St. John of the Cross drew this diagram of his understanding of God. (Photo Courtesy of Jim Burklo)
A few weeks ago, I was splashing around in a swimming pool with my five-year-old grandson. My daughter had told me that he was starting to ask theological questions. So I asked him one. “Who is God?” He grinned at me and said, “Turn around!” I turned to look behind me – nobody was there. Again he said “Turn around!” Again, no one was there. “So, tell me, who is God?” I asked him again.
“Mister Nobody!” he answered with a mischievous smile.
The great contemplatives of Christianity described their profound experiences of union with God, but the very nature of these experiences made it impossible for them to define or describe the One with whom they were in one-ness. The sixth-century Christian mystic known as Dionysius, whose work informed much of the contemplative tradition of the faith that followed, wrote a long paragraph explaining what God is not, including these lines: “…neither does anything that is know him as he is… nor can any affirmation or negation be applied to him…” Teresa of Avila wrote of this highest state of contemplative prayer: “In this fourth state there is no feeling, only enjoyment without any understanding of the thing in which the soul is rejoicing. It understands that it is enjoying some good in which all good is gathered together, but this good is incomprehensible.”
The One with whom we experience this mystical union is both a “Mister” and a “Nobody.” A “Mister” in the sense of being experienced as if it was an encounter with a person, and a “Nobody” in the sense of not being like any other person or thing, beyond being grasped as a concept or image.
This subjective experience of divine union is undeniably real – a state reported by people throughout history and across divides of culture and religion. We stumble into the realm of the debatable when we try to objectify the One with whom we are in communion. If we define this One as a supernatural, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God who intervenes in the workings of the universe, we inevitably must ask what evidence there is for such a God’s existence. And there isn’t any. In exploring and understanding how the world works, we have no need for this assumption. If a supernatural God did exist, surely it would be obvious to everyone, all the time. And the assumption of the existence of a supernatural God isn’t required to reach the state of unitive consciousness reported by the mystics, either.
So who or what is God? Progressive Christians, including myself, answer with the line from 1 John 4: “God is love.” This love is a quality of relationship that is deeply attentive and appreciative. To love love itself (herself? himself?) is the supreme experience of love, the highest form of prayer. It is union with the divine. We experience it personally, so we find ourselves using the language of personhood to express it.
To my question, “Mister Nobody” was an answer that made sense! Because the person we experience in contemplative prayer is like nobody else. When I turned my head at my grandson’s command, I saw a cliff and distant houses and a canyon with ravens gyring above. Was all that, and all else, God’s body – the material form in which immaterial love manifests? Or was I looking at Mister No-body? As Dionysius wrote: “…nor can he be expressed or conceived, since he is neither number nor order, nor greatness nor smallness; nor equality nor inequality, nor similarity nor dissimilarity…” On the outline of the trail to the top of Mount Carmel, his allegorical drawing of the path to union with God, St. John of the Cross wrote “ni eso – ni eso – ni eso – not this, not this, not this.” To meet God, one must let go of all assumptions and attachments along the way. One must seek nothing and nobody.
Is my grandson an incipient atheist or a budding mystic? I don’t need to know, and I certainly don’t think he needs to know, either, at this point in his life. All I know is that whatever he meant, and whatever was behind that joyful smile as he said it, sent me walking once again up the path on Mount Carmel.
Jim Burklo 2022
The Rev. Jim Burklo
The Rev. Jim Burklo is pastor of United Church of Christ of Simi Valley, California. This post is republished with permission from his Substack blog.