What “believing in God” means to me

I believe in God.

There, I said it.

In many communities in the U.S., this is the expected and respectable stance to take. But in the urban, progressive environment in which I was molded—including in universities and some leftist circles I've been a part of—expressing a belief in God is often almost a kind of taboo. The person who expresses it is likely to be immediately summed up and judged as irrational, unintellectual, or unintelligent. The topic of God or spirituality rarely if ever comes up except as the butt of jokes (which I admit are fun to make.)

This is a sad state of affairs, because it means a significant chunk of humanity these days is cut off from a part of the human experience that has shaped us from time immemorial. 

There was a time when I, too, would have said I don’t believe in God. The older I get, though, the more nuanced my understanding of God becomes, and with that also my confidence that it exists.

I don't actually believe that it's possible for any human not to believe in some kind of God. I don't mean to sound provocative or dismissive; I just think it's a matter of conflicting definitions of what "God" means. If someone says to me they don't believe in God, I'm tempted to ask them which God they don't believe in. Unlike Santa Claus, God means something at least slightly different for literally everyone who uses the term. If we define God as a bearded white guy with a staff deciding from a cloud in the sky what happens in the world, blessing some while condemning others to an eternity in hell... then yea I don't believe in that guy either. But man, how far astray the modern human has wandered to reduce something so complex and indescribable to something so concrete and boring!

I've been starting to think that the problem is that modern humans, at least in the Western, post-industrial world, have lost touch with the importance of symbols in human culture. Symbols have always been used to represent complicated things, whether concepts or processes or memories. The symbol is not the thing itself, only a reflection, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. 

In sports, receiving a trophy or medal for an accomplishment has long been a cultural norm. Is there some inherent value in the trophy itself? Certainly not the gold-painted plastic ones I got for youth baseball and soccer. But they still meant something to me. I could pick one up and hold it and remember and feel a connection with that time of life and the journey that the trophy SYMBOLIZED. A nation's flag is not important because of the cloth or colors themselves, but because of everything it symbolizes to a people (and it can symbolize different things to different people). A photograph on the wall, a painting, an old rocking chair--pretty much everything in our physical world has some kind of symbolic value beyond just its image or function.

So with that in mind, depictions of God as a Father in heaven is a SYMBOL for something much greater, and frankly, it's silly to mistake the symbol for the thing itself. Now, I do believe that that outdated symbol of God as bearded white man needs some updating, or at least that it shouldn't be the EXCLUSIVE symbol of God. But my point here is that we need to understand the symbol as a symbol. Just like the bearded guy on the throne, the word "God" itself, like all words, is only a symbol, a reflection, of something infinitely deeper and broader.

So what is God for me? 

God is everything, starting with the infinite patterns, rhythms, and natural laws of the universe that determine the course of things. Laws of motion, gravity, quantum physics, chemistry. Somehow God, those infinite rhythms and patterns, produced something as amazing as a universe with infinite galaxies, and a solar system with an Earth that revolves around a sun in just such a way that it somehow birthed an ocean, and later microorganisms, and then even fish that swam around, and birds, and kept evolving to produce giant furry creatures like giraffes, and monkeys, and eventually the insanely complex organisms that are human beings. I'm only recounting the tiniest fraction of it all, but how unbelievably awesome! THAT, to me, the force or energy that made all that happen, and that continues to bind everything together to work together in some kind of imperfect harmony, is God. Evolution is of course an essential driving force behind that pattern, so it's absurd to me to think of evolution and God as two opposing theories. 

