I find myself increasingly reluctant to utter the great and ancient name, the capitalized noun that is above all other nouns. The cat's got my theological tongue and won't let me engage in G-- talk. I haven't become an atheist or anything like that. I still have a wavering trust in the Whence and Whither of Everything, in spite of my temptation to despair in the presence of evil (which I refuse to capitalize and give the status of a noun).

There is something troubling and, perhaps, uncharitable in my antagonism to certain forms of godtalk and religious institutions. Nevertheless I need to honor my doubts and disbelief and try to understand the reasons for my gut-level distaste for the cacophony of contemporary theological language.

I confess I am irritated by the spokespersons for G--, the televangelists of Videoland, the caretakers of revelation — Jewish, Christian, or Muslim — with their unquestioning certainties and their smug claims to be in possession of the definitive knowledge of the Almighty. When their chummy god whispers The Truth in their ears, reveals his eschatological plans and moral absolutes, I want to run away. The defenders of the faith arouse a profound suspicion in me. I can't help feeling that the Grand Inquisitors of orthodoxy with their gospel of miracle, revelation, and authority combine intellectual shallowness with arrogance. By what right do they dismiss the darkness of the human condition, our ultimate ignorance of the origins, purpose, and end of life? Their unquestioning certainty mocks the agonizing struggle of mind and heart that is necessary to trust and keep hope alive in a world of soul-numbing evil. Although I castigate myself for my intolerance of those who find comfort in simple faith, revealed truth, and absolute morality, I am forced to acknowledge that I prefer the company of doubters to the congregation of true believers. Those who wrestle with mystery seem more open and compassionate than those who possess the revealed truth.

Further to the point. When I consider the political prostitution of theological language — the effort to link God to the fortunes of tribe, nation, and ideology — I move from mild irritation to pure outrage.

As I demonstrated in my book Faces of the Enemy, the god of holy wars is an idol and an abomination. The landlord god, the political deity who provides the theological glue that holds the in-group together and justifies its exclusion of the out-group, the warrior god who sanctions the warfare between Us and Them, is a creation of propagandists. Hasn't the bloodstained face of the 20th century taught us that we should refuse to utter the phrase Gott mit uns in any of its variations? Don't we know that the god of Jihad, of Tutsis and Hutus, Bosnian Serbs and Muslims, the god of pure races and holy lands, is nothing more than a transcendent excuse for ethnic cleansing and genocide? And, in the aftermath of our recent crusade against communism, by what hubris can we exempt the god of Jews and Christians from the observation that all talk of "god-and-country" is a disguised form of idolatry? Our willingness during the nuclear arms race and cold war to sacrifice all life on earth to save us from "atheistic communism" should warn us forever against the demonic consequences of claiming that we are "one nation under God" and that "In God We Trust." Communism wasn't bad because it was atheistic; it was bad because it was a cruel, repressive, inhuman system that was willing to sacrifice millions to create a utopian society.

So much for my irritation and anger about theospeak. I would like to move now to the comedy of gender.

A couple of decades ago I was awakened from my dogmatic slumber within the patriarchy by Ms. Mary Daly's left to the jaw of Beyond God the Father. She convinced me that the language that referred to G-- as He, Father, Lord, King, Ruler, etc. was a covert way of claiming and maintaining the superiority of men and the "masculine" virtues — reason, power, control — and of keeping women in the missionary position. In short, the theological He-archy of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was an ideological weapon in the war between the sexes. Even though it meant giving up my comfortable claim to phallocentric superiority, I resolved to repent of my bias and cease using gender when speaking of or to the Creator and Sustainer of All.

Imagine my surprise, when faster than I could say "I surrender" I was inundated by feminist manifestos proclaiming the She-archy — Motherhood of G--, the Womb of Becoming, the Age of the Goddess, and the divinity of all things feminine. And nobody laughed or remembered that for the thousands of years when the Great Goddess ruled there was human sacrifice, slavery, blood, and cruelty enough for all.

Isn't it high time that we removed tribal and gender politics from theology, banished G-- from the war room and the bedroom? If we can't find a way to speak about G-- without smuggling in our political, ideological, and genderal concerns, then it is time to be silent. Let's forget gender for a decade and get on with loving mercy and seeking justice for all creatures great and small who dwell in the Commonwealth of Sentient Beings, regardless of race, color, creed, sexual orientation, number of legs, wings, or fins.

Next, let me consider what is a matter of taste. I know enough of Dionysus to reject the Calvinistic dogma that all things sacred should be done decently and in order. (Which is to say, I am a recovering Presbyterian.) Nevertheless, I still have a high regard for manners and modesty. I am a part of the generation that once believed there were certain things gentlemen and women did not talk about in public — like sex and religion. We thought it seemly to sequester our sexual and spiritual agonies and ecstasies within the sanctuary of intimacy and not blab about them in public. But, in the course of my pilgrimage, I backslid. In 1969 I joined the sexual revolution, migrated to California, was engulfed by New Age spirituality and became a part of the tell-it-all generation. We tore down the walls between privacy and publicity, made our sexuality the center of our politics, and turned spirituality into a commodity that could be purchased in seminars or learned from how-to-do-it books. Popular magazines preached the technology of better orgasms and gave maps of easy paths to peace of mind, prosperity, and enlightenment.

Suddenly we have got our comeuppance. It is nemesis time. Having gone too far in the right direction, we are suffering from a surfeit of pseudo-candor. We are drowning in details of the president's sex life that would have embarrassed Freud. And Conversations with G-- appear on The New York Times' best-seller list.

I find the public revelation of intimate sexual and spiritual experiences increasingly distasteful. I suspect that true saints and great lovers don't advertise their prowess, parade their tenderness, or exhibit their compassion to be seen by all. There is something I admire about the nearly obsolete virtues of shyness and modesty. Strong and silent go together more often than not. It is not seemly to speak too much about sacred things in public. Words of endearment; like prayer, are best spoken in a whisper.

There are, I believe, more profound reasons than any of the above for my growling reticence to speak about G--. Theologian Paul Tillich, with whom I studied at Harvard, said that the great words — faith, hope, love, grace, sin, salvation — sometimes became so trivialized and degraded that we need to cease using them for a generation. When the moneychangers and propagandists take over the temple of language and use the name of G-- for trivial, vain, and malicious ends, it is time to declare a moratorium, a season of theological silence.

Try this. Proclaim a linguistic fast and a feast of imagination. For Lent give up using the familiar ways in which you speak and think about G--. Allow the old words to be replaced by silence. Force yourself to create new ways of speaking. The thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart called G-- "the wilderness where nobody is home." In this century, philosopher Charles Hartshorne named G-- "the self-transcending transcender of all." Tillich substituted "the Ground of Being" or spoke of the G-- beyond G--. Invent new names, use them once and discard them. Stretch language to its breaking point. There are no literal truths in the realm of theology, so get wild and excessive.

For instance, instead of God: The Quantum Leaper. Being-Becoming-Itself. The Whence and Whither. The Subject that Encompasses All Predicates. The Great Whomever or Whatever that is Within-Without-Beside-Before-After-and-During. The Verb that Activates All Other Verbs. The Cosmic DNA. The Erotic Whole. The Source from Whom All Longing Flows. The Black Hole Where Love Embraces Death. The Creative Destroyer. The Alpha and Omega Helix. The Mad Experimenter. The Eternal Not Yet. The Dissatisfied One. The Creating. The Sustaining. The Abiding Etc. without End.

Notice what happens when your imagination is forced to coin new language? It becomes poetic, makes a raid on the inarticulate and returns with new metaphors. It must consult raw experience and ask "what exactly do I mean when I speak about G--? What kinds of experience make me want to use this word?"

There is a mystical wisdom that has always been sequestered within the great religious traditions that cautions us against getting comfortable with any of our language about G-- The via negativa suggests that we remain most faithful to the ultimate mystery when we remember that we know best what G-- is not. After a long dissertation of how we may speak about G--, Thomas Aquinas is forced to acknowledge that even "by the revelation of grace in this we do not know of God what He is" and are, therefore, "united to Him as to one unknown." Saint Augustine, after writing endlessly in an effort to explain the Trinity, acknowledges that he wrote only in order not to remain silent.

The task of authentic religion is to keep this world a sacred place, to remind us to wander, to tread reverently on the humus and be compassionate to all sentient beings. I believe we do this best by remembering: In the beginning was Silence.

The Word is still spoken in sparrowsong, windsigh, and leaffall. An electron is a single letter, an atom a complex word, a molecule a sentence, and an indigo bunting an entire epistle of the sacred. The ocean whispers its mystery within the chambered sea shell. Listen quietly to the longing in your heart for love and justice and you may hear an echo of the holy word that addresses you. Hush for a while. Be still and know.

Sam Keen, whose Psychology Today conversations brought Joseph Campbell, Norman O. Brown, and other seminal thinkers to national attention, holds two M.A.s in theology from Harvard and a Princeton Ph.D. in philosophy. His books include the best-seller Fire in the Belly, Hymns to an Unknown God, and his most recent, Learning to Fly: Trapeze — Fear, Trust, and the Joy of Letting Go.




From Spirituality and Health magazine, Spring/Summer 1999.
Copyright © 1999 by Sam Keen

Used by arrangement with Spirituality and Health.