Musing on God

I just listened (over Zoom, of course) to my church's annual Coming of Age service, where the teens tell us what they believe and what Unitarian Universalism means to them.

Every year, this service sets me musing about some aspect of my own beliefs, and sometimes I crystalize something that I have been sort-of thinking for some while.

Two things hit me this year. First, the idea that UUs can "believe whatever we want" has it backwards: the underlying truth is about responsibility, not freedom. Unitarian Universalism teaches that we are all responsible for what we believe, and that no book or authority or creed can take that responsibility away from us.

Second, I thought about God, where my beliefs are not as simple as theism or atheism. 

I believe that God can be a useful concept if you hold it the right way. In day-to-day life, we all live inside a story that we tell about the world, as if we and all the people we run into were characters in that story. We live with the purpose of making the story come out "right", according to some notion of rightness.

But the world and the people in it, ourselves included, are so much more than what our story captures. Occasionally that more-ness breaks through, and for a short time we are without a story, without a self, and without boxes to put other people into. This is both wonderful and terrifying, but without those moments we would never grow.

Used artfully, "God" can be a word in our story reminding us that our story is incomplete, and that its incompleteness makes it brittle. This kind of God points to the great mystery, the great more-ness, of the world. In times of crisis, when our stories fail, God can be a reassurance that new stories are possible, and that chaos is not the final word.

But used badly, "God" can serve the exact opposite purpose. This kind of God is just one more character inside the story we tell, and God lives in a box as confining as any other character's. We have God defined and mapped out; we always know what God wants. 

Worse, this God may be an authoritarian character who mainly wants all the other characters to stay in their boxes. If you notice something odd about your story, something that makes you wonder if you have it right, God will shout you down and tell you to ignore whatever it is you thought you saw. And if you ever try to set the story aside for a moment and look at the world beyond, you are going against God. 

So I believe in the God who breaks us out of our stories, not the God who holds us in them.