This

by Michael Gungor

  So, setting aside the question of whether God exists or not for a moment, who or what should we even think of when someone uses the word God?

  Good luck on finding a single, agreeable answer on that question. Even within the Bible of a single religion, you find a God who both commands people to love their enemies23 and for his people to commit genocide.24 Even with the same author (Paul) within the same New Testament of the same Bible, you can find both a view of God with whom “there is no more male or female”25 and a view of a God who wants women to cover their heads,26 to remain silent in the church,27 and not have authority over a man because it was Eve who was deceived, not Adam.28 Still, as varied as the theological views of God may be within Christianity and in the Bible itself—whether God is the angry bearded guy in the sky or the loving All in All in which we live and move and have our being—most Christians would agree that God is the one who created the universe (even if that was by means of evolution through natural selection) and the one who raised Jesus from the dead. But this is not how other religions would think of God, obviously.

  Some of the other great religions of the world from the East, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, have a very different concept of ultimate reality (God) than the Christian one. In these stories, God is not someone who stands apart from his creation like a potter and a pot. Instead, God (Brahman, the Tao, the Void, etc.) is seen as the fundamental and ultimate reality or self that gives rise to and as everything that is. From this perspective, we are God grown from God in a way that has led us to forget who we really are. There is no fundamental divide between creation and its creator here, only the illusion of it.

  In the monotheistic religions like Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, saying “I am God” is at the top of the heresy list. Saying that sort of thing has been known to get folks in trouble—burned-alive and nailed-to-crosses levels of trouble. Why? Maybe because in the Christian understanding of God, a statement like “I am God” either is a statement of an unfathomably delusional ego or someone who does not identify with their ego, and either way, that person is dangerous. In fact, the latter is probably even more dangerous because a person who doesn’t primarily identify with their ego isn’t likely to put a lot of stock in the earthly ruling powers that be.

  “Bow before me!” says the empire! If you’re a reasonable ego, you tremble and bow. If you’re God, you’re free to laugh at yourself.

  Human empire is, after all, built on myths of authority and hierarchy and power—all silliness when one realizes that all of the suns in the universe are burning within your own heart. This is why saying “I am God” is perhaps the highest heresy in so much religious empire. If you are God, then who can we manipulate with shame and sexual mores to fall in line and cough up the cash?

  There have certainly been Christian mystics like St. Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Ávila, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and many others who have experienced and recounted a more seamless reality between creation and creator than most Christian thought is willing to allow. And, of course, there is Jesus who was a Jew, not a Christian, but is the one for whom Christianity is named, very clearly claiming unity with God. There are also a few verses here and there—“In Him we live and move and have our being”29 or “From him, through him, and to him are all things”30 or that “Christ is all and in all”31—that might hint at a more mystical union between the divine and material reality. Still, on average, Christianity would teach that God is somehow fundamentally separate from his creation. God is thought of as a single divine being in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who created the universe by his word like a potter forming his clay.

  In most Christian theology, human sin deepens the fundamental divide between God and his creation in a way that can only be bridged or restored through Jesus, the only begotten Son of God. Through Jesus, God can dwell within us, and through faith in Christ, we can dwell with God for all of eternity. Still, even in the restoration of the relationship between God and humankind through Jesus, the Christian imagination usually maintains a strict fundamental boundary between the creator and the created. We may be invited into communion with God for eternity, but not into full union with God as God. Other “monotheistic” religions like Judaism and Islam often have similar outlooks on the gulf between God and his creation, even if the specific doctrines and stories that describe how this divide is healed vary.

  In the ancient Indian and Chinese philosophies, there is no real divide between God and humans. In these stories, our sense of aloneness and alienation from our source is because we (God) are lost in our own games of make-believe and magic.

  Even for post-Christians in the West who may not be particularly concerned about heresy, saying “I am God” sounds egotistical and absurd. But this is because we are hearing it through our myths that assume the ego to be a real and separate thing from its source. In this Christian or post-Christian mythic context, saying “I am God” feels like stretching out our ego to the size of infinity because in this myth, there is no possible conception beyond the patchwork, fractured framework in which the ego is the fundamentally real, supreme, and unquestioned reality of the universe (“I think, therefore I am”).

  In other mythic contexts, like Hinduism, saying “I am God” is a realization born from letting go of the false ego stories that make one feel like a someone who could be separate from God.

  Christianity sees this view of God and shakes its sternly frowned countenance—“that’s pantheism!”

  I remember when I first came across the idea of pantheism in my Christian school as a kid, and we laughed at how those primitive people on the other side of the world thought that a tree or a rock was God. Why would you worship a tree or a rock rather than the God who created them? What we failed to see was all of the cosmological and metaphysical assumptions we were making in that question, which elevated our own egos to the position of ultimate reality. More on that in a moment. First, it’s worth noting that pantheism is not native to Buddhism, Hinduism, or Taoism. It is a word Western Christians (mis)used to categorize a conception of God in all and as all. It is a bit of a misguided caricature though because it still carries with it the inherent assumption of fundamental separateness and ego supremacy of Christendom. This would be a little like defining Star Wars plot points with Star Trek terms. They are different mythic universes. Saying that Luke “beamed up” his light saber is not quite right.

