Peter on Names

Last updated on: July 11, 2014 at 11:43 am by Peter Bishop

Peter on Names 2014-07-11T11:43:19-04:00 Peter Bishop

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I’ve decided to try spelling it “G*d.”

I once saw a Jewish author do that. It was thirty years ago and I no longer remember who the writer was, but I recognized at the time that he was echoing the practice the ancient Hebrews had of never speaking the name of the Holy One. I think that practice came partly out of a deep, visceral nervousness about too lightly invoking a Name of such Power, but I think also it was a way of reminding themselves of the transcendent and ineffable nature of their God. YHVH was father to His children, but He was also creator of the universe, and it was an awfully big universe even back then. You could call Him Papa, but you always knew He had a special secret name besides; a Name that spoke of infinity and eternity and thus would never fit on a human tongue.

I’m probably projecting more onto ancient Hebrew theology than was really there. Modern Christian ideas about infinite-and-eternal-God may descend more from Aristotle than from Abraham. If so, please forgive the error, but bear with me…whatever the history, I think what I’m saying is still true in the present.

Names. As a Pagan, names are less of an issue. The Gods we worship as Pagans all embody the Divine, God-beyond-God, Ain Soph Aur, or whatever you want to call it. As God-stuff reaches down through levels of the Tree to touch the lives of us mortals, it particularizes and takes on personalities. We call Them by names. The names may be traditional or coined on the fly, but I don’t believe any of them are the True Names of the Gods. My sense—just an intuition I’ve picked up along the way—is that the True Name of a God is not something a mortal can hear…at least, not and still stay mortal.

It was incredibly liberating to me to become a Pagan and a polytheist, because it meant I could build a relationship with the Divine again without having to go through a church and a Bible about which I had developed some profound misgivings.

[nb: I worry that this paragraph will offend Christians. That is not my intention. I worship alongside Christians even today, and many of the Quakers I most admire and seek to emulate are Christian. But the path that G*d set me to walk led me through Hell for a few years when I was younger, and I cannot talk about my relationship with G*d if I am too polite to describe what I saw of Christianity from the perspective of one of its damned souls.]

The Christian God also exists on many levels of the Tree, but Christians (and monotheists in general) cannot differentiate between the levels. The Creator of the Universe is the same as God the Father is the same as Jesus Christ is the same as the Holy Spirit that inspired Paul is the same as the Word of God is the same as the Bible is the same as any right wing Bible thumper… As a Christian (and I was a very committed and devout Christian for many years) I hit an impasse where I couldn’t pray to God or even think about God without being overwhelmed by all of the evil done in His name. Christians come up with some very creative ways to try to get their God off the hook. It’s not my purpose here to argue with them—only to say that the first time I prayed to “Goddess” instead of to “God” was the first time I was really able to cut myself loose from all the butchery and hate and conquest and enslavement that has followed like a shadow behind the message of love and salvation.

Names. If a Celtic Goddess and a Middle Eastern God share some common divinity, it’s at a level where there are no names—a level so transcendent that it’s beyond any possibility of personal relationship. Above the level of the Gods, Pagans will speak in very abstract terms like “the divine,” or “the ultimate reality,” or “the ground of all being.” (Some Pagans at least. I don’t speak for us all.) God at that higher level is much more like a force of nature than a personal deity.

And that was fine until I became a Quaker.

My experience of the Divine in Quaker worship is both very like and very different from my experience in a Pagan setting. The experience of the Horned God in a Wiccan circle often feels to me like hands laid on my shoulders by Someone very large (a proud parent, perhaps?) standing behind me, or like a cloak draped over my shoulders and enveloping me in warmth and strength. The presence of G*d in Quaker meeting is every bit as intimate, but somehow less personified. The difference may be as simple as Quakers doing corporately what a Wiccan priest or priestess will do individually. In a Wiccan circle, even if everyone present were covered with God or Goddess, each one’s experience would be more individual and each aspect of the divine presence might take a different name. The Light that covers a Quaker meeting doesn’t seem to want a name. It’s close enough to the human level to touch us, but still universal enough that it feels right to say things like, “There is that of God in everyone,” when I would never talk about “that of Herne” or “that of Athena” or “that of Jesus” within everyone.

After spending enough time talking with Quakers, even a Pagan Quaker will start using the word “God” just because it’s convenient. It’s the word everyone else in the room is using. It’s a single syllable, unlike any of the other terms that come to mind. And it does encompass most of what I want the word to say…but it makes me uneasy. As an ex-Christian worshipping alongside Christians, in a religion that has its roots in Christianity but includes both Christ-centered and non-Christian members, “God” is a really loaded word. It’s very hard to say “God” without someone in the room hearing “Jesus.” So it came to me a few days ago to start writing “G*d,” as I once saw a Jewish author do, as a way of avoiding the pitfalls of using THE NAME.

Names. I keep coming back to the theme of the limitations of language for describing the ineffable. Paul was swept up into the Heavens, given a tour of the Celestial Spheres, and then plunked down again on Earth to try to describe what he saw using a language that evolved to communicate about hunting and fishing and sewing and cooking… You might as well try to write “I love you” in Fortran. How can we ever communicate with clarity about our experience of G*d? I don’t have an answer to that. What I have is a message that someone delivered in meeting on the morning that I started writing this post:

“Live up to the Light that thou hast and more will be given thee.”

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