“Every moment is a portal through which the Messiah may enter” - Walter Benjamin
Using words like “god” and “church” can be problematic. You might believe in god or not. If you do believe in god, words are still difficult. All words are metaphors for something. Words become most difficult when we use them to describe something we cannot see. Love, justice, fairness, equality are all examples of words we have that might mean vastly different things to different people. When we use words as metaphors to describe the spiritual, we are wading in murky waters.
As through a glass darkly
The word “god” is fraught. What you think god is might be vastly different than the believer beside you. If you do not believe in god, the very use of the word might conjure up ideas that you have decided to reject, and likely should reject. This problem with the word “god” may at least partly be due to the fact that we start with a concept rather than an experience or a confrontation. If we start with a concept of God, most will see god as the source of order in the universe. But perhaps there is a different way of viewing the idea of god. If we start with the idea of Christ – one who enters the world to disrupt our concepts - we start from an entirely different place. In one sense, god may be the thing that maintains order, but necessarily god is also the thing that smashes our world apart. God is the thing that holds things together and also the thing that breaks things open.
The Hebrew words in Exodus 3:14 for “I AM THAT I AM” are ehyeh asher ehyeh which should more accurately be translated “I will be what I will be” which is also translated as “I shall be there howsoever I shall be there” or “I will become whatsoever I may become.” This expression in Exodus 3:14 is an idiom, an expression that has a meaning that cannot be understood by the individual words. The name is about presence and fluidity. Not a name that can be pinned down. An active force. A becoming. Not a concept, but a confrontation. More verb than noun.
So, believer in god or not, there is an ultimate reality behind the universe, an absolute nature of all things, an active becoming that contains both order and chaos. And whether you define that reality as a personal being such as god, or an impersonal being such as the origin of being or being itself, or some kind of ultimate principal that governs the universe, that’s fine. The principals are the thing, not the metaphors or words we use to describe them.
A rose by any other name......
Theology conceptualizes god, revelation is an event.
Creation is a revelation; a revelation of the ultimate reality of things, a revelation of god, a revelation of what IS. Creation is also an incarnation. It is the non-being becoming and evolving into being. It is the ultimate reality becoming the present reality. One might say it is god being incarnated from a non-physical thing into a physical thing. Religion may speak of Jesus as the incarnation of God, but before Jesus, there was the universe. It was god’s first incarnation, the first incarnation of the principals of ultimate reality. And reality is being incarnated every moment of every day.
“Every moment is a portal through which the Messiah may enter” - Walter Benjamin
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