For God’s sake: Neil Morgan’s thought for the week

Neil Morgan

| Photo: by Adrian Dascal on Unsplash

In Meeting for Worship recently, I was moved by the image of someone I know who washes his car nearly every day. I was tempted to say he did it ‘religiously’.

The theologian Paul Tillich defined the religious as that which is of ‘ultimate concern’. So the ‘object’ of religion – which we sometimes call ‘God’ – could be conceived of as a placeholder for that. In a secular age, people can be subtly told that they have no right to speak of this ultimate concern, only of personal concerns. We are ‘getting above ourselves’. It seems we are groping, in some ill-defined spiritual haze, toward transcendence. But transcendence, we are told again, also does not exist. It is a metaphysical mistake. We should not ‘go there’.  But can we be – should we try to be – in contact with the ‘ultimate concern’ inside us?

In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, the young heroine Lyra uses a knife to open windows to parallel universes of possibility. But, at the end of the last volume, she is told that all these windows must, from now on, be tightly closed ‘because if you thought that any still remained, you would spend your life searching for one, and that would be a waste of the time you have. You have other work than that to do, much more important and valuable, in your own world. There will be no travel outside it anymore.’ (The Amber Spyglass, Chapter 37.)

We do not map the word ‘God’ onto the meaning of things like cars. It seems to me that the grammar of it instead maps onto the transcendent mystery of the world. According to Augustine, to have faith is ‘in believing to love, in believing to delight, in believing to walk towards God, and be incorporated amongst the limbs or members of God’s body.’ That is an odd way of talking, isn’t it? It’s certainly a strange turn of phrase in the car-washing twenty-first century. Nevertheless, I think I can see where Augustine was coming from.

In like manner I think the erasure of the word ‘God’ (and other words such as ‘worship’, and ‘prayer’) from Quaker vocabulary would be a signal not that God has actually been erased, but that our humanity had atrophied. It would be a sort of spiritual dementia – the forgetting of the deeper aspects of human meaning, a closure of several windows to aspects of ourselves, not to an old Man in the Sky.

In Quaker practice, we are invited to respond to a personal ‘ultimate concern’. This has both immanent and transcendent resonances.

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