Sunday, April 28, 2013

Do you believe in God?



Do you believe in God?  Great!
What if I told you that I believe in God too
Just not in the way you might
Would that be okay?

But what if my belief in God
Is too different
From your belief in God?
Would one of us need to give up rights to the term?

Are you an unbeliever?  Great!
What if I told you that I don’t believe in God either
At least not in the conventional sense
Would that be okay?

But what if my unbelief
Was more nuanced
Than your unbelief?  Or yours more than mine?
Would one of us have to concede a belief in God after all?

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Yet what if belief or unbelief is completely irrelevant
To the reality of God’s existence or nonexistence?
What if faith still works like faith
Regardless if we believe in a God or not?

What if right is still right, wrong is still wrong
Grey is still grey, and “beats me!” is still “beats me!”?
What if hope is still hope, love is still love, and trying is still trying
No matter how we use our faith?  –as long as we use it

What if faith is as universal
As our limits and shortcomings
And learning to love was the only real choice we ever had in the first place?
Would that give us an all-inclusive meaning to the struggles of life?

Would that pretty much describe God in a nut shell?
Or humanity?
Or grace?
Or all of the above?

In the end words DO have meaning
And ‘God’ is no small word
Question is, is there a Word
Bigger than how we might think about ‘God’?

If there is, do any of us really have the right to define it?
To color it?  To wrap it up in a box?
Postmark it for Jews and gentiles
But not for heathens or heretics?

Given what “God” means simply by us saying it
Isn’t it still the holy grail of human language?

An utterance for every knee and tongue
Too sublime to bow or confess a thing
Other than what faith would give us
In the very moment of its sudden and glottal stop!

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So what if faith took living
Rather than believing?

And God took faith
Rather than confessing?

Perhaps that would give us all
Only one thing left to do:

Live by loving others
Die in the throes of struggle
And hope to God that that was more important
Than what we believed.











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