Many of us inherited images of God in childhood: a distant figure above us, watching, rewarding, judging and intervening from afar. At times, God became little more than a larger version of ourselves: a celestial authority keeping score, meting out justice, favour, and punishment.
Perhaps this explains why some deeply religious people approach death with profound fear. Their faith has sometimes been shaped more by reward and punishment than by trust and surrender. Beneath the surface lingers the anxious question: Have I done enough? Will I come up short?
Across history, human beings have projected onto the Divine many of our smallest instincts: exclusion, vengeance, tribalism, superiority and cruelty. We have imagined a God who chooses some and rejects others. A God more concerned with correct beliefs than compassionate lives. A God willing to condemn, divide and exclude. A God whose love appears conditional.
This is a small God. A harsh God. A God that looks less like love and compassion, and more like tyranny and control.
It may be that many who have walked away from religion have not rejected the Divine at all. Perhaps they have simply rejected images of God that were too narrow, too fearful or too cruel to begin with. A God that should be rejected.
As Richard Rohr maintains, any God worthy of the name must surely transcend labels, doctrines, denominations and boundaries. How could the source of all life belong exclusively to one religion, one nation or one group of people?
Even though the mystics across traditions may begin with names and beliefs, they gradually move towards silence, wonder and encounter. They discover that God is less an object to be understood and more a reality to be experienced. Less a distant ruler and more the life within life itself. The sacred presence flowing through all things.
The more certain we become that we have captured God fully within our ideas, the smaller God tends to become. An expanding spirituality moves in another direction, towards humility, mystery and awe.
Perhaps this explains why so many are struggling with organised religion. They continue to long for meaning, connection and transcendence. But knowledge about God is never the same as experiencing the Divine. Belief does not transform people. Transformation comes through encounter.
The deeper spiritual question is not: What name do I give to God? It is: Does the God I believe in make me more compassionate, more open-hearted, more inclusive and more capable of love?
In this awareness, love becomes a name for God. Compassion becomes a name for God. Justice becomes a name for God. Presence becomes a name for God. Silence becomes a name for God.
God is not a ruler somewhere above us, but rather, an ocean in which we already live, move, and have our being. Not distant. Not absent. Not belonging to some and withheld from others. But here. Within. Beyond.
Present.
Always present.