Naming the Unnameable. Dr. Rev. Matthew Fox

To give love and to receive love? How great is love, how vast, how without limitation? Do all creatures love in some way?

      Just today I read the story of a wounded dog, a Doberman named Khan, who after just four days into a new and adopted family with a 17-month-old baby saved that baby’s life by suddenly picking it up by its diaper and tossing it across the yard. At first the bystanders thought the dog was attacking the baby—until they realized the dog took sick very suddenly. Rushing it to the veterinarian they learned he had been bitten by one of the most venomous snakes on the planet—the Mulga—and Khan was near death for days as the vets struggled to save its life. Instead of killing the baby the dog saved its life, had intervened when he saw the snake approaching the tiny child, and put its own life on the line. As it turned out the dog lived. And the child too. Love among the animals. This too is love, this too is God present.

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      God Is Goodness

      Julian of Norwich tells us that “I saw that God is everything that is good and energizing…. and the goodness that everything possesses is God.” If she is correct and all beings carry goodness, is this another way of experiencing the omnipresence of God—God as the goodness in all things? God is the goodness within goodness. Our experiences of goodness then constitute our experiences of God. We need to be hunter-gatherers after goodness therefore.

      Meister Eckhart, when asked how you know a good person, responds: “A good person praises good people.” To praise is to recognize goodness—and rejoice at it by celebrating it. We need to become hunter-gatherers for praise. Aquinas teaches that God “is sheer goodness” and is “the fount of all goodness” and since goodness of itself is generous, “God is supremely good and therefore supremely generous.” Hart concurs: “The good is nothing less than God himself, in his aspect as the original source and ultimate end of all desire: that transcendent reality in which all things exist and in which the will has its highest fulfillment….Our longing for the good is an aboriginal longing for God.”

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      God Is the One to Whom We Give Our Thanks

      If we are surrounded by goodness and take goodness in so as to praise it where we find it, then we are urged to give thanks for life, for existence, for the goodness tasted therein. When Dorothy Day, an atheist and communist at the time, became pregnant she was so overcome by the beauty of bearing a new living being inside her that she converted to Christianity. Why? “Because I had to give thanks to someone,” she said. God is the One to whom we render our Thanks.

      We need to make a simple return, Hart says, “to that original apprehension of the gratuity of all things” a deep response that is not neutral but that is grateful to “the limitless beauty of being, which is to say, upon the beauty of being seen as a gift that comes from beyond all possible beings.” Thomas Aquinas considers gratitude to be the very essence of healthy religion: to be religious is to be thankful. One is never half-full of thanks—one is thank-full.

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      God Is Existence, Being and Isness

      Eckhart says “God is being” and a “fountain of being” and Aquinas says: “God is pure existence….God is essential existence and all other things are beings by participation.” Deepak Chopra writes: “God is not a mythical person—he is Being itself.” He elaborates: “The vast physical mechanism we call the universe behaves more like a mind than like a machine. How did mind ever find a way to manifest as the physical world?…The very fact that anything exists is supernatural—literally beyond the rules of the natural world.” The true miracle is existence itself.

      Hart underscores the uniqueness and the necessity of God as being when he observes that “all physical reality is contingent upon some cause of being as such, since existence is not an intrinsic physical property, and since no physical reality is logically necessary.” He recognizes that “the ultimate source of existence cannot be some item or event that has long since passed away or concluded, like a venerable ancestor or even the Big Bang itself—either of which is just another contingent physical entity or occurrence—but must be a constant wellspring of being, at work even now.” Aquinas holds the very same perspective when he says: “God’s work whereby God brings things into being must not be taken as the work of a craftsman who makes a box and then leaves it. For God continues to give being.” Indeed, God “continually pours out existence into things.” Rabbi Heschel concurs when he says Creation “is not an act that happened once upon a time, once and for ever. The act of bringing the world into existence is a continuous process. God called the world into being, and that call goes on….Every instant is an act of creation.”

      Hart makes a stern judgment about our culture when he declares that we are out of touch with being: we “may well be the social order that has ventured furthest away from being in its quest to master beings.” The specialness of the divine Being and its relationship to being resides in the fact that “nothing within the cosmos contains the ground of its own being.” Because “it is far easier to think about beings than about being as such….we therefore always risk losing sight of the mystery of being behind the concepts we impose upon it.”

      Eckhart defines creation as “the giving of being” and says that “Isness is God.” He is saying that all being is a representation of Divinity. This would echo Aquinas’ teaching that “to exist is the most perfect thing of all, for compared to existence, everything else is potential.”

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      God Is the Ground of Being

      Divinity is to be found in the depth of things, the foundation of things, the profundity of things. We all have a depth, a ground, a presence and there, says Eckhart, lies Divinity, for God is the ground of being and “God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.” Thich Nhat Hanh agrees when he says, “all notions applied to the phenomenal worlds…are transcended. The greatest relief we can obtain is available when we touch the ultimate, ‘Tillich’s ‘ground of being.’…Life is no longer confined to time and space.” Thich Nhat Hanh equates “nirvana” and “God” and “ground of being” when he says: “God as the ground of being cannot be conceived of. Nirvana also cannot be conceived of. If we are aware when we use the word ‘nirvana’ or the word ‘God’ that we are talking about the ground of being there is no danger in using these words.”

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      God Is the Cause of Wonder

      Being is not just a fact or a thing. Being fills us with wonder for there is an “immense preciousness of being,” says Rabbi Heschel, which “is not an object of analysis but a cause of wonder.” Heschel asks: “Who lit the wonder before our eyes and the wonder of our eyes?” We become struck by an “unmitigated wonder” and we ask about the universe: “Who could believe it? Who could conceive it?” And “How shall we ever reciprocate for breathing and thinking, for sight and hearing, for love and achievement?” Because of being, an “awareness of the divine…intrudes first as a sense of wonder.”

      Einstein concurs when he says: “There is no true science which does not emanate from the mysterious. Every thinking person must be filled with wonder and awe just by looking up at the stars.” Awe moves us beyond knowledge to wisdom. Aquinas observes that what the scientist, the poet and the philosopher all share in common is this: Each “is concerned with the marvelous.” Indeed, “amazement (admiratio) is the beginning of philosophy and science” and “one meditates on creation in order to view and marvel at divine wisdom.”

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      God Is the Mind of the Universe

      At the conclusion of his ground-breaking book, The Self-Organizing Universe, physicist Erich Jantsch asserts: “God is…the mind of the universe.” He defines “mind” as “self-organization dynamics at many levels, as a dynamic which itself evolves. In this respect, all natural history is also history of mind.” Jantsch draws an accurate conclusion when