Yes, it is true; I am going to talk about God. I’m well aware that some of you are already smirking.
“Who talks about God anymore?” I can hear someone say. “Is this some kind of joke?”
Some readers of the more patient persuasion may lean closer to the printed page and mumble, “This could be interesting, but I doubt it. I’m sure I’ve heard this all before.” Others still may merely have to glance at the word ‘God’ and this will be enough. Without reading a word more, they will rise from their seats, slam the offending material onto a nearby table and promptly walk out of the room.
I believe that as I am not a card-carrying member of any of the super-faiths my experience of God may not be looked upon too favourably. I am not alone in this position. I think that there are millions, if not billions of people, who without their banner of belief feel that their own communion with God must be stranger than late night television, and best kept to themselves. Many people think, “What could a mere nobody in the scheme of things have to say about such an important subject.” Yet individuals in established churches can talk earnestly and seriously about all sorts of experiences they have had with God. The other members of the congregation will listen quietly to what is being said, and no matter how many times they may move their eyebrows up and down while listening, they will not doubt for a minute that the speaker has communicated with a transcendent spirit.
I believe every woman and man has had an experience of God and that all human beings have had communion with God, whether they recognize it as such or not, whether they remember it consciously or not. I believe God is part of our very being and that we may be aware of this being so, but we cannot easily speak about it. We could speak more easily about a remote part of a country we are unfamiliar with than about God. We find that it easier to speak to God than it is to speak about God. Why is this? What is wrong in our lives that we can no longer identify God and we can no longer talk freely and openly about our own feeling of divinity? What is it that prevents us from communicating what we feel is sacred? Why have so many of us given up trying to illuminate that part of us that is divine?
The belief that we are part of God and that God is part of us, this belief has never really been looked upon favorably in the West. This belief is usually seen as blasphemy; the apartness must be preserved. Yet to think of our experience of God as something that comes from outside ourselves, from outside our world, our universe and our experience, this usually leaves us waiting or hoping for an epiphany that never comes. It is like waiting for a train that we know it is imperative to catch, and yet we have become so dispirited and worn down that we only look for this train now and again, and only out of the corner of our eye. We may even have forgotten what it is we are waiting for in the first place. Most importantly though, we have forgotten that it is incredibly important that this train does come.
The heart of this dilemma is that God will always be, and has always been the great unknown, and yet there are times when there is nothing we could be more sure of than that God exists and it is our communion with this deity that feeds our lives. Believers who don’t realize this paradox, or do not know what a paradox is, usually find themselves in trouble. They have conflict in their own souls and they usually conflict with others. When you ask these believers what their God is like you can see that this deity has many of their own characteristics. This God exemplifies what they see to be their own best and most noble qualities. This ineffable being, therefore, cannot help but come across as parochial and human. A description of God given by a Catholic Christian in South America would have little if any relation to the God described by an Anglican Christian living in Great Britain.
We can clearly see in retrospect how the Gods of the Ancient Greeks had the same and psychology as those who worshipped them and that they embodied the different ways that people pictured the divine. Yet learned Catholics, Baptists and Anglicans of the Christian Church feel free to say that obviously the Ancient Greek Gods didn’t exist because they were too human. The main point generally made by Christians is that the Greek Gods were not always benevolent. To the Christian, part of the very make up of God is his benevolence. These same Christians see the Muslim God Allah as too proud and the Indian Gods as too strange or foreign and they therefore dismiss them as being irrelevant to their own experience of God – which they may be.
It is only when a decision is made that these foreign or strange Gods should be irrelevant to everyone’s experience of God that blindness begins. This type of Christian believer looks upon other people’s different beliefs in God as a distortion of the reality of God. It is hard to know what a person with these beliefs would think if they visited a Japanese shrine, a Hindu temple or a mosque, and saw such obviously earnest, heartfelt worship taking place there. Would they think that these believers mean well but ultimately they are deluded? Would they think that these people share more or less the same belief as Christians but that they need to be told about Jesus Christ? Or would they think what these people are worshipping is wrong and that they should be converted to the right faith that they believe is the Christian experience of God?
One has only to walk through the Old City of Jerusalem to see how absolute belief in the reality of one definitive God can seem unreal. From the moment I walked through Damascus Gate on the evening of my arrival in Jerusalem I was transfixed. The wall that surrounds the Old City was just as I had imagined it would be: tall, dark, foreboding and solid. The market stalls, the incense, the heavily robed Hassidic Jews, the Dome of the Rock, the long thin walkways, the penetrating call to prayer; this is what I came upon when I walked within these walls. As I had an avid interest in all the religions represented here I walked from one lane way to the next in a daze. The Old City of Jerusalem is split up into four quarters - there is the Muslim quarter, the Jewish quarter, the Christian quarter and the quarter of the more obscure Armenian Orthodox Church. Within these quarters there are numerous factions. In the Christian quarter there are over ten denominations represented, ranging from the Greek Orthodox to the Mormons. Judaism is also as seemingly disparate with Hassidic Jews worshipping next to Black Hebrews - black Americans claiming that they are Jews descended from the original tribe of Judah. Some other groups also represented are the Messianic Jews and the Samaritans. I will briefly describe one of these many splinter groups of the Islamic faith, the Sufis, to show you that these are not merely names, but a whole way of living and experience of God. I was very interested in the beliefs of the Sufis when I set off for Jerusalem four years ago. The Sufis, the mystics of the Islamic faith, talk about their communion with God in a way with which I strongly identify.
