God in a Box

Human beings are very food at pigeonholing things to understand them. The first experiences of the transcendant "beyond this world" were placed in very specific boxes. The recognition of the transcendant was attached to specific things: Streams, animals, and weather all had their own "spirit". These spirits were eventualy anthropomorphised into individuals with names. The transcendant had been placed in boxes. The boxes of polytheism were rigid and slow to change. These boxes could change. Ares was a god of agriculture when the Romans adopted him. At some point a farmer was probably forced to defend his land (or he felt the need to take somebody elses land and claim it as his own), and his god of agriculture taught him to defend himself (or how to conquer others) with such efficiency that soon Ares became a god of war. The boxes could change, but there were problems. One problem was that the boxes would come in sets, called pantheons. THe more important problem was that the sacred was still being divided into boxes. At some point in time, somewhere around 2000 BCE a nomad had an experience of the sacred and transendant and realized that there was only one source of hte sacred and only one creative force in the universe. Most importantly, he realized that there is no box.

This concept is difficult to explain and has proven difficult to maintain. Monotheism had been tried in ancient Egypt with the promotion of the sun-god Aton over the other Gods, eventually to the dismissal of other gods, but the pantheistic nature of the familiar religion reasserted itself. Moses had difficulty maintaining the monotheism that Abraham found. Whenever he spent too much time on the mountain the people he was liberating made their idols and started worshippping other Gods. Monotheism had to be reinforced in the peoples minds over and over again.

Since we tend to put everything we encounter in daily life in a box we frequently try to put God in a box. In trinitarian doctrine we find three boxes that are one box. This is understandable difficult to process.

Perhaps the prophet Mohammad was onto something when he realized that no box constructed in the minds of human beings can contain God, and instead of explaining away the box, he gave names and titles to God that put God in every box. When we look at playing cards or dominoes we recognize the patterns on those cards and identify their value. This only works with smaller numbers. Imagine a playing card with fifty spades, or one hundred hearts, or one thousand clubs. We wouldn't be able to tell the difference between one thousand or one thousand and one diamonds on a card, we would only see one mass of diamonds. The effect of placing God in so many small boxes, declaring that the creator is in all of these small categories, we are overwhelmed and we see only one large God. We pass a threshold where many trees become one forest and many people become one crowd.

Trying to see God in every small box effectively removes the boxes and presents us with a God that is not contained in the boxes, but is present in the boxes. This is refered to as the transcendence and immanence of God.

Celtic spirituality is very comfortable with the immanence of God. So is the spirituality of the Native American tribes, although they had a polytheistic outlook, they saw the force of creation in all things.

I think that all mystic experiences include the notion that there is no box. The experience may lead you to feel like you are part of the entire world and connected to it, or it may make you feel small and insignificant, like it does to Job when God finally reveals himself to Job.