  In these so-called “pantheistic” myths from places like India, China, and Japan, the universe is not thought of in the same way as it is in the empires built from European Christendom. In the Christian imagination, the universe is usually felt to be a set of fundamentally separate things and events. In the Hindu imagination, God is not simply the sum of a bunch of separate things, as the Christian term “pantheism” infers. Nor would they claim that a rock or tree as a separate thing or event has the power to (in and by itself) create or sustain a universe. Pantheism, then, is a word used on the outside of the Eastern stories and rarely by one who understands those perspectives.

  Today, as I survey the ancient “tree” stories and how different the universes are in their tellings, I find value in both the Christian and Hindu imagination. The assumed separateness at the core of Christianity has, for example, amplified the worth of the individual in ways that certain aspects of Indian culture, like the caste system, have not. Christian cosmology and theology have made room for ideas like equality, social justice, body autonomy, and the pursuit of individual happiness in ways that are more difficult to imagine from the perspective of the beggar and the prince being essentially one and the same Godhead.

  Still, every good thing has its limits, and I have found that there is a cost to the egocentrism inherent in Christianity, and a truth, wisdom, and beauty in the stories of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism that are missing from the traditional Christian imagination almost entirely.

  To a Christian, the idea that Christianity is
inherently egocentric might be a foreign or disagreeable concept. Christianity is supposed to be about Jesus, right? We learned in Christian school that our faith was not about ourselves but about God and “his story” (history . . . wah wah wah—that’s that edgy Christian-school humor). But I would like to suggest that all of Christianity’s it’s-not-about-me talk is actually a very clever way for egos to reign as the supreme reality in the Christian myth.

  Let’s go back to the Bible again. Before Copernicus came along in the sixteenth century, claiming heretically that the earth revolved around the sun, everybody32 thought that Earth was literally the center of the universe. This view of reality where a tiny, young (approximately six thousand years old, according to the biblical genealogies) universe literally revolved around the human ego was the cosmological viewpoint that the Bible was written out of. There are over two hundred verses that refer to the world as being some sort of unmoving object with a dome spread out above it. Isaiah speaks of God being “enthroned above the circle of the earth.” In Daniel 4, there is a tree that grew so high that one could see it “to the end of all the earth.” The entire Bible envisions the universe as a three-tiered reality where the earth is a flat, stationary disk at the center of the cosmos, above which there is a “firmament” that separated the heavens from the earth, and below which is Sheol, the place of the dead. Even God took his proper place on the stage of this human-centered universe by making his home “up there” in the heavens.

  In the creation narrative of Genesis, God takes five days to set the stage by creating the rest of the universe before he finally gets to the grand finale of the sixth day when he makes his masterpiece, his pièce de résistance, his magnum opus, the crown jewel of his creation that is to be crafted in his very own perfect image—meeeeeee, the human ego.

  “But how could we say that the human ego is the center of everything if human beings are such a fragile and short-lived phenomenon within the universe?” the skeptic may ask.

  Humans are only short-lived because the human ego made a mistake! (Says the story.)

  All evil, suffering, entropy, and death in the entire universe is because of a single ego’s sin. That’s how powerful the ego is! Adam, following his female partner’s lead, ate the fruit of a forbidden tree, and this caused a rift to happen within the universe between heaven and earth, which paved the way for all of this evil that we see around us.

  “Wait a minute,” the skeptic says, incredulously. “Are you saying that the reason that asteroids struck the earth, creating ice ages that killed off billions of living organisms millions of years before the first human would walk the earth was because a naked lady in a garden ate the wrong piece of fruit? Are you really saying that none of the trillions of planets in our universe have ever had life on them except our planet? Or if those planets have had or currently have life on them, are you really saying that the reason those life forms die, or feel pain in childbirth, or get cancer, or anything like that is all because of the sinful hearts within one of the species of ape on a tiny ‘pale blue dot’ in the Milky Way galaxy?”

  Yes. Whether or not that sin was seen as a literal naked woman eating fruit from the wrong tree because a talking snake tricked her, or whether that story is a metaphor for some sort of primal sinful human condition, the narrative told from Genesis to Revelation to the seven ecumenical councils of the early church to the thoughts of C. S. Lewis to the pews of First Baptist Church of Toledo last Sunday morning is that human sin caused the Fall, and the Fall is responsible for all of the evil in the universe. The Fall is what Jesus came to correct. He came to die to reverse the curse, to bridge the gap, to pay the price, to take our place and heal creation.

