Objectifying the Divine
I was recently gazing into a pool at the bottom of a deep gorge into which my oldest friends and I had hiked just to take a swim and hike back up, and I was appreciating the way that praying takes you out of a place. You look up in instantaneous recognition of it, and that’s it, that’s the prayer, and anything that comes after that is in the way of whatever happens next. Searching for more words becomes this cosmically rude act: “Hold on, God. Don’t interrupt me with more Reality. I’m trying to pray here.”
The quality of your prayer is nothing more than the quality of your life.
Truly, this was one of the first “spiritual” insights I’ve had in months, and that seems related.
The most obvious harmony that might draw someone such as myself into a life of dual Jewish and Zen lineage is these lineages’ agreement on one point: not to objectify the Divine. To my lineages, the Divine is not a thing — nor is it several things, nor many things — that can be identified and comprehended as itself in its totality. The Divine is reality in a way that can be more or less recognized at any given time, but no more or less true.
One of the most difficult things to get past for me in conversations about religion with my peers is how utterly unlike living a real life of faith the contemporary (post-)Christian hegemonic construction of religion is.
Everybody — hardly limited to people raised Christian — has this idea that religion is when you mentally subscribe to a specific set of things, choosing it over all the other available sets of things, and then spend a significant portion of all your attention and energy trying to remember to uphold those things. It’s a gamified relationship to reality, except that — if it gets into your psychology deeply enough — the stakes are as dire as for anything else in life, if not more.
At least Pokémon Go players understand they’re doing it for fun!
I catch myself doing this frequently. Gamification is an unavoidable condition of life in high-tech late-capitalism; it helps the hours go by. But — as someone blessed with traceable lineages — there are also unmistakeable felt senses of being Jewish or being Buddhist that arise in certain kinds of day-to-day self/world interactions, and those situations are essentially nothing like the ones that gamified religion mind cooks up. They arise when I am in a natural state and observe Jewish or Buddhist behaviors and inclinations arising unbidden as the natural and preferable response. That’s when I go, “Ah, religion.” Not when I have to force myself to remember what Religion™ says to do in this situation before I can act.
When I have had real intimacy with the Divine, I could feel my soul’s rawness and imperfection. When I could bear that with humility, I felt it cleansed and forgiven. It did not call me to be anyone any more extraordinary than who I always was. That’s why I dismiss anyone preaching strictness and severity or demanding perfection. It just sounds like fear of something they have never known.
I understand how people get like this, though. They have experienced firsthand that the religiously transmitted concept of spiritual purification refers to something real. But they have not experienced what lies at the bottom of this well, which you can only experience firsthand after dropping all intermediating concepts: Purification is real, but purity is not.
I don’t like being careful with God. My exact words never matter as much as the wordless sense I get when God and I are really communicating. Real-life actions matter a lot more than ritual actions. Religion should not be a closed loop. It should be an open spiral, a river that empties out into the fertile delta of your life.
Dogmas about the nature of God are ways of hiding dogmas about the nature of other people.
Next time another person is centered in your awareness, try counting how many categories you’re imposing to simplify who they are to you and what you expect of them.
Once your own filters are cleared by this exercise, start listening to the ones that person is imposing on themself, to simplify who they need to be to you in order to handle the encounter.
Then listen to the ones you’re using on yourself.
The idea is not to eliminate categories, but to allow all participants to maneuver toward the most successful configuration, without anyone imposing their filtered view on anyone else.
Now listen to the categories you’re imposing on the universe.
It almost doesn’t even matter to me what the object-level teachings of my religions refer to. I’m very sure that the relief I feel when I remember that my God is One is real. The felt sense of being religiously Jewish is much less like an encounter with a Being than it is like coming (back) to a place.
In fact, I am no longer quite sure there’s a difference between a “being” and a “place.” Like… even you are a place. When I am with you, I am actually “at” you. (See also: planets.)
I get why cultures use the word “gods.” But my culture often uses the word “place” — with the definite article, The Place — as a name for God, which to me makes much clearer the relationship between “places” and The Place, i.e. you know, the universe. In the Torah, when our ancestor, Ya’akov, wakes from his roadside dream about the ladder between Heaven and Earth, he cries out:
מַה־נּוֹרָ֖א הַמָּק֣וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה אֵ֣ין זֶ֗ה כִּ֚י אִם־בֵּ֣ית אֱלֹהִ֔ים וְזֶ֖ה שַׁ֥עַר הַשָּׁמָֽיִם׃
“How awesome is this Place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to Heaven.”
This is one of the most ancient places from which we draw this Name. (Side note: If I ever go to another planet, you can bet your ass that is what I am saying when I step off the gangplank.)
To me, the life of faith is about learning to live together in the Place, not learning to live in accordance with the Will of the Being.
