
 Land that so many others are still praying for.