A Wordless God

Yesterday I was talking with my Spiritual Director and found myself saying something I had not really articulated before - how difficult it is to use words to describe the spiritual experience. Oh, at times I have claimed that others had co opted words like god to mean something other than what I think and experience (definitely the bearded Moses-esque grandfather figure on high). But that wasn't what occurred to me yesterday.

It is my experience and belief (and I am not claiming this to be the truth that others should believe - it is just how it occurs to me) that god is not only the life force that causes us to breathe but that which is in, through and around us in so interwoven a way that it could not even be isolated on a DNA or RNA chain. God is in the conception, and it is god that births us. God is present within us from before we were and is certainly the unifying one after we have ceased to exist on this earthly plane. Thus we are born knowing god - but if so, what happened?

We happened; words happened; events happened; and meaning happened. As we assembled a meaning and identity in our youths we left behind the one thing that we absolutely, intimately knew in search for words and meanings and skills to cope with our living life. And along came the theologians - attuned to the yearning sense inside each human - and gave us words to describe both the feeling and the source. But the horrible thing was that the words took over the experience and became the full extent of the meaning.

I was talking yesterday about how I missed the experience, of how I seemed to well up and choke on some words in hymns we sang in church. When I was pushed to identify that feeling, it resembled the longing and "missingness" I feel for my dad (who died some 41 years ago when I was only 18). I know god, and I believed in a historical Jesus, and I am awed/inspired/humbled by the thought and reaity of the crucifixion, but I was missing something, and there were no words to label that something.

I miss the being of being one with god. I know that sense and I have known that oneness. But when I try to describe it there are no words - because it comes from a knowing as old as I am that predates my knowing all these nifty theological words. I feel it tug in me and call to me to sit with it swirling around in my blood and bones and between the cells, vibratinng the chromosomes. It is a presence that is not distinguishable from my presence (when and if I am ever fully present). There may be zillions of names suggested for what that is, but I don't know them. I only know that when I don't pay attention, when I am not awake - as in fully present - I miss that and am missing who I am that I am. And isn't that what god called himself?