with the possibility that there is no God and we really are on our own and this may be all there is.
Now I realize lots of people have questions and convictions and doubts along those lines—that’s nothing new. But in my case, it was an Easter Sunday morning, and I was a pastor. I was driving to the church services where I’d be giving a sermon about how there is a God and that God came here to Earth to do something miraculous and rise from the dead so that all of us could live forever.
And it was expected that I would do this passionately and confidently and persuasively with great hope and joy and lots of exclamation points. !!!!!!!
That’s how the Easter sermon goes, right? Imagine if I’d stood up there and said, “Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I gotta be honest with you: I think we’re kinda screwed.”
Doesn’t work, does it?
I should pause here and say that when you’re a pastor, your heart and soul and paycheck and doubts and faith and hopes and struggles and intellect and responsibility are all wrapped up together in a life/job that is very public. And Sunday comes once a week, when you’re expected to have something inspiring to say, regardless of how you happen to feel or think about God at the moment. This can create a suffocating tension at times, because you want to serve people well and give them your very best, and yet you’re also human. And in my case, full of really, really serious doubts about the entire ball of God wax.
That Easter Sunday was fairly traumatic, to say the least, because I realized that without some serious reflection and study and wise counsel I couldn’t keep going without losing something vital to my sanity. The only way forward was to plunge headfirst into my doubts and swim all the way to the bottom and find out just how deep that pool went. And if I had to, in the end, walk away in good conscience, then so be it. At least I’d have my integrity.
This book, then, is deeply, deeply personal for me. Much of what I’ve written here comes directly out of my own doubt, skepticism, and dark nights of the soul when I found myself questioning—to be honest—everything. There is a cold shudder that runs down the spine when you find yourself face-to-face with the unvarnished possibility that we may in the end be alone. To trust that there is a divine being who cares and loves and guides can feel like taking a leap—across the ocean. So when I talk about God and faith and belief and all that, it’s not from a triumphant, impatient posture of “Come on, people—get with the program!” I come to this topic limping, with some bruises, acutely aware of how maddening, confusing, frustrating, infuriating, and even traumatic it can be to talk about God.
What I experienced, over a long period of time, was a gradual awakening to new perspectives on God—specifically, the God Jesus talked about. I came to see that there were depths and dimensions to the ancient Hebrew tradition, and to the Christian tradition which grew out of that, that spoke directly to my questions and struggles in coming to terms with
how to conceive of who God is
and what God is
and why that even matters
and what that has to do with life in this world,
here and now.
Through that process, which is of course still going on, the doubts didn’t suddenly go away and the beliefs didn’t suddenly form nice, neat categories. Something much more profound happened. Something extraordinarily freeing and inspiring and invigorating and really, really helpful, something thrilling which compels me to sit here day after day, month after month, and write this book.
Which leads me to two brief truths about this book before we go further.
First, I’m a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. I realize that for some people, hearing talk about Jesus shrinks and narrows the discussion about God, but my experience has been the exact opposite. My experiences of Jesus have opened my mind and my heart to a bigger, wider, more expansive and mysterious and loving God who I believe is actually up to something in the world.
Second, what I’ve experienced time and time again is that people want to talk about God. Whether it’s what they were taught growing up or not taught, or what inspires them or what repulses them, or what gives them hope or what fills them with despair, I’ve found people to be extremely keen to talk about their beliefs and lack of beliefs in God. What I’ve observed is that while we want more of a connection with the reverence humming within us, we often don’t know where to begin or what steps to take or what that process even looks like.
So if, in some small way, this book could provide some guidance along these lines, I’d be ecstatic. In saying that, I should be clear here about one point: this is not a book in which I’ll try to prove that God exists. If you even could prove the existence of the divine, I suspect that at that moment you would in fact be talking about something, or somebody, else.
This is a book about seeing, about becoming more and more alive and aware, orienting ourselves around the God who I believe is the ground of our being, the electricity that lights up the whole house, the transcendent presence in our tastes, sights, and sensations of the depth and dimension and fullness of life, from joy to agony to everything else.
Now, about where we’re headed in the following pages.
This book centers around three words. They aren’t long or technical or complicated or scholarly; they’re short, simple, everyday words, and they’re the foundation on which everything we’re going to cover rests.
These three words are central to how I understand God, and if I could CAPS LOCK THEM THE WHOLE WAY THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, I would; or write them in the sky or etch them in blood (on second thought, maybe not) or graffiti them on the side of your house (let’s not do this either, though I’d love to see what Banksy would do with them), because they’re the giant, big, loud, this-one-goes-to-eleven idea that animates everything we’re going to explore in the following pages.
They’ve unleashed in me new ways of thinking about and understanding and most importantly experiencing God. They’ve made my life better, and my hope is that they will do the same for you.
But before we get to those three words, we first have two others words we’re going to cover. (Nice buildup, huh?)
It’s these two words that will set us up for the three words that form the backbone of the book.
First, we’ll talk about being open, because when we talk about God we drag a massive amount of expectations and assumptions into the discussion with us about how the world works and what kind of universe we’re living in. Often God’s existence is challenged in the conversation about what matters most in the modern world because haven’t we moved past all of that ancient, primitive, superstitious thinking? We have science after all, and reason and logic and evidence. What does God have to do with the new challenges we’re facing and knowledge we’re acquiring? Quite a lot, actually, because the universe, it turns out, is way, way weirder than any of us first thought. And that weirdness will demand that we be open.
So first, Open.
Then we’ll talk about talking, because when we talk about God, we’re using language, and language both helps us and fails us in our attempts to understand and describe the paradoxical nature of the God who is beyond words.
First open,
then Both.
And then, after those two words,
we get to the three
