God in the Box


We know that everyone’s worldview helps them organize themselves to navigate their journey through life. But there is a broader influence on our movement through reality which I call a person’s Godview.

It is our nature to employ metaphors and symbols to refer to God and we get used to a myriad of shortcut ways to refer to the divine in “ordinary” life. Any way we express or think anything about God, even use of the word “God,” simplifies concepts of God. Limiting God influences how we relate to our world, especially when we lock our references and descriptions into dogmas for people’s allegiance.

But, hey, I couldn’t write this essay if we didn’t have invented ways to refer to … (okay, what are we going to call this?) … God. But there I have objectified “it”. In this we have to face our limits and give ourselves grace to use the gifts we have to contemplate “the beyond.”

There is reality beyond the verbal, the mathematical, the arts, religion, etc. We can “be still and know” as the Psalmist says (Psalm 46:10) using the word “know” to go beyond the intellect. But the ineffable experience of the beyond is a part of our nature which is bypassed by many, feared by some, simply denied by others, and explained away by psychologists like Freud. (Carl Jung broke from Freud and affirmed spirituality.)

The Objectified God

Let’s focus our discussion on those who want to be “believers,” practice some form of “believing,” and might even be zealous for God. My guess is that most of us at least have a warm spot in our hearts for God and feel pretty good that this is part of our life.

But we can’t always be thinking about God. I mean, really, there is a time and place for that. We have a book of scriptures, a building (or easy chair in the house), rituals performed (around the clock if you use YouTube), special people who organize and lead spirituality, special clothes for some of us, … wow the list of containers seems endless.

Yeah, we really, sincerely need to have containers for God, or we are just going to be completely overwhelmed by religion. Besides, what product will we promote if we can’t define God?

So, on one hand God, in order to be God, is limitless and infinite, to be clear, “not finite.” But, on the other hand, God must be accessible, comprehensible, and useful by means of our containers. (Some say that this is what Jesus came to do. — No, it’s not.) And holding both is challenging our “objectivity.”

For instance,

we’re having an exciting time discovering the incomprehensible factors of time and space as we behold the as yet unmeasured, expanding universe, and date amazing fossils from millions of years ago. But our God container says God finished creating it all in seven days by speaking words (presumably ancient Hebrew) about 6,000 years ago.

What do we do with science? View it as the enemy threatening to dispose of God? It is indeed frightening to have God disposed of. It is also a daunting task to keep re-explaining God in order to continue validating our containers, and how long can we keep that up?

Let Containers be Containers, and God be God

I truly appreciate our containers. Without them I wouldn’t have realized they were helps to grow and experience reality beyond them. To “know” God we need concrete metaphors, examples and personal manifestations, Jesus being pivotal. But even Jesus pointed out his own limits. One of our sister believers, Julian of Norwich, about 800 years ago,

came to view God no longer as another existing being,
but as existence itself.

If we focus and depend upon our containers too much, we adopt assumptions that God is just another limited being,

“supreme” but defined,
top dog but we can deal with “Him.”

To avoid “Him” obstructing our ambitions we maintain container limits in such ways as stopping science, banning books, restricting education, segmenting society, and putting down people who hold containers differing from … [whoever is in power: Christian Nationalists? Taliban? Oligarchs? Materialists? …]

Such behavior has perpetrated wars, violence, destruction, and death for centuries. But people are still imposing this limited god on the world as if we haven’t had enough chance to learn from previous failures.

The capacity for humanity to commune with uncontained God is an unexplainable phenomenon despite Freud. Containers are gifts to reveal more. Each of us in our particular combinations can be a gift revealing more of infinite God. Let us hold lightly the containers that help us to rise above them and grow into new, God-inspired ways to move ahead in boundless Life.

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