I've been thinking about God and evolution (although not in the ways you might suspect).
Since I first ran into God when I was about ten years old, I’ve been trying to figure out what I believe about God and what God might find interesting about me.
I believe deeply in God. At the same time, midway through the first year of my ninth decade, I know with certainty almost nothing at all about God
Our faith or lack of faith begins as an inheritance from our families and the culture in which we are raised.[i] As we pass through childhood and adolescence, we may learn catechisms or ritual prayers, read and memorize sacred texts, listen to sermons by faith leaders, meet friends with different religious histories. From these various moments, our faith evolves and each of us creates our own personal God or no-god.
In each of these seasons I learned new things about God, let go of beliefs that no longer worked for me, altered what I thought were fixed convictions, or changed my behavior. In the course of these shifts, some people abandon belief in God for a season or a lifetime while others discover God for the first time. That hasn't happened for me, but I can certainly understand how it might.
The result of these multiple changes is that, though we may worship and practice our beliefs with others who share our common faith or non-faith, when we sit down to talk specifics about our beliefs, each of us has a personally nuanced set of convictions. Even among my Episcopalian friends, the way we describe our experiences with God differ dramatically.
Let me show you what I mean.
Question: Do you believe in God?
You probably have a pretty quick answer to this - whether yes or no.
Question: Can you describe the God you believe in, or why you don't believe in God?
It's impossible to answer this question without weaving in your own story. How does what happened to you, and when it happened, now shape your view of God? How, if at all, do you communicate with your God? How does your belief or disbelief affect how you relate to other people or how people have related to you? How does faith affect how you earn and spend your money? Does your faith help you make difficult decisions, when there's not an obvious right or wrong answer?
I suspect that the answers to these questions would diverge wildly, depending on how our faith has evolved. I'm convinced that each of us arrives over time at a personal vision of our God, and that somehow we trust that this unique God will be our north star to lead us to wherever we’re supposed to go, like the Magi to Bethlehem.
I believe that any God or no-god worth following wants us to experience what Irenaeus, the second-century Christian bishop, wrote: The glory of God is the human person fully alive. The star I seek takes seriously my personal journey and has as its goal a story that bubbles over with liveliness. This life-enhancing God focuses not on my failures and disappointments, nor judgement and punishment, but rather on my delights and the vibrancy of my living.
I can only believe in a God who honors my current self, not who I was meant to be or still can be or should be. I can believe in a God who accepts the Rick Thyne shaped by the communities I’ve lived in and the choices I’ve made. I don’t trust any God who wants to shape me into someone other than who I am.
Imagine a God who is not disappointed in who I am, but delights in me, as is!
The Creator I believe in places no limits on my intellectual curiosity but instead honors the mind given to me. No question I may not ask. No new discovery I have to reject because it contradicts some ancient text or sacred tradition. Nothing in my imagination I cannot play with or dance to or wish for. Nothing!
I want a God who accepts and respects the entire scope of my emotional life. When I’m up or when I’m down, when I’m afraid or full of courage, when either love or hate surge in me – wherever I am in my emotional world, I want a God who understands me and who will sit with me in precisely this place, present with me until I’m ready to move to a different place. I want to share this same experience of being present with my friends and family and clients. I think this is what it means to love someone.
I want a God who is comfortable with my body. I can be physically as fresh as a puppy or just a tired old man; I still lift weights at the gym but every morning have to make certain my feet are steady beneath me before I stand up from the side of the bed; I can be post-prostate-surgery flaccid or (thanks to the wonders of modern medicine) gratefully erect; some days I’m physically fit as a fiddle, others as flat as a pancake. I want a God who respects and rejoices in this very body that is not the prison-house of my soul but the source and the fabric of all that is alive in me.
I want a God who embraces my mortality. When I turned sixty, I realized any derivative of the word young that I still tried to apply to myself was fraudulent. When I turned eighty, I realized that any failure to include the word old to define myself was equally fraudulent. I cannot for the life of me remember certain names or places. My hearing is in slow but steady decline. And where are my damned keys? I take a handful of supplements every morning and a handful of medications every night to manage my aging blood pressure and cholesterol levels, bolster my diminishing testosterone, and relieve the chronic aches in my back and surgically replaced knees.
I’m already a year older than the life expectancy for a white male in the USA. Lucky me. My mother died in the mid-1990s, at 84, so I’ve believed since then that this is the proper age at which to die. Or not - the closer I get to 84 the more I want to cast doubt on this conviction. But I’m aware that I’m playing with numbers; at some time not too far into the future, my number’s up. And I want a God who will walk with me through each stage of my diminishment, until I am no longer.
I leave the question of life after death to the same uncertainty I have about whether God exists. In both cases, I certainly hope it’s true, but in neither case is there evidence one way or the other that gives me confidence that what I wish for is actually real.
I am advocating for a curious, imaginative, evolving faith. My relationship with God is a work in progress, which began when I was ten years old and is as yet unfinished. Any God worth believing in is not threatened by the evolution of my thoughts or the changes in my faith, but delights in my ongoing efforts to understand what is beyond understanding.
Blessings,
Rick
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe now.