  I heard a famous preacher give a sermon one time about cosmology, and at the end, he showed a slide of a nebula that looked a little like a cross. Not surprising that he could find one shaped like that, given the fact that there are countless nebulae out there. (There’s also a crater on the moon that looks a lot like Mickey Mouse if anybody wants to use that information for religious purposes.) But this preacher made the cross-shaped nebula the pinnacle of his sermon. It showed how the work of the cross was at the heart of God through the entire creation process. When one stops to think about all of the implications of God setting up the entire universe in precisely the right way so that approximately two thousand years after Jesus was crucified, a few Christian egos could feel some sense of satisfaction by looking through a telescope and seeing a nebula that looked sort of like the instrument that the Romans used to crucify God’s son with, it really is staggering how far the ego can and does go with its storytelling in order to reify and center itself as the supreme reality of the cosmos.

  It’s no wonder identifying oneself with God is the highest heresy in Christianity. The real God of Christianity is the human ego. It is far more orthodox and acceptable to the tradition to question the existence of God than to question the existence of an ego that could be separate from God.33

  I don’t think Jesus saw the world through the same egocentric lens that the faith named after him has tended to. He did live in a time of the three-tiered cosmological model of the universe, so he understandably still spoke in ways that hinted at God being “up there”: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. . . .” But he didn’t speak of God like others did. He didn’t speak of God as some being who was far away or living in a temple who had to be appeased. He spoke in relational and identity terms that were so intimate as to be considered heretical by the religious powers of the day.34

  By the way, after letting Jesus go as some exclusive “lord and savior” for my eternally extended ego, I was eventually able to, thanks to people like Ram Dass and the wisdom within the mythical structures of the Far East, hear his words anew. For so many years, I held firmly onto the belief that Jesus was the clearest picture of God—that really important thought-idol that lived somewhere out there—and I thought I needed to believe in Jesus in order for my ego to be accepted by God. I was told that I had to believe the right things about this Jesus if I wanted to be in paradise rather than burning forever in hell after I died.

  It would be difficult to misunderstand Jesus more than this. What, after all, is more egocentric than our views about the “afterlife”? And I’m not just talking about Christians here. There are billions of people from nearly every tradition who live their entire lives around the idea of an afterlife, doing everything they can to ensure that they and their loved ones go to Heaven, or have a good next birth, or get a bunch of virgins in paradise, or have their own planets to chill out on with all their wives and spirit babies.

  I think that most people use the stories of disembodied souls, reincarnation, or an afterlife as a really clever way of reifying the ego—as another way of feeling that “I” am fundamentally separate from THIS. Like a wave assuming that it will become a wave again somewhere else in the ocean after it crashes against the shore or a fist assuming that there’s some metaphysical afterfist up in the clouds where fists go after hands open. For many of us, our ego stories are so substantial, we have extended our stories in our minds as far as they can go—to an infinite existence beyond the grave. And again, maybe there really is some sort of illusory separation from the One that somehow contains my memories and mythical “self” constructs from this life. Maybe the individual “I” story does continue beyond the grave in other stories for a while somehow, before reuniting with Brahman in full. I don’t know. I don’t personally have any memories of dying before.35 But even if there were an afterlife, the questions would still remain, what is the ultimate Ground that keeps the souls coming back around? Who keeps the heavenly harps in tune? What could there ever be but the infinite, omnipresent THIS?

  Because I grew up interpreting Jesus’s words through this faulty lens that was based on extending the existence of the small sense of “I” that is the ego through eternity, I never could hear the true wisdom of his gospel. Here was this man who said things like, “when you do this fo
r the least of these, you do it for me.” He identified not only with an individual ego but with all of humanity—with the poor, sick, and imprisoned. He identified not only as human but as God. “He is the vine, we are the branches.” “Whenever you see me, you see the Father.” He sought that “we would be one” as he and his Father are one.

  Can you hear these words? I didn’t used to be able to. I was like the ground, full of thorns that choked out the truth of the words. I used to think that verses like “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but through me,” meant that Jesus was some sort of narrow door that kept the riffraff out of Heaven. Now I see that Jesus was not speaking from that place of separation—nobody sees the sun but through its light. It’s all one, and Jesus saw it, yet he was still a man with great compassion who walked among the poor and oppressed, bringing healing, forgiveness, and love. He lived in a time of great oppression. His land was under occupation from a brutal foreign empire, yet his advice was, “Look at the birds.” People were being crucified. Their lands, homes, and lives snatched away. “Look at the flowers.” Their identity attacked and dismissed. “Don’t worry about tomorrow.” Jesus was free.

  But being free didn’t mean that he didn’t care about the suffering of humanity. Jesus didn’t just escape into his meditation cave to live in constant bliss (although he did escape the noise of the world quite often). Jesus wept. He got angry and overturned tables. He chastised religious leaders, calling them hypocrites, vipers, and whitewashed tombs. He taught people that God was most clearly found in the unwanted segments of society and that the Kingdom of God would overturn the evil of the world they found themselves in. But the fight would not be like most thought it should be. It would not be with swords or horses or armies, but in being free like a child. The war against oppression would be fought by loving their enemies and blessing those who persecuted them.