Believe it or not, the fundamentalist Christianity that would deny evolution is relatively new. It's only been a century or so that Christians have claimed that we need to interpret the Bible literally, for example that God created everything in six 24-hour periods. Before then, everyone understood (and many still do) that the Bible is chock full of allegories that symbolize deeper truths. That's why Jesus spoke in parables; there's literally no way to interpret them literally, unless you think he never meant to do more than just talk about stuff like birds and seeds all the time. But as a reaction to a very understandable fear of the drastic, upheaving, uprooting changes to traditional life that came with capitalism and industrialism and urbanization and "modernity" in general, at some point many Christians desperately clung to the Bible as something that could give them a literal, unerring, unchanging, fundamental "truth," and wouldn't allow the slightest questioning of it or consider other ways of understanding God beyond it. It's easier, in a way, to cling to that certainty than to sit with the paradoxes and nuances of life and of God. In the process, they often lose touch with the most important values religion teaches us in favor of tightly controlling behavior and personal matters like people's sexual orientation.

No wonder that anyone with a more "rational" perspective on the world decided to reject that version of God. But the problem is that many atheists and agnostics, from all the way at the other end of the spectrum, have adopted that exact same definition of God. They rejected it instead of worshipping it, but it's the same misguided confusion of the symbol for the thing itself, and it's not at all how God has been understood throughout the vast majority of human history.

An atheist may say that the "God" I described above is just science, not God, and I would respond that we are only arguing over semantics, over what the proper symbol of the pattern and rhythm is. 

Call it science if you want, but I choose to call it God. 

Referring to it as God, and honoring it, praising it, somehow endows our psyche with more hope, faith, and love, because it gives us a chance to align ourselves with it and be part of it. It gives us something to follow, encourages us to PARTICIPATE in the infinitely loving processes of the universe, instead of solely following our narrow-minded egos and our own selfish desires. It’s something to give gratitude for, an emotion that is shown to be connected with well-being and happiness. 

Will it ever be possible to PROVE that the forces I'm describing are "loving" and benevolent, as opposed to completely random? Nope. I know that I FEEL something undeniably loving when I look at a beautiful landscape, when I hear cardinals chirping on a cool morning, when a roar of laughter erupts while sharing stories around a living room. Even in the disgruntled fog of a mid-year staff meeting full of dozens of stressed-out teachers, if I look for it, I can feel it in the solidarity flowing between us. Stop reading this right now and take a slow, deep breath, and you may feel it too. But no one will ever be able to prove it.

Nor, however, will anyone ever be able to prove the opposite. Contrary to popular belief in secular circles, it’s no more logical to claim with certainty that NO god exists than it is to claim that some god definitely does. Neither can ever be proven scientifically, because the question is beyond the realm of science. So in the face of the mystery, I will choose the path that leads to more love and well-being, which also in turn leads people to treat each other better.

On our sabbatical, partly because we spent so much time in the natural world, partly from some of the stuff I've been reading,* I've been thinking about God in these terms a lot. The main symbol that's been occurring to me has been a circle. I've long known, intellectually, that the human experience (and the entire universe) contains ups and downs, expansions and contractions; I imagine my days, my years, my entire life cycling around in a circle. 

But those down times sometimes feel so hopeless, so utterly painful, because there's something in me that doesn't have "faith" in the pattern, that doesn't want to trust that good times always follow bad ones, just like the sun always rises no matter how dark the night, and warm spring air will eventually come and melt away the snow, no matter how bleak and cold winter gets. The task of faith is truly believing, not just in my head but also in my heart and soul, that in the end, everything will be okay. This means not getting overly irritated when we miss our bus, or have to pay more than I expected for a meal, or even worse. The "dark" times are a necessary part of the process, the decay before the renewal, of all existence.

Richard Rohr talks a lot about the story of Jesus' death and resurrection as a SYMBOL for this universal pattern. Bad things happen, often unfairly, like when Jesus was crucified. But the pattern of renewal dictates that death is ALWAYS followed by resurrection, as when an acorn falls to its "death" only to be reborn into an oak tree. Colloquial sayings like "every cloud has a silver lining" and "it was a blessing in disguise" show that an understanding of this pattern, of what I call God, is deeply embedded in our collective consciousness. We all have stories of an experience that was extremely hard for us; but if we're open and faithful about it, years later we're able to see that as bad as it was, something good eventually sprang from it. I'm reminded of Tupac talking about the rose that grows from concrete. He said that if you were to see a rose growing from concrete, you wouldn't criticize it for having wilting petals, you'd be amazed at it, admire and praise it for being able to grow in the first place! He was making a slightly different point about it than I am, but it fits here too as one of infinite examples of God's work; even in unfavorable conditions, God does miraculous things with the beings of the Earth, from flowers to human beings. 

