How to explain God
October 31, 2007
There has been a common problem that has faced everyone from the time of Abraham onward (I know, for eons previous.) : How to tell others about the experience of the holy
If one has had a Spiritual Experience there is the urge to tell others, but there aren’t words or images that do the job well. And so we are obliged to use symbols, allegories, inadequate substitutes all.
This is the quandary I have felt since posting my first blog yesterday, or the day before. I am far from satisfied at what I wrote, passed it on to other writers’ works, and then come back today to try again-continuing the discomfort.
I first had the Experience about ten years ago, have it more often the longer it goes, have read the reports of a number of people who have had It, registered with the Welsh university that keeps track of these things for some unknown reason.
Faced with the option of continuing this rambling, or publishing in discomfort I decide to publish and then go do something else.
November 1, 2007 at 5:49 p. 11.
I have found that thinking of God as a verb rather than as a noun gives a more accurate idea of what It is about. Bring the verb towards the idea of ‘being in itself’ is more accurate still.
November 9, 2007 at 5:49 p. 11.
Now I am curious…what was/is the “Experience”?
November 9, 2007 at 5:49 p. 11.
Here is a description of my experience, I don’t know how it compares to others who have had a Spiritual Experience, but it is mine.
About ten years ago I faced death, I truly believed that in about a quarter of an hour or so I would be dead; nothing that I had important prior to that time was of any help, nothing nor no one.
I am going to leave out the circumstances that brought me to this point, because their dramatic nature might detract from what I am attempting to share.
To see, to feel, to know that an abyss of pure blackness was right there, and that I was about to be into it is unlike anything I had experienced; it was as if I was naked, standing on a bare rock during a great storm, being scraped clean of anything that I thought was important.
Obviously I didn’t die, but I was left with something that took months to face, that at that edge of non-being there was a presence, or a Presence; it was not a thing, not a noun as much as a verb, something that was through me, around me, was more me than I am myself. An experience I could not have had if I was not at that edge, ready to tip over. A Presence that had always been there, will always be.
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That’s about it, I’ll probably edit that explanation more as I go along.