conceptions of God

There are those ones in each age, in each religion, who are drawn inexorably to meditate insatiably on the divine scriptures until the words flow through their veins; and their minds and hearts are drenched in thoughts of God.

There are others, more rare, who go beyond the words and even the thoughts. They set out to find the face of God and kiss his feet, only to find they must utterly abandon all they have ever conceived or held dear, to leap over that threshold into the unqualified Truth that is God.

They find that God cannot be expressed by any words in any language, That Reality cannot be explained or described by any thought or idea. That formless mystery that is God can only be experienced directly beyond the reach of words and thoughts.

There have been those saints, prophets and sages in each time and place who dare to leave behind all, even their very sense of self, to find the way that leads into the place of God. Then, as those who have been given sight, they attempt to relate some sense of that profound eternal Truth to those who must still struggle with the blindness of words and thoughts.

There are others also, ones who become consumed with contemplating the many varied meanings of the words of the seers, and spend their lives forming and re-forming ideas and thoughts which seek to capture some slightest whisper of that Truth. Like builders they construct magnificent edifices of the mind that soar to unimagined reaches of sublime awareness, yet always fall short at the doorway leading to the Actuality of that Reality.

And after them come those who fall in love with the divine words and thoughts expressed in multifarious ways and forms. The theologians, philosophers, teachers who read, discuss and write about God differentiate, multiply, classify, codify, and systematize, all the ever-expanding ideas of God. Yet all the words cannot bring us the faintest scent of That Infinite who is our Divine Beloved.

We are entranced with God and our minds continually revolve in search of that inherent Reality at the heart of all things. Yet the mind can never reach that Infinite Reality and so our concepts of God are the stuttering attempts of our human minds to find some way to express the inexpressible, to describe the indescribable.