When we lose touch with a consistent acknowledgment and appreciation of God, of the patterns I'm describing, we start to forget this universal pattern, and I believe that that's a huge part of the problem we in the modern, materially-wealthy world find ourselves in. In my last reflection I wrote about how people living in Guatemala generally seem to let things unfold on their own more than we do in the U.S., and I think the issue of God is related. Instead of trusting the patterns, trusting in God that everything will be okay, we do everything we can to control things and fit them into our narrow, egoic interests: we want to make sure we live in the best neighborhood with the best schools, so that our kids can get a perfect education, so that they don't end up at the bottom. What a deep-running fear at what will happen to our children if they don't end up in a “respectable” profession! I can't fault parents for it; the reality is we live in a (Godless?) society based on greed and self-interest, where if you DON'T play this game you could end up poor and marginalized in a system that doesn't care much about the poor and marginalized. 

But we should remember that playing that game is based off of a human-created idea of "success;" and that usually, your average middle-class person's conception of the "dreaded" camp of the marginalized is full of stereotypes based on the idea that certain ways of being are less valuable than others. Here's another reason religion or knowledge of God is important: it teaches us to buck mainstream ideas like that, and that we are ALL equally valued children of God, regardless of status, wealth, outward appearance, etc. We have no business judging different ways of being human any more than we should judge the rose that grew from concrete or the dog who lost a leg. (Of course I'm not saying parents shouldn't encourage their kids to become educated; they should. But the intention should be the broadening of their minds and the learning of useful skills; it shouldn't be for some human-centered idea of success that will shelter them permanently from the inevitable life challenges they'll have to encounter.)

So for me, believing in God and following God's will is about participating in the patterns of the universe.

Once you start thinking of religious ideas and texts symbolically in this way, they suddenly hit different. "God makes all things new" used to confuse me, but symbolically, it makes perfect sense: there will be a renewal after death. Even words as cringy as sin and punishment have a meaning behind them.Part of what makes humans unique--and many creation stories contain some version of this--is that they can choose whether or not to follow along with the patterns or not, in other words they can choose between good and evil.  Sometimes, we selfishly follow our own will instead participating in the patterns. Symbolically, this is referred to as "sin" and results in some kind of punishment, because you will eventually be flung back violently (violent backlash) if you keep trying to bend the patterns of the universe to your own will. If I keep treating people around me badly, it will eventually come back to bite me, as people will stop wanting to be around me and I will eventually be isolated, which is perhaps the worst form of punishment (symbolically: hell) for the social creatures that we are. And collectively, we are about to be punished with the “fury of God” (read: natural disasters brought on by climate change) for the sin of excessive industrialization. The interplay of sin and punishment, understood symbolically, is itself all a part of the pattern. What goes around comes around. Karma.  

The mistake NOT to make here is to think that anytime something bad happens to someone, they deserved it. No, absolutely not. There is plenty of evil in the world, due to humans' choosing evil, and part of the purpose of religion is to help people choose be on the side of correcting those injustices. But what's amazing about the universe we live in is that, again, even when objectively evil things happen, God makes something good out of them, if we only stay present enough to recognize the storm cloud’s silver lining. 

