Some months ago, a Friend said in Meeting in Brussels, ‘I am praying to a God I’m not sure I believe in.’ Nobody developed this further in the ministry that followed; for me this period of confinement has thrown some light on this question.
I read the other day that according to opinion surveys in the USA, about 65% of the population say that they are praying again and approximately the same percentage think that the corona virus has been sent as a warning or punishment from God. Most people say that they are praying for the pandemic to end. In Europe, the percentage is a little lower, but in general many people seem to be praying again and for the same outcome as our American friends. An elderly Italian lady interviewed on the TV news last week, had what I would say was a ‘medieval’ attitude to the situation when she insisted that God had sent the virus as a punishment for our wickedness. What are we to make of this?
Prayer of course means asking, even if many now realise that it should be something deeper, more an act of contemplation, and for most people that is still what it is, asking … Please God, don’t let this happen to me … Please God let me get that new job … A number of footballers now cross themselves or point to the sky when they score a goal, as if God had been enlisted in their efforts to defeat the other team. Unfortunately, God is also the God of the opposing side, but perhaps he allows himself a degree of partisanship on Saturday afternoons? But at a deeper level, is God a being that will take away scourges when we ask or bribe him (yes, him, because that sort of God is the male God of old) and give us presents or favours when we do what he approves of. Is that the nature of God, in fact?
For myself, I can say that the god I believe in is not a god. In fact, I’m not even sure that believe is the right word to use. We humans so often get ourselves confused about the reality that we try to grasp because we use words loosely but imagine that they are definitive, clear and can be grasped by everyone else. The way I see it is that we humans certainly experience transcendence, divinity and that is a real experience, but we go wrong when we try to label it. The great theologians of the Middle Ages, Christian, Jewish and Moslem all said that God is best described as Nothing, because it is impossible for us to make any meaningful comparison or description, we should rather point to the experience than try to capture it in words. An experience that awes us and carries us beyond words; an experience that surrounds us but cannot be grasped.
The images that arise in my mind are from Exodos. Moses goes into the desert and sees a burning bush that burns without ceasing and realises that he is in the divine presence; when he asks, ‘Who are you?’, the answer is ‘I am that I am’ – nothing more, nothing less. When he later climbs Mount Sinai again, this time as he leaves Egypt leading the now free Israelites, he meets this presence again and receives the Law, which he is instructed to take down to the people of Israel waiting below. However, when he arrives at the foot of the mountain, he finds the people worshipping a Golden Calf that they have made for themselves. Perhaps this is the god that people are praying to today, but is it the Presence, the ground of our existence, is it the ‘I am’ that is shrouded in mystery?
I finish by repeating that Quaker ministry from the 17th century that I am so very fond of, and which describes the only theology that I know by experience in the process of centring down in our silent meetings, ‘In stillness is fullness, in fullness is nothingness, in nothingness are all things.’ Can we say more than that?
Phil Gaskell
22.05.2020