A major part of Sufism is the way in which believers try to cleanse themselves of consciousness so that they can destroy the feeling of everyday reality - the difference between myself as a person and God, or myself as a person and the world that is outside me. By doing this they come to an encounter with God or even become God. Sufis believe in meditation and an ascetic lifestyle that they believe induces a feeling that one is intimately connected to God. This feeling of Godness can also be brought about through dancing which brings about a feeling of ecstasy and a whirling drunkenness. What Sufis feel during these experiences of God comes from being immune to context - the conscious mind becomes almost non-existent. The Sufis in history tended to stay away from the cities and flourished in the more remote areas - they were very popular in Central Asia and the former Soviet Union. Sufis were also very successful missionaries for Islam. The Sufi belief has many parallels with the Indian mystics in that they advocate an inner war on behalf of faith to eliminate temptations and obstacles to true obedience to God.
The Sufis believed in returning to the source of God’s being where they would experience God’s immediate divine presence in divine integration. Sufis most well known leader was Al-Hallaj who was a strong advocate of Jesus and once said that he was the “Real ,” which was the same as saying he was God. Al-Hallaj also talked freely about his divine experiences. In 922 CE he was put to death on the cross for blasphemy, as Jesus was some 900 years before him. Al-Hallaj and Jesus both died for very similar reasons and with a very similar message: the Kingdom of God is within you. There can be no doubt now that I am digressing, but isn’t it through digressions that we come upon new worlds of experience and ideas? By looking very briefly at Sufism we can see that although superficially it is a mere speck on the face of Islam, it is nonetheless a belief in its own right. Along with the beauty in which the Muslims pray and the seriousness in which they take their religious duty, Sufism is a part of the Islamic faith that I really admire.
I had to have my eyes open to find Sufism. This belief was certainly not paraded in front of me as a child. I, like many others, could have grown old thinking that because I was dissatisfied with what was represented as religious experience in my own culture, I was not religious and did not have a relationship with God. This is not to say that I didn’t find anything of worth in the Judeo-Christian religion with which I was brought up. It was only the church that I found totally undesirable. In fact, the Gospels and the Torah were the foremost reasons why I longed to go to Israel and Jerusalem in the first place. To be allowed to walk inside the inner sanctum that backs upon the Western (Wailing) Wall and to look upon the Hassidic Jews as they bob madly to and fro lost in prayer - this was special. To see all the books of prayer majestically piled up like pillars and to feel the energy and hum of serious worship - this was a revelation. Climbing up Mount Sinai in the middle of the night is also something I will never forget.
It takes a whole night to walk up to the summit of Mount Sinai. If you start walking up that steep path out of the desert and into the darkness of the night sky at twilight you will get to the top just before dawn. The last few hours I walked alone in an absolute trance while a warm wind fell upon me and the silence of the desert night informed me that I was in a sacred place. The stars were the only thing that provided light as I climbed the final giant steps – 3700 in all - that were carved into the rock by a monk as penance. And to feel the sheer size of Mount Sinai rocketing out of the flat desert floor; how could I possibly see myself as a mere tourist? I was a Son of God going up into the black heavens to have the Word revealed to me.
My many afternoons and evenings spent at the Mount of Olives and at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were no disappointment either. The church at the Mount of Olives has a mural of the Passion of Jesus that glows high above the altar; it is one of the most satisfying depictions of sadness that I have ever seen, and in the context, devastatingly powerful. So much beauty in faith was on display in Jerusalem and yet it was tarnished by the fierceness in which it was protected. Each group of believers seemed adamant that they could not see anything but ugliness and opposition in their neighbour’s faith. The Jews and Arabs living here have a strong reason outside their religious beliefs to look at the other as the enemy, but why Christians and Muslims should still be so wary of each other, this can only be because they know so little about the other’s religion and the people who embody it. The Jewish rabbis I came across were a good example of this isolated knowledge. I had always been very impressed by what I saw to be the rabbi’s great learning - there is no real equivalent to a rabbi in the Christian church. But when I talked to some of these rabbis and saw their places of learning, I realized that this learning was all insular. They felt that all they needed to know was contained in the Torah and the thousands of commentaries based on this book that make up the Talmud. You could spend a lifetime studying just a small fraction of this body of sacred scripture and still not know the Five Pillars of Islam. And yet these Jerusalem rabbis live and worship so close to believers in the Islamic faith!
I do not pretend to know what goes on behind closed doors in all of these faiths, but I could not and I cannot come to grips with the fact that one believer believes the other is so fundamentally wrong. And to see this so clearly in such a sacred and confined space, why this is enough to induce schizophrenia or even the famed Jerusalem syndrome - a form of madness that is not uncommon among people who visit the Holy City. Is it any wonder that so many of us are baffled? What can be made of these millions of believers who are adamant that what they see as God is the ultimate reality, and that those who don’t share this belief are lost?
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Illustrations by Angelo Madrid.