What are you worshipping? (Or, “how to change your views on God”)
I wrote this nearly a year ago, I think…? And, to be honest, the concept of “God” isn’t even really one I think about hardly at all anymore. But I came across this writing in a journal recently and am dropping it here as food for thought for anyone who is feeling uncertain about their beliefs in God, or is questioning, or has struggled to understand why “God” doesn’t always make sense to them…
This question “what are you worshipping?” is often asked by pastors and in Bible studies. What we are worshipping is of utmost importance because Christians are supposed to worship God alone, above all else. Christians are supposed to keep Jesus and God and our faith at the center of our lives. Worshipping anything else is bad, it’s idolatry. When I think about it, the term “worship,” to me, essentially means “elevate in importance.”
i.e. What is it that you are making the most important thing in your life?
In deconstruction, I realized, I wasn’t worshipping GOD, I was worshipping my beliefs and my ideas about God. I had certain ideas about who God was and what He was like and THAT is what I was elevating in importance.
To go further into it, I got some of my ideas and thoughts from the Bible, of course. Well, my interpretation of the Bible; from pastors of various denominations & their sermons…ahem, their interpretations of scripture; which then led to the ideas and thoughts about God I internalized from my interpretations of their interpretations of who/what God was…
So, basically, I was worshipping ideas and beliefs that I got from my own {limited} interpretation and other people’s interpretation of the Bible and what they thought about God (which was also based on how they were raised and their life experience and education, and so on.)
The God I worshipped was actually made up of all these opinions and conclusions which was kind of formed by (but also smooshed and shoved into fitting into) a particular reading and understanding of the Bible.
Some of my understanding of God was also formed by my experiences of what I called “God.” Those feelings or events that felt very personal; an encounter with “God” or Jesus that also gave me a sense of who/what He was. The tricky thing is that even those encounters are, to a large extent, filtered and interpreted through the lens of what we think we know about “God.” We judge these experiences in our lives: we say THIS is from God, or we could say THIS is a spiritual attack – different people can interpret the same event in different ways, depending on how they understand God and what they believe God to be like. And we do it all the time… Someone gets cancer and we call it evil. But then their family gets saved because of it and we revise our opinion and call the cancer a blessing.
We are constantly adjusting and creating new beliefs and conclusions and opinions on what/who God is, based on our our (and other people’s) interpretation. And people will say, “just read the Bible for yourself, see what it says…” But that is just an invitation for people to fill themselves up with more ideas about God. I mean, THAT is what the Bible is! The Bible is a collection of judgments, opinions, ideas, conclusions, and stories about what some people understood and believed “God” to be like.
And what Evangelicals, especially, do is take those beliefs and opinions and say that they are TRUE. Absolutely true.
We create an image/idea of God for ourselves that is malleable, but also unmoving and unchanging. It’s like that slime/oobleck stuff that is both solid and liquid. The tighter you hold onto it, the harder it becomes, but as soon as you open your fingers and relax your grip, it becomes liquid and oozes into a big uncontainable mess. Our ideas of God are like that.
The reason that we cling to our ideas about God is because they make us feel safe, they make us feel secure, they make us feel “right” – Which is the 2nd thing we worship: certainty.
Everything in mainstream evangelicalism, and other religions as well, is about certainty.
It makes these religions appealing because nothing in this life is guaranteed. The idea that we can know something for certain is intoxicating.
To know, to be sure of something in an uncertain world, makes us feel powerful, secure, and protected.
And we worship THAT feeling! We want, more than anything else, to feel safe. We want to know that our kids are safe, that we’ll all go to Heaven, and that there will be no more suffering and no more pain and everything will be puppies and rainbows.
In times of trouble, we cling to our certainty. We desperately hold onto the knowledge that God will somehow make all things work together for good for those who love Him. We worship our beliefs about God because they give us a feeling of certainty and safety. And we worship certainty and safety because our beliefs about God tell us that we can have that, that we need that.
Underlying this assumption or belief in all of this is that God is knowable. We say things like “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” and “who can know the mind of God?” We like to reference the last few chapters of Job, where God makes it clear that nobody can understand Him… but then we say “But wait! We can know the mind of God! We can know what He is like!” and that’s where we insert all our ideas and beliefs about Him.
But, consider this: As soon as you have a thought about God, you make God into something you can have a thought about. You make God knowable, which automatically puts God into a box of something that humans can understand with our lame little finite brains. As soon as you describe God, it’s the same as attaching an idea or a concept to it. And if God is knowable, if it can be conceptualized, then it ceases to be “God.”
This is what deconstruction did for me – it helped me release all my ideas and thoughts about God; it helped me “unknow” Him.
So now, I try to not have any thoughts about God. It’s not that I don’t think there’s something out there, I do. But I refuse to make that something into something I can understand of make sense of. I can see evidence of it in nature, in how my kids are, in other areas of my life and my soul, in my experience, but I try not to label it or put judgments on it.
And, you know what? It doesn’t feel safe. It doesn’t feel secure. I don’t get to belong to any of my old communities where the emphasis is on believing the “right” ideas about God. This way of living is not safe, but it is free. It feels pure. It feels.. childlike in a way. It feels exciting and ripe with possibility and hope.
And the question “what am I worshipping?” has changed, it’s shifted. It’s less about how much I’m filling up my life with things other that God, and more about how much of my life am I filling up with my ideas of who/what I think “God” IS?
I had a thought the other day that deconstruction has been like being a pre-teen who has her room walls decorated and covered with the posters of her favorite boy band… who talks to her favorite member, has long conversations about how much she loves him and what it would be like to be together and how wonderful he is and, oh, all the ways she is devoted to him…. and then she turns around and the real in-the-flesh guy is standing there in her room. Deconstruction showed me that what I was “worshipping” was simply a facade, a curated image and ideal of something that I really didn’t know. And deconstruction has given me the opportunity to take another look at it, without the blinders on. To see it for what it is.
And one more thing: Just like that pre-teen girl would feel foolish and embarrassed and shy and stupid when her secret (that may have seemed so real to her!) is found out, there can be an anger and shame and embarrassment with faith deconstruction. BUT, just like it takes the appearance of the real person to break through and offer her a new level of relationship, deconstruction is an invitation to grow; an invitation to get to know life and spirituality and a new way of being once the facade is revealed for what it is.
Letting go of your judgments about God is not easy, but I encourage you to believe its what “He” would have you do. You cannot really be filled with God until you empty yourself of all the ways you believe Him to be.
It might sound like if you let go of all your beliefs and ideas, you’ll be left with …. nothing. Maybe you’ll become an atheist. Ahhhhhhh….. check your judgment that being an atheist is wrong. Perhaps an atheist has a better understanding and appreciation of “God” than you do! 🙂 But, you’re right that you might be left with nothing… and perhaps, like the great christian mystic Meister Eckhart says, “God” will not be able to resist that emptiness.
If I hope to find you {God}, I need to let go
of all I think I need to know,
turning from what I desire
to become the emptiness You cannot resist.
~Meister Eckhart, Book of the Heart: Meditations for a restless soul; translated and compiled by Jon M. Sweeney & Mark S. Burrows.
