Lately I’ve been reading Godless for God’s Sake: Nontheism in Contemporary Quakerism to prepare for the aforementioned retreat on that topic. I should’ve read it ages ago, but didn’t because I was always either too broke or it was out of stock. Plus, there was plenty to read online.
The following heavy passage comes from James Riemermann’s contribution, Mystery: It’s What We Don’t Know –
When the most thoughtful believers speak to me of God, it almost always comes through to me as a heightened awareness of relationship. Grammatically, God is a being, an entity, but what Friends tend to describe as God seems more like an event, an encounter, that occurs when a self-aware individual becomes intensely aware of relationship—with another human being, with a community of Friends, with the complex web of beings and resources that sustain life on earth, with the sun that feeds energy to that web, with the entire cosmos out of which emerged absolutely everything we value. What a breathtaking moment is that encounter! Here I am, living my life as if I were a single soul, a person, a mind mysteriously sprung from a physical body. And in an instant it dawns on me that I am not just myself. On the contrary, the energy of the universe flows through me, and at my death will pass through me and back into everything that exists! My God! This is no metaphor, there is nothing magical or supernatural about it, nor is it something more out there with which I can occasionally commune. Rather, it is the essential, undeniable, literal, constant reality of being human in the real world. We are a part of everything, and it is all linked together.
For the moment, let’s call it God. It may or may not be eternal, but it certainly began long before I was born, before life of any kind emerged, and it will live well beyond all of us. What, then, is the experience of God? As mentioned earlier, everything we have learned about the mind powerfully suggests that it is inextricably linked to the physical brain. When the brain is altered, happy people become sad, brilliant people become dull, gentle people become angry and violent, and sometimes entire personalities vanish without a trace. There is every reason to believe that our experience of God—that is, everything we can possibly know of God—will end with the death of our bodies. And when there are no more conscious creatures in the universe, there will be no experience of God. As far as anyone is concerned, no God. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
And there goes hope, there goes eternity, there goes nostalgia, there goes the happy ending we all yearn for. It will not do to pretend we are not disappointed. Part of that ineffable mystery of self-awareness is a built-in longing for eternity, for a connection with ultimate meaning. We don’t know why we have it, but we have it. It will not do to deny that longing, nor to nostalgically pretend we have not learned what we have learned.
Yet, right now, for a while, we have ourselves, we have each other, and we have the world. The vast, quite possibly meaningless universe out of which we emerged, and into which we will dissolve, is in our hearts, our minds and our souls, alive with meaning.
