REsources for Living
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If you were going to look for God, where would you look? Would you go up on top of a mountain? Would you look in the crashing ocean waves? Would you be more likely to find God in a giant sequoia redwood tree, or in a tiny plant growing in the pinch of soil between mountain rocks? Would you look up towards the stars or down toward the earth that supports us?
Maybe you would look for God in your favorite piece of music, when it swells to heart-stopping force, or stretches out into something mysterious and lovely, or when the beat makes you want to move, or the singer shares something that rings true in the bottom of your soul. You might want to look for God in a painting that is full of light or a dance in which people connect and separate and re-connect again.
You might very well look for God in a soup kitchen where people who have very different lives connect, or in a vigil where people come together and light candles to show their common concern. God might be in a hospital, where people are facing the end of their lives and families welcome newborns.
Maybe you would find different gods in different places, one spirit in a shining mountain lake and another spirit in a great rock that rises from the desert. Of course, you might look for God in a church or synagogue or mosque, in the sound of people singing or praying together.
Wherever you looked, how would you know if you had found God? I was going to say that no one knows what God looks like, but really, we all know that God doesn’t look like any particular thing. No one is ever going to take a picture of God and have that picture labeled “God” by facial recognition software.
There is a story from the Hindu tradition of a man who takes his son down by a river. The man brings with him a pan and a lump of salt. When they get to the river the man invites his son to fill the pan with water, and to place the lump of salt in that water. The father and son talk for a while, and then the man asks his son to look at the pan of water and show him the lump of salt.
“I can’t,” says the boy. “It isn’t there any more.”
“Really?” responds the father. “It isn’t there, or you can’t see it?”
“I can’t see it. It must be there, because who would have taken it out?”
“If you can’t see it, how will you know the salt is there in the water?” In answer, the boy dips his finger into the water and tastes it.
“Yes,” the boy says, “the water is definitely salty.”
“Taste the other end of the pan,” his father tells him. So the boy dips his finger in the far end of the pan.
“Yes, it’s salty there, too.”
“And how about the middle?”
“Yes,” the boy responds after tasting each section of the pan, “Yes, it’s all salty.”
“That,” says the father, “is how it is with God. You can’t see God, and can’t find the one lump of God, like a lump of salt. But, like the salt, you can taste God in everything—in the earth, the sky, in me and in you.”
But what does God taste like? Does God taste like chocolate, or bacon, or a fresh peach milk shake? How do we know when we are tasting God? Some people would say that looking for God, or tasting for God, is just plain silly. Why bother trying to connect with something that nobody can quite describe? Looking for God, after all, is just a bit like going to a train station and trying to meet up with someone else’s imaginary friend.
But those of us who would say we’ve found God and those of us who are looking for God and those of us who think that looking is just a waste of time—we all confirm that the water tastes salty. We all have moments of awe and wonder, and times of deep gratitude. We know that all life is somehow connected, that each of us belongs to something much bigger than our own individual selves. We know that our lives and our choices matter, that we are accountable to something beyond the desires of the moment.
Now, you certainly don’t have to say that God is what we all belong to, what we are all accountable to, the source of wonder and the recipient of our thanks. God is just a word, and not a very impressive word at that. On the other hand, it’s not a bad thing to have a little word-package to stuff those ideas of connection and wonder and broader life into.
Sure, at times people use the word “God” to talk about something as off-putting as a man on high who judges people according to an arbitrary set of rules set down in an old book. On the other hand, when you say the word “fence,” some people imagine white pickets and some people imagine barbed wire, but that doesn’t make the word useless or inaccurate.
Sometimes you need a word to start a conversation. And really, it’s the conversation about what most deeply connects us, what most deeply moves us, that interests me the most.
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