Here's an example. In Guatemala, at one point we felt a little taken advantage of by the American running the place we stayed at. The gas at the place ran out, and he told us we could replace it and that he would reimburse us. We did so. Before he reimbursed us, we asked to stay an extra 4 days, which was about half the cost of the gas. We were hoping we'd still get that half reimbursed, but instead, he made it sound like trading the extra four days for the gas was an even deal. It felt petty to complain, as it amounted to a measly amount, and we had gotten a good deal on the room in the first place. Still, I was frustrated, mostly because it just didn't seem fair, and so I spent way too long fixating on it. The only thing that helped me not to was to constantly tell myself, basically, to have faith! This wasn't going to ruin our trip, and we'd be okay in the end.

Finally, just as I was letting myself accept it, I miraculously found some money in the pocket of a pair of pants I was wearing that had been left behind long ago by a former guest. As I excitedly pulled the wad of dollar bills out and started counting, I was amazed to find almost the EXACT exact amount we felt we'd lost. It was as if God was saying, "Simple-minded ones! I told you to trust!" Do I believe God intervened directly? Not really. But I do believe that it was yet another sign that the universe has a plan, that God will provide. And no lie, it's kinda cool and mysterious that it was basically the exact amount we lost.

So God provided then, and continued to over and over again—all the more when I had faith and kept my eyes open, ready to accept the pattern and participate in it. Which is what Jesus was alluding to when he talked about faith healing people and moving mountains. 

This example has privilege written all over it, I know. I couldn't even begin to try to make it analogous to the situation of so many people in the U.S. who struggle regularly to make enough money to pay rent in a relentlessly unjust and profit-driven society. So maybe my positive outlook here may have its blind spots, I'm willing to admit.

But it's worth noting that it's not usually the poor and oppressed who think they can go without God; it's those who have enough material wealth and privilege that they think they can control everything on their own—and in their arrogance usually make more and more problems for everyone else (climate change again being a good example). Some of the most profound and God-inspired statements I've ever heard came at church, when people experiencing homelessness, whether they were members or just passing through taking shelter, would take the mic after the sermon to respond and offer their testimony. Regardless of what their life looked like to an outside observer, many were still able to recognize God in the pattern of things, and be grateful for whatever they had been given. They were able to embody, much more than me, the faith that I'm trying to promote here.

I hope that this will be helpful to anyone who struggles with mainstream Christianity or religion in general, but senses intuitively that there's something about spirituality that is worth exploring and embracing.

*I can't claim to have come up with any of this on my own. My ideas are always a big synthesis of my life experiences and things I've read. But here's some of what I've been reading lately and probably influenced a lot of this: Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God, Adrienne Marie Brown's Emergent Strategy, Octavia Butler's Parable series, Richard Rohr's daily meditations,  Popol Vuh (the Mayan creation story) Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, Beatrice Chestnut's The Complete Enneagram.. Many more I'm sure that I'm forgetting.

Control it or let it unfold? Sabbatical reflections

My fiancé and I recently got back to Cincinnati after about 80 days in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the first of two legs of travel for our sabbatical year. Here's a brief outline of what we did: 

We spent a couple weeks backpacking from city to city and staying in hostels through southern Mexico, then eventually decided we wanted to slow down and spend more time in the places we stayed so that we could get to know people and absorb a little more of the culture. So we ended up spending close to two months in Guatemala. First we stopped in Xela, the second biggest city in Guatemala, to take Spanish classes while living with a host family for a couple weeks. Then we went up to Petén, a rural area in the north covered in rain forest, and spent a few weeks volunteering on farms involved in reforestation projects. Along the way, we passed through a couple more culturally significant cities in Guatemala--Lake Atitlan, Livingston, Antigua, Guatemala City--before heading over to El Salvador for our last eight days, which we split between a hostel in Santa Ana and a couch surfing host in San Salvador.

I'll spare you all the details, but suffice it to say the trip was exciting, challenging, relaxing, stressful, thought-provoking, realigning, meaningful, among so many other things. 

For me, the most beautiful and beneficial aspect about it was just being able to get some space from the environment, lifestyle, and patterns of thinking I'd settled into over the past six years living in Cincinnati. We're fortunate to be able to have this kind of experience. It should be something that every human on the planet is entitled to every few years, and I hope anyone reading this can make it happen someday if they haven't already.

We learned so much while we were away: about the Spanish language, about Central American history and politics, about Mayan culture and traditions, about farming, plants native to the Guatemalan rain forest, tropical fruits, about ourselves and our relationship--the list goes on and on. 

I've noticed that often with traveling, a big part of the learning actually happens when you come back, and the person you've grown into returns to the place you left with a new point of view from which to experience, evaluate and make sense of what you've been swimming in your whole life. 

The most striking thing I've noticed being home this time around has been the perfectionist way with which Americans from the U.S., or at least middle-class and wealthy Americans, view the world. The deeply felt need to tightly control one's surroundings, to do things "right." This contrasted drastically with the laid back, let-things-unfold-as-they-unfold approach to life we encountered on our trip.

One example: shortly after we got back to the U.S., we saw a woman approach a bus that was stopped at a red light, hoping to get on. But that particular bus doesn't have a stop at that particular intersection, so the driver opened the door and kindly informed her that she couldn't get on, all in about the same time it would have taken her to board, pay her fare, and sit down. Of course there was no practical reason not to let her on; it simply violated protocol, the "right" way to do things. Now, the exact same thing has happened to me before, even with the same bus route. But after our trip, it struck me as so odd, even ridiculous. In Guatemala a bus will typically stop for you anywhere along the route, even if it stopped literally ten seconds earlier. Less rigid, less focused on efficiency and the "rules" about the "right" place to get on the bus, which opens up space for more compassion for the person who wasn't quite able to make it to the stop in time. And this was the case even though, ironically, if you miss a bus down there, there will almost certainly be another one coming shortly. We took busses dozens of times, and maybe three or four times waited longer than five minutes. The woman who missed her bus in Cincinnati probably had to wait another 15 or 20 for the next one. 

Another way this cultural difference manifests is in the relationship between humans and animals. Dogs roam the streets everywhere in Guatemala. They don't bother anyone, but regardless, in the U.S., most people would never be okay with unattended dogs walking around their manicured, pristine suburbs. In Guatemala they seem to be tolerated at the very least; people even put food out for them and let them hang out on their doorstep. When we got out to the rural, the coexistence was even more pronounced: pigs and chickens are also part of the menagerie. They walked around freely, grazing along the sides of roads. We figured they must be owned by someone, and when we asked about it we were told they were. Apparently everyone seems to just kind of know whose animals are whose, and they let them roam free to find food wherever they can. Instead of humans needing to be in complete control, animals and humans are coexisting, with nature at the helm. Plus, it makes for many more sightings and interactions with puppies, and kittens, too.

Even this squirrel wanted to coexist...especially when he found I had food.

We also noticed that people were so much more resourceful down there. In the U.S., when you need some material object, what do you do? Go out and buy it. Or nowadays, pick up your phone for a couple minutes and click a button. In rural Guatemala, instead of always buying a manufactured item created perfectly for the exact use you will put it to, people engineered what they needed with whatever was around. Simple benches from a slab of wood and tree stumps, outdoor stoves from leftover cinderblocks and rebar, flowerpots from washed-out water or coke bottles, wild plants used as teas to cure soar throats or as bandages to heal machete wounds, the list goes on. All perfectly functional, and less wasteful. 

Maybe the most pronounced example was the work culture. In the U.S., we literally have a phrase "work-life balance," which shows that we typically treat work as if it is disconnected from life. As if you have a life, and then you go to your work which is not part of it. On the farm in Guatemala, work was much more integrated with life. The first thing we'd do sometimes when we showed up to the farm would be drink a coffee, while enjoying the scenery and chatting with the other folks around. Then maybe we'd discuss what we'd be doing that day, and get started chopping down branches to feed the cows, or planting cacao or coffee or breadnut, or transplanting trees. After an hour or so doing that, we'd head back to relax and chat while someone prepared lunch. Someone may pull down a coconut, chop it open, and pass it around for sips of coconut water. After lunch we'd find another task to do, and the cycle would continue. It felt like a rhythm, a balance between producing and just living, being, with relationships at the center as opposed to productivity-- relationships with nature, with food, and with other humans. We also loved how mothers could take their kids to work with them, and that there always seemed to be kids around wherever we went. It made child-rearing seem much more natural, less stressful and complicated, than back home.

I realize that I'm generalizing quite a bit here. I met plenty of people whose mentality toward work was further along the spectrum toward that of the U.S. I also don’t mean to romanticize life in Central America or less developed countries in general, though I suspect I am some. I'm aware that there are positive and negative aspects to any cultural norm, and I could go back and point them out in each of the ones I described above. For example, the American director of the organization we were volunteering with lamented about how the farms could be producing so much more and making themselves more financially stable if only they took a more diligent attitude toward the work. There is probably truth to this--and I have to admit, I sometimes found myself feeling bored and wishing there were more for me to do--but the owners of the farms, weighing his arguments, seemed to opt for the more relaxed, rhythmic, balanced, and relationally-rich work culture they were used to. They kind of smiled and shrugged when describing his seemingly unquenchable zeal for "improvement." 

Whatever positives to American work-culture there most definitely are, we have to bear in mind a difficult truth: the urge to control things in our environment to the extreme that we do, to be perfectly efficient, to "advance" technologically, is a legacy of white supremacy and capitalism and, in my opinion, a fundamental driver of climate change and the destruction of the planet. Guatemalans may have a low per capita GDP than Americans*, but they are infinitely less responsible for the climate crisis. In fact, reclaiming indigenous practices similar to the ones practiced there, where Mayan culture is thankfully still very prevalent, is going to have to play a big role in whatever resurrection we can hope for as/after the climate catastrophe runs its course.

Not to mention, I don't think it would be at all fair to say that Americans are better off than Guatemalans. Materially, yes, and I certainly believe in creating a world where Guatemalans have the same basic access to the important care and services that we do. But in terms of overall well-being and happiness? I wasn't there long enough to truly know, but my instinct, based on the many interactions and conversations we had with people from diverse parts and backgrounds of the country, would be to say that Guatemalans have us beat. I suspect it has to with the fact that they spend so much more time in community, just being around other people, than Americans. We noticed that they were essentially always with other people, whether their immediate families or the several friends who would randomly stop by to chat for a few minutes every day. Middle-class Americans seem to spend so much time alone, in (comparatively) giant houses, with all sorts of stuff, but very little human interaction. No wonder that so many Americans are terribly lonely. Paradoxically, it's mostly by choice. Once people have money, they often spend it to make themselves more comfortable, but that often means more isolated. I've always believed that capitalism and the inequality it produces are not, in the end, healthy and wholesome for those who reap the material benefits. Which is why the privileged need to be just as invested in forging an equitable society as the marginalized. But I digress...

Many Americans, myself included, have had the perfectionistic need to control and manage deeply engrained in their psyches for generations. I'm struggling with it right now, as I keep revising this post so that it perfectly expresses what I want it to before I publish it. My goal in writing this isn't to convince people to try to change that all at once, but maybe to help them at least become conscious of it, and to be reminded that there are people who are getting by with a much more "let-things-unfold" kind of attitude toward life. 

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*The reason for poverty in Guatemala goes much, much deeper than anything I've described here. The country has had a long history of being exploited by foreign companies (United Fruit) and governments (the U.S. funded the Guatemalan government during their civil war, which left hundreds of thousands dead, persecuted, and displaced). I'm sure there's plenty more that I'm not even aware of. My point is just that even if it were feasible to "advance" economically through a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps type of increase in production, if they follow our model, it will only exasperate the global crisis we're in.