Monotheism for Beginners
If God is no more than love, I'm good with God!
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(Myself, in the middle, 1992, at the Urban Ministry drop-in center in Palo Alto, CA:)
When I was the director of the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto, serving un-housed people, I witnessed the existence of God on a daily basis. One divine manifestation stands out from my time in that work. Two of our “regulars” were at our drop in center one morning. One was a tall guy with some teeth missing and fingernails made funky by jungle rot that he contracted when he was slogging in the rice paddies as a grunt soldier in Vietnam. The scars of war lingered in his alcohol addiction and PTSD. He lived on the streets, smelling pretty bad. But he was a cheerful guy, talkative, fun to be around. The other was a young woman, also suffering from alcoholism, but functioning enough to hold temporary jobs. She came to our drop-in center every morning to use the phone to see if she could land a gig. She didn’t mix much with the other folks there – she was on a mission to get to work.
Suddenly the Vietnam vet started jerking and heaving, and he fell to the asphalt at our outdoor drop in center. He was having an alcoholic seizure. The young woman rushed to his side, sat on the asphalt, took her handkerchief out of her purse and jammed it into his mouth to keep him from biting his tongue, and as he heaved and jerked she put his head in her lap and stroked his matted hair tenderly, reassuring him with soothing words, until the paramedics arrived.
After calling 911, watching this all unfold, I just stood there, as she ministered to that man, and I wept. I was seeing God. In the first letter of John at the end of the New Testament, the writer said that “God is love”. I didn’t need to believe in God. Divine love was right there, up in my face – an overwhelmingly obvious reality.
I’m a monotheist. I believe in just one God: the love I witnessed that morning on the asphalt.
The problem with a lot of God-talk is that it is inconsequential to our experience. The existence or non-existence of one or another supernatural God, something or someone other than love, doesn’t make any practical difference to us. It doesn’t explain anything that we can see, touch, or feel. Birds go on chirping, trees go on swaying in the breeze, traffic keeps roaring along the roads whether a supernatural divinity exists or not. Saying that such a God created the universe explains nothing about how the universe works, nor does it make much if any difference in how we relate to the world. Believers in supernatural divinities and atheists alike can be loving and caring and humbly awe-struck by the universe.
But if God is the kind of love that manifested between that woman and that man on the asphalt at that drop-in center for the un-housed, that’s something that is enormously consequential, something very real that we can feel and observe, something that matters. It would have been a very different morning if that woman had not done what she did.
For these reasons I am an amotheistic monotheist. “Amo” for “amor” – love, “theos” for God. If God is more than love, I’d love to know about it. But meanwhile, the God of love is plenty divine for me! I refer to “God” because I speak the Christian language of spirituality. We speak of God poetically as a person because love is personal. As I wept, watching that woman attend to that suffering man, I was worshiping the love I was witnessing. To love love itself is to love God with reverence.
We humans have a powerful desire to learn how we got here, what our place and purpose is in the cosmos. The quest to understand God is a reflection of this elemental desire.
I think that “God is love” is the place to start on this quest. Unconditional love, love for strangers, love even for enemies, as Jesus taught us and showed us to love, is real, it is here, and it is amazing. But how did it get here? How does this “agape” love connect with everything else? What is the origin of “agape” love? And where is it headed? We can live just fine without the answers, but our curiosity is natural.
Let us assume that unconditional love – love that reaches beyond family and friends – love that extends to strangers, enemies, and to all beings on the planet and beyond – is an emergent property. A form of relationship that unfolded from the ongoing natural process of the creation of the universe. Somehow, at least on this little planet around our little sun in our little galaxy in an obscure pocket of the cosmos, love emerged in the process of the evolution of living organisms. How did this love come to be, through this evolutionary process? Are there seeds of it in the fundamental subatomic events of physics? I don’t know, but I wish I did! It appears that there is a propensity toward this divine love inherent in the universe, or love would never have come to be. What I witnessed on the asphalt at our drop-in center must be seamlessly connected to the nature of nature itself. It must be integral to the structure of the cosmos somehow. This suggests that the universe as a whole has a divine quality. Think of it! The whole universe conspired over billions of years of explosions and contractions and churning and burning and creation and re-creation to result in the crown of all creation: the love of a woman for a smelly, dirty stranger having an alcoholic seizure on the asphalt at a center for unhoused people. Because of what happened on that asphalt lot, we have all the proof we need that God is infused in the entire cosmos.
What we don’t have is a working theory of how unconditional love got integrated into the cosmos. If and when we get one, I’ll be thrilled to know about it! Meanwhile, I aim to manifest this love wherever and however I can, and to worship it when I witness it between others...
(Read much more about this topic in my new book, WATER IN THE DESERT: Progressive Christianity for the Spiritually Thirsty.)