God as Verb

The Return

I did not set out to believe. I set out to find God, or disprove God. Somewhere in the search, the question changed. The demand for a verdict began to feel smaller than the thing I was trying to encounter.

I wanted to know what was real.

I wanted to know whether meaning was something we made because we were afraid, or something we recognized because reality was larger than us.

I wanted to know whether love was chemistry, attachment, survival, projection, spirit, or some combination of all of them. Whether consciousness was an accident. Whether prayer was imagination. Whether symbols meant anything beyond the meanings we gave them. Whether there was anyone listening.

The question “Does God exist?” began to feel like asking whether music exists while someone is singing.

Technically, maybe it is a valid question.

But it is not the only question.

At some point I became less interested in proving God as a noun.
I became interested in God as a verb.

What does God do?

What happens when love moves through a body? What happens when a person chooses repair instead of domination? What happens when attention becomes presence? What happens when someone is allowed to remain fully themselves and still be loved?

What happens when reality contradicts me and I do not immediately force it back into the story I already know?

What happens when I remain answerable?

That is the territory I have come back with.

Not certainty.
Orientation.

I do not know whether God is a being, a field, a symbol, a relational process, an emergent property of consciousness, an old human word for the sacred, or something that exceeds every category we have built for it.

I do not think I have the answer.

I am no longer sure that having the answer is even the point.

What I keep returning to is participation.

Not as doctrine. Not as proof. As a way of being here.

We could build worlds so perfectly articulated around ourselves that almost nothing interrupts us. We could surround ourselves with systems that know our preferences, predict our desires, deliver what we want, confirm what we already believe.

We could reduce dependence. Reduce friction. Reduce uncertainty. Reduce the number of times we have to ask another person for anything.

And perhaps we would call that freedom.

But I am not interested in a world in which nothing can surprise me.

I am not interested in becoming so protected from otherness that I no longer have to encounter it.

Because the joy of being alive seems inseparable from the risk of being changed by what we meet.

None of these are completely ours.

That is precisely what makes relationship with them possible.

The tree does not exist to affirm me. The ocean does not organize itself around my comfort. Another human being does not arrive as a perfectly rendered extension of my needs.

They resist. They surprise. They ask something of me.

Sometimes they wound me. Sometimes they save me. Sometimes they simply stand beside me and show me that the world contains a life I could never have invented from inside my own.

That feels sacred to me.

Not because I can prove anything metaphysical about it.

Because I do not want to live as though it were disposable.

Maybe this is also where God speaks.

Not necessarily through certainty. Not necessarily through doctrine.

Through reality. Through symbols. Through patterns we notice before we understand them. Through dreams, stories, bodies, landscapes, seasons, gestures, repetitions, coincidences that stop us long enough to ask a better question.

I do not mean that every symbol is a message from God. I do not mean that every coincidence is instruction.

I mean that human beings have always encountered meaning through more than literal language.

A symbol can hold something before we know how to explain it. A story can organize experience before we know what it is teaching us. A body can recognize something before the mind has found words. A landscape can change us without making an argument.

Maybe symbolic literacy is one way we remain capable of receiving meaning from a reality that cannot always be flattened into propositions.

And that feels increasingly important as our lives become more abstracted. More mediated. More quantified. More filtered through systems that decide what is relevant before we have encountered it ourselves.

Dashboards. Feeds. Metrics. Scores. Recommendations. Categories.

All useful. All partial. All representations.

Symbolic literacy asks us to remember that reality is larger than the representation.

Symbolic literacy is not permission to make everything mean whatever we want.

It is learning to stay in relationship with meaning without possessing it too quickly.

To become symbolically literate is not to believe everything means something.

It is to recover the capacity to ask when something does.

And then to stay open long enough for reality to answer back.

A Different Grammar

So when I say God as Verb, I do not mean that I have solved theology.

I mean that I no longer need theology to be solved before I can live in relationship with what the word has always pointed toward for me.

These are not proofs.

They are practices.

I went looking for an answer outside myself.

I came back with a way of standing inside reality.

Not alone. Not at the center of everything. Not powerless either.

Participating. Listening. Answering. Allowing what is not me to remain real. Allowing myself to remain real too.