An unfortunate word
There is so much wrong with ‘God’. It is supposed to refer to an overwhelming mystery, but ‘God ‘ is really inadequate. Hard ‘g’, hard ‘d’ and little ‘o’. It may be no coincidence that it spells ‘dog ‘ backwards. There is nothing in the sound that suggests the ultimate mystery. It’s even worse if you are Jewish orthodox, where the word appears as G_d.
The word ‘God’ sounds suspiciously like the word ‘good’. Indeed, that is how St Thomas Aquinas (1225 -1274) understood it (though writing in Latin) when he produced the most elegant argument for atheism I have encountered:
“It seems that God does not exist. For if of two opposites one were infinite, the other would be altogether absent. Now “God’ means infinite goodness. If God existed therefore there would be no evil discoverable in the world. But there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist. Furthermore, it is redundant to assume multiple causes when one or a few are sufficient. Now, everything we experience can be put down either to nature or to human will. It is therefore not necessary to assume God’s existence.” (Quoted in a footnote by John Hick in “Evil and the God of Love).
However, the roots in Sanskrit have nothing to do with goodness or morality. They apparently come from Sanskrit words meaning either to pour (as a libation), or to invoke while offering sacrifice. In other words “God“ refers to the direction in which we place ourselves rather than an entity above and beyond us. But nobody understands it that way today, although within prayer and worship we use it to place ourselves in a spirit of prayer.
Many people today have a visceral reaction against the very word.
“The word God still aroused a certain antipathy. When the thought was expressed that there might be a God personal to me this feeling was intensified. I didn’t like the idea. I could go for such conceptions as Creative Intelligence, Universal Mind or Spirit of Nature, but I resisted the thought of a Czar of the Heavens, however loving His sway might be. I have since talked with scores of men who felt the same way.” (Alcoholics Anonymous p.12, 1939)
And yet we do need some form of words to use that are appropriate.
Oh Lord!
One that is much used in Christianity is “Lord”. There are three problems with this:
- 1 it is too male;
- 2 it is too patriarchal – implicitly demanding obedience;
- 3 it is a mistranslation.
The word ‘LORD’ in the Old Testament – or in translations of the Tenach (the Jewish scriptures – Law, Prophets, Writings) – is actually written in capitals to show that is not what the text says. In hundreds of instances it should be properly rendered as ‘Jehovah’, or more likely ‘Yahweh’. The reason for the change was that later, the rabbis and teachers of the Law felt that the name of God was too sacred to use, (as they do still today) so they used the vowels usually attributed to the word, (in Hebrew one does not write out vowel sounds), and then added random consonants which happened to spell the Hebrew word for ‘Lord’. So for instance, in Psalm 86 “Lord occurs eleven times, four being a mistranslation of ‘Yahweh’. In Psalm 96 all ten occurrences of ‘LORD’ are mistranslations of ‘Yahweh’.
The writer of St John’s Gospel so disliked the word that he did not use it once to refer to God. Today Liberal Jewish synagogues replace it with the phrase ‘the Eternal’, perhaps because they want to move away from patriarchy. This isn’t bad as it does link up with idea of ‘to be’, as in the original Hebrew.
‘Yahweh’ however can be useful in meditation. It may relate to the sounds of one’s breath, so it could accompany breath-focussed meditation.
Father!
Jesus’, and the author of John’s Gospel’s, favourite word was ‘Father’. Again, this is eminently usable as a form of prayer, depending on one’s own experience of one’s father. And it was constantly used by Jesus, who used the Aramaic word ‘Abba’ or ‘Dad’. It is worth noting that the chief of the Roman gods, Jupiter, has a name that comes from the head of the pantheon of gods in Sanskrit, ‘Dyans-Pita’, from the two words for sky and father. In other words, Father in heaven’! In a convent I visit, the word ‘mother’ is equally used. But both are incomprehensible outside the community of faith.
Other voices
“Allah” isn’t bad. It has an openness about it, and a pleasing flow in the sentence “La illaha illallah”, – “There is no god but God.” And it is used (in Maltese) by the Christian churches in Malta. But it carries too many Muslim associations for the average non-Muslim.
Alcoholics Anonymous uses the phrase ‘Higher Power’, which is not bad. But both the word ‘Higher’ and ‘Power’ have problems, similar to calling God ‘the Almighty’. Looking around the word we inhabit, with the challenges of populist politics and accelerating climate change, Almightiness does not seem much in evidence.
‘Great Spirit’ is a translation of the Native American tribe of the Sioux ‘Wakan Tanga’, which is probably better translated as ‘Great Mystery’. ‘Wakan’ can also be translated as ‘holy’. Not bad.
The Hindu sound ‘Om’ or ‘Aum’ has a suitable mysteriousness about it. It is Hinduism’s most sacred mantra; it is described as a sound, which is the vibration of the Supreme and which allows you to feel the whole universe. It is a reality well beyond our world of sense perception and it is often chanted at the start and end of meditation. But it is not a noun, or a verb, and cannot be used as part of any sentence.
Making sense of God
Before settling on a word or phrase, one needs some sort of understanding of what we speak. In Christian tradition there are two classic ways of referring to God, the Positive Way and the Negative Way (the Via Negativa). The positive way asserts that God is perfectly good, perfectly just, perfectly merciful, perfectly loving etc. The natural response is through worship and prayer. The Negative way is to take any such attribute and move beyond it , for the Godhead (God beyond God) is so other than us that any human definitions are inevitably more wrong than right. The natural response is silence and contemplation.
For me, a useful definition of God comes from a phrase quoted by the 12th century ‘Book of 23 Philosophers’, the 16th century satirist Rabelais, the 18th century sceptic Voltaire and going back to late pagan writings such as Hermes Trismegistus: “God is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere , the circumference nowhere.”
A useful starting point?
A possibility
What we need is a word or phrase that can be used both in statement as in invocation. There is such a word in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. That word, specially but not uniquely used by the prophet Isaiah, is ‘the Holy One’ or ‘the Holy One of Israel’. ‘Holy’ not only has a pleasant sound (in English), but there is the sense that the meaning is beyond our normal perceptual world, and even beyond moral categories. To say about someone that they are a holy person is significantly different from saying that s/he a good person, though it includes that. For many Jews it is a synonym for the sacred Name of God itself. He is the One “utterly transcending the realm of the finite, the fallen and the imperfect”. (from Hebrew4Christians.com)
To call God the Holy One also refers to the essential unity of the Great Mystery, as is emphasised in the basic Jewish creed, “Hear, O Israel, Yahweh your God, Yahweh is One, (echad).” This is sadly watered down in Christian liturgies by saying, “The Lord your God is one Lord.” A shame.
So: is “the Holy One” or “the Holy and Eternal One” a possibility?
What do you think?
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