The God That Stands By

The God That Stands By

*This article previously appeared in an issue of _Creation Spirituality_ magazine.*

Often, when we in the West encounter Eastern religions, we are put off by the idea of the "impersonal" God. We have a bias toward a personal, loving God who is interested in us on an individual basis.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with this bias, in itself; the personal God is important to us because it is the God of our experience. Our mythology speaks to us of a God that repeatedly intervenes on the believer's behalf. This is the God that made Sarah fertile beyond her years; who led the Israelites across the Sea of Reeds on dry ground; the God that raised Jairus's daughter from the dead. This God affords us full attention when we request an audience, and is deeply concerned with even the pettiest details of our daily lives.

What, then, do we make of the God who allows six million of "His" people to be tortured and murdered; who allows thousands to die in earthquakes and other natural disasters; who allