Photo by David Besh from Pexels

Fingers help create the Moon​

It is as true to say that God creates the World,
​as that the World creates God.

- Whitehead, Process and Reality 
​

​We humans create so many images of God.

God as Cat, God as Friend, God as Mother, God as Lord, God as Coyote, God as Energy, God as Lover, God as Judge, God as Beauty, God as King, God as Earth, God as Father, God as Water, God as Silence, God as Matrix, God as Fire, God as Question Mark, God as Companion, God as Creativity, God as Everything.

I offer one more image: God as the Moon. I like the image because it suggests that our attempts to describe God are like fingers pointing to the Moon. The Moon transcends our fingers. No finger has a monopoly on the Moon and all point to it in some way, illuminating something about it.

I suggest further that the Moon is Love and alive with its own kind of feeling. It experiences our fingers pointing to it and in experiencing them they (the fingers) help create the Moon. This means that the Moon is not up and away but rather everywhere at once. The Moon is in its moonlight, touching everything in some way. Indeed it is inside each finger even as it is beyond all fingers, luring the finger to become fully alive; and it is a companion to all fingers, sharing in the sufferings and joys of all living being. The Moon is like the woman in the image below. She holds a world she loves and is partly created by the world she loves.

​If we want to understand how the world creates God, we must find a better analogy than the Moon. How about God as Mother? Or as Father? Or both?  Parents know, in ways that the Moon may not, that they are partly created by their children.

​- Jay McDaniel, 3/23/2022
​

Compassion by Mary Southard, Ministry of the Arts, used with permission: https://www.ministryofthearts.org/art/compassion/

The World creates God as​
​Children create Parents

Many years ago my youngest son asked if I created him. I said "Yes and No." 

​Yes, because his mother and I helped bring him into existence some years ago. And No, because, with his self-creativity and spontaneity, he creates himself moment by moment, albeit in relation to his surroundings. 

I added that he creates me, too. I would not be who I am, as his father, without his presence in my life. I said that I was very glad to be created by him, would not have it otherwise. I like being created by him.

He asked if this was true of God, too. He asked if God could not be "our father who art in heaven" without our presence in God's life. I said, again, Yes and No. So let me back up.

As any parent knows, our children do indeed create us. Not completely, not entirely. We are more than our children. We "transcend" them, to use Whitehead's terminology. (See The Mutual Transcendence of God and the World.) But we are partly created by our children, and we wouldn’t have it any other way, because we love them.
​
I’m not simply talking about our sense of identity as parents. Yes, we would not have our identity as parents without our children. The concept of parent depends on the concept of child. But I'm not talking about concepts alone. I'm talking about our existence, our lives.

Consider your own life. Your life is not an idea in your mind or an abstract entity in the sky. It is your lived experience in the world: your momentary thoughts and feelings, your undertakings and undergoings, your sufferings and your joys, your hopes and your dreams. These experiences are your life.

And so it is, say process theologians, with the consequent nature of God. This side of God is not shut off from the universe, isolated in divine splendor. It is the universe itself as gathered into the ongoing unity of God's consequent nature. God is the Life of the universe, its intimate Companion.

We experience this side of God in various ways: through experiences of beauty, hope, wonder, creativity, and prayer. When, in prayer, we sense that someone or something is listening, God is this listening presence. We are being heard by God and our prayer affects God. The consequent nature of God is the Deep Listening of the universe.

Of course, God is affected by our lives even when we do not turn to God in prayer. A mother is affected by what is happening in the lives of her children even when they are not turning to her; she is a companion to her children, a fellow sufferer who understands. And so, say process theologians, the consequent nature of God is a companion to the universe, a fellow sufferer who understands.

*

How, then, do we create God? We create God in something of the way that children create parents, by living our lives.  As we undertake and undergo the many experiences of our lives, our lived experience is felt by God in a loving way. God is created by feeling our presence; receiving what happens to us, whatever it is; and loving us, 

To be sure, there are healthy and unhealthy ways for us to create God. When we harm one another in acts of violence, we bring pain to God's life. Images of divine wrath are the other side of this pain. And when we love one another and the world around us, we bring pleasure to God's life. 

*

Could God exist apart from us humans? Certainly, there would be God without human beings because there would still be something to feel and love: the other animals and plants on earth, the hills and rivers, the trees and stars. They create God, too. They are among God's children.

But could God exist even if there were nothing to feel and respond to? Even if God were alone? If God could exist in this way, says Whitehead, God would be deficient in actuality. The actuality of God, he says, needs a universe. Each entity in the universe, however and whatever it is, helps give concreteness to God' life, apart from which God would not be fully God.

This is why, when God hears us say that we help create God, God answers as would any mother or grandmother: "Thank you. I wouldn't have it otherwise, now please love one another as I love you."

Does God create us, too? From a process perspective God, the answer is Yes. God creates us by availing each and every entity in the universe, us included, with providential aims for the fulness of life as felt within the depths of our lives.

These aims are deeper than our conscious lives. They are inwardly felt goals and possibilities peace, for love, for understanding, for hospitality, for questioning, for zest for life. The spiritual alphabet of Spirituality and Practice below offers a menu of them. God creates us, moment by moment, by planting within the depths of our lived experience, possibilities for:
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​Whenever you see any of these thirty-seven "letters" in the alphabet embodied in people's lives, you see God's creativity. You see places where God is creating us.

​Legend has it that, a long long time ago, what was given by the world was but a watery chaos without form. God created the world out of this chaos by presenting it with possibilities for order and novelty. Thus arose the heavens and earth, the plants and animals, and, at one stage, our own species. We were a consequence of God's love.

The consequent nature of God is complemented by the consequent nature of the world. All is consequential. All is co-creative and co-created.  All is inter-becoming. The Mother's hope is that we, in our small way, can create one another in ways that mirror her grace, for the common good of all. In so doing we give her pleasure and greater beauty. She creates us, that we might help create her.

- Jay McDaniel, 3/23/2022

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​Love

by Hope Montgomery
Musician in Residence, Cobb Institute
​