Reflections on God

I went through a period of time attempting to describe God with the perfect noun. God is love, God is trust, God is everything, God is happiness, etc., on and on. Eventually I realized that I was attempting to much, that what I wanted to say was simply “God is.”

I have since realized the truly expansive implications of this, and combining it with ideas about evil have come to terms with a personal perspective on God.

To begin, we must humbly recognize the following. We have five basic senses, but we must recognize that reality, and God of that reality, is infinitely more than what these rudimentary means of data collecting can pick up. Even our senses fail us often enough, and are vastly inadequate within themselves.

We are not limited to these five senses, however. We have means of perception that are deeper than these data collecting techniques. We have intuition, love, awareness. We can guess the power and awesomeness of all that we cannot perceive due to our lacking abilities because of our soul, and our unspeakable connection to God. God, the greater reality. But God is beyond us, of course. She must be. And the power is beyond our imagination – how could it not be? For God is the greater reality, is reality. All that is is God, absolutely everything and anything and all that we can’t even imagine. All is God.

So where is evil? Nowhere. It is the very absence. The big bang theorists are right in a at least on thing. We are ever expanding outwards. Space, true nothingness is infinite. God is growing. God is greater than our wildest dreams, but still growing. Justice is God, injustice is an absence of God. All that is is God, all that is not is evil, or what we, as Christians, have called evil. Evil is absence. Satan is a figure full of emptiness.*

A woman steals a car. The evilness is the lack of goodness she had. At the root, however, we can find the justice in her action, in her movement. For whatever reason, it is justifiable to her. Never do we do any action without inherently, in some way, justifying it to ourselves at some level. Even a serial murderer claims justification – even if it is a complete disregard for society. In this disregard, the crime is irrelevant to them and so justified. Genocides happen because the victims are dehumanized, thus allowing the action to be justified, to be “okay.” Even things we do with guilt, we do in our heart out of some sense of righteousness, desire. Succumbing to our desires is a form of justification.

In so far as our actions are harmful, misguided, evil, simply wrong, we our missing something. We are missing knowledge, we are missing perspective, we are missing strength we are missing focus, love, hope, faith. We are missing many virtues, goodness, etc., and the specifics matter, but at the heart of it all is that we are missing virtues, goodness, etc. All wrongdoing can be attributed to an absence of goodness (faith, hope, love, etc.), an absence. That is, all evil can be attributed to absence, while all goodness to God. All that is is God, all that is not is evil.

It is our purpose to manifest God, the greater reality, the greater truth and meaning, as much as possible. It is our responsibility, to ourselves and others. We are part of God, within God. It is for us to create God, to see God, to be God as often, and in as many ways as possible. That is the rooting out of evil – the filling it with God.

*and not worth a tenth of the attention we give.