What God means in our context

There is a nondimensional entity of love, and it gives meaning to us all – not by obedience, but by sheer irresistibility

As, in our adult years, we wrestle with "what's it all about?", we find ourselves without answers. All other species seem quite clear about it, but not us.

Philosophers come and go, their theories last a while, and then someone encounters a 'but'. Theologians more so. Even evangelists. Look at us. Religions are laughably hostile to one another, politics ditto, and our insistently justified behaviour is murderously childish.

It seems to me that the root of all that misery is our God.

COVID-19 is helping us to identify it more closely.

You don't need to be much of a historian to recognise that We created God. There were tribes with chiefs, there were monarchies with kings, they came somehow to see themselves with Divine Rights and even powers, which translated into authority over life and death of all bodies and souls in their territory.

Modelling themselves on monarchs and monarchies, religious leaders gave themselves infallibility and authority to decide what you could and could not read, say, do, even after death – under threat of horrific punishment: a notion that is still widely clung to.

We've invented and made decisions about such concepts as eternity, infinity, omniscience, omnipotence, infallibility, and so on, and we still pedal them.

On top of that we have insisted that we, whoever we might be, are definitely right about the meaning of the cosmos and of all that is in it, and deduced – illustrating our miserable grasp of even such elementary legalities – that if I am right and you differ from me, you are wrong. What's more, in being wrong you are guilty, and must be alienated and/or punished.

You may possibly redeem your freedom to live by surrendering your freedom to Our way of answering "What's it all about?", otherwise you are condemned in ways both corporal as well as political, religious, social, relational and so on and on.

But all is not lost: you can still return to the fold by performing certain rites and rituals, and thus are free to do the same all over again. And again.

Human experience has convinced the whole world of the pre-eminence of love

So long as we have a God, I do not see how we can possibly escape this horrific situation. None of what I have written above surprises you.

Each of you will insist that it's not like that in your particular interpretation of your particular God, but with a little reflection you will find yourself compelled to yield. If you have opted for atheism – there is simply no God – your position is utterly consistent and intelligent.

But it leaves you uncomfortable: this death thing obtrudes, insisting on a better answer than that after it there must be nothing.

As it appears to me, and I have said something helpful (I hope) about it in the previous reflection, the core of all human life is the tension between fear and love.

The combination of chemical and other causes that led to the coming into being of the human person contains within itself these two forces, fear and love. If you insist on using the concept of creation – I drag my feet on it – then the Big Bang was created.

I admit, I do not know what exactly that means, but I think it spills over into dimensions way beyond our cosmic experience right now.

But let me hew to my interpretation: human experience has convinced the whole world of the pre-eminence of love over all human phenomena in terms of fulfilment.

Forget about its essential incomprehensibility: we have experienced it in countless ways, and go on doing so. Another way of making that statement is, it involves dimensions that we cannot specify.

And that has led me to submit that all the love that the cosmos experiences, in every natural being, is itself the repository of all that each one aspires to as the fulfilment of her/his life. We've given it the name love. We have diminished it by using the name God, but that really is what God means in our context: love.

I'm certainly not the first to touch that base, and you yourself could quote lots of scriptures to reinforce it.

But I think that when we diminished its reference from Love to God, we then captured the shrunken version of it and reduced it to the monster sketched earlier on these pages. There is no such person, much less a trinity or an infinite this or that.

There is a nondimensional entity of love, and it gives meaning to us all – not by obedience, but by sheer irresistibility. Where that is not our perception we have been misled, led astray.

And that is what we have done to our world. We need to get rid of God as currently advertised, and bring back the fullness of love. Otherwise fear will go on winning. God bless.

Brendan MacCarthaigh is a Christian Brother from Dublin working in India for over 50 years, mostly in Value Education with senior classes and teachers.