Catching the wind

Timothy Pitt-Payne offers a personal reflection on belief in God

We used to believe in God… We knew that there was a Person who made us, loved us, and cared for us. God knew everything and could do anything, and his goodness was without limit.

God was like the best parent you could possibly imagine, but infinitely better. Whatever happened, we knew that everything was all right – when things went wrong it was only temporary, because God would put it right in the end. We were strong and courageous, because we shared in God’s infinite strength. God spoke to us and told us what to do, and our greatest delight was to do the will of God.

Then God died.

God was choked by all the suffering around us. The world we found ourselves in seemed, as far as we could tell, not to care for us at all. In fact, it was constantly trying to kill us, often in very unpleasant ways. It was a dangerous world, and none of us got out of it alive.

So what was God doing? Why had God put us in a world like this, if he cared for us so much? Why didn’t God step in and stop our suffering? Perhaps God couldn’t. Perhaps God didn’t choose to, or didn’t care.

God froze to death in the enormous spaces of the Universe. We could tell that there were countless multitudes of stars, and we were on a small planet circling just one of them. We knew that our lives were very short, and the life of the Universe was unimaginably long. When people told us that God had made the Universe for our sake, we laughed at them.

God fell silent. We no longer knew what to do next, because God no longer spoke to us. We had to make up our own lives out of nothing, because there was nobody to tell us how to live.

So we found ourselves alone, orphaned. We were conscious beings, in a Universe that was unconscious. We were loving beings, in a Universe that was hostile or indifferent. We were meaning-seeking beings, in a Universe without meaning. We were a contradiction, an absurdity. All we could do was to face up to our predicament as bravely as we could. The more we tried to deny the truth about our condition, the worse it would be for us when denial became impossible to sustain.

But then God rose from the dead.

We stopped seeing ourselves as separate from our world. Rather, we were woven into the fabric of our world.

Our world was trying very hard to kill us, true – but then, it had worked very hard to bring us to life in the first place. You could say that the world was hostile or indifferent. But you could say with equal validity that the world was gracious. We were caught up in a web or net that was pulsing with life.

Everything that mattered to us – consciousness, meaning, purpose, love, goodness – had emerged from within this world, and hence was a property of the world, not just of ourselves. And so too the divine, the sacred, the holy. Out of the middle of the world, God was reborn.

We recovered our sense of amazement. It was a wonder and a mystery to us that there should be anything at all – not how the world was, but that it was. Every creature that existed took part in and bore witness to this mystery. God was the name of the mystery.

Every human creature – every living thing – was a different expression of the world. You could not love a person in isolation. When you loved a person, you loved the world in them, and them in the world.

The demonic was also an emergent property of the world. There was an ocean of darkness as well as an ocean of light. It seemed that destruction was the shadow cast by creation, a shadow that creation could not escape. But the darkness did not lead us to despair. It seemed to us that the destructive power tended to destroy itself; while the creative power tended to sustain itself in being, even at the cost of allowing a space within which the destructive power could operate. The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.

God was no longer a Person, but God was relational. We knew God in and through our connections with one another and with the world. Sometimes you could relate to God as to a person. We started to talk to God again.

Once more we tried to find the will of God – though we knew that this, too, was a metaphor. Imagine a surveyor looking at a flood plain, and saying, where does the water want to go? We looked at the world and asked, where does God want to go?

Looking back, we found it hard to explain how the change had come about.

There hadn’t been a single, sudden moment of transformation. There had been a series of small things, hints and nudges and leadings that had brought us to a new understanding.

We felt the wind in our sails once more. And now our task was to catch the wind, and see where it took us.

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