How We Make God and Life Divine
by Randy Southerland, RScP
The high school baseball team was on a winning streak and that was a big deal. It was a small town where high school sports were a big deal, with the inspired passion and the sort of devotion that could only be found in a small rural community.
The young pitcher Benji was on a hot streak and everyone, me included, hoped that it would last. He did too.
Athletes can be superstitious. He wore the same pair of socks for every game and never washed them. He believed that his lucky socks helped them win, and he didn’t want to do anything to disrupt the streak. That was until they lost, and the streak was broken. I guess he then gave the socks a long overdue washing.
I’m sure he didn’t think of it that way, but he was engaged in a process that peoples and religions have been doing since the beginning of time -- infusing ordinary physical objects with divine power.
Anything can and does become divine. Religions of all kinds say certain days are holy -- like Easter and Christmas or the Winter Solstice.
Certain places are holy. Like the Koutoubra Mosque in Marrakesh, Morocco, the city of Jerusalem, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Taj Mahal or even Graceland where the prophet of rock and roll Elvis Presley died.
In certain faith traditions, bread and wine can become sacred during religious ceremonies, representing the body and blood of a divine figure. Similarly, prayer beads, statues, or religious texts, when used in worship or meditation become sacred and serve as conduits for spiritual connection and divine presence.
Think about all the holy relics Christianity has preserved. Some of these things are alternately fascinating and weird.
One church in Italy has the tongue of St. Anthony.
There are four heads of John the Baptist including one held by a mosque. (So if your teenager looks at you like you have four heads just know that she’s thinking you too are divine.)
Transmuting the physical into the divine and holy is a process that we all engage in whether we think we are being spiritual or not -- just like the baseball player. We need God to be understandable and personal.
It’s like the way we form a belief in a god or divine being. The god or gods are personifications of a divine ideal. We create them in our mind and imagination. And the degree to which we can believe in them they become real to us.
This is the creative process. God may have created man in his own image, but ever since then we’ve been recreating god in man’s image.
Think about it. We have this compulsion to humanize the divine. It’s not unusual. It’s a process that happens and has always happened in every religion.
The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach said, in accounting for the enormous success of Christianity’s conception of God, “only a being who comprises in himself the whole man can satisfy the whole man.”
What Feuerbach is saying is that the near-universal appeal of a God who looks, and thinks, and feels, and acts just like us is rooted in our deep-seated need to experience the divine as a reflection of ourselves.
We want the transcendent to be real to us and to take on a physical form. So, is it any surprise that that we are ourselves able to make objects -- whether human remains or socks -- divine?
The more we think about Gods in human terms, the more we will project our human attributes upon them. Our values are god’s values, our traits are god’s traits.
In Pentecostalism and various forms of charismatic Christianity the faithful are encouraged to not just “talk to God,” but also learn to hear God talk back.
Even in New Thought we want a divine intelligence that doesn’t just listen to our prayers, but also responds with useful information -- divine guidance.
Why do we have this need to humanize the holy and essentially hold it in our hands? No matter how big our imagination may be, we are still bound by our physical forms. That is what we know and imagining something totally beyond the everyday physical us is just beyond us.
That’s why it’s good to get personal with God. Giving the divine, however you conceive of it, a friendly name and thinking of it in a personal way will get you much further in your spiritual development than one that exists just beyond your imagination -- unknown and unknowable.
So, the next time you sit in meditation or prayer, or take just a quiet walk, open yourself to a divine that you can know and will know you. Give it/him/her or whatever, a name. And maybe you will hear and get a bit closer to a divine that you too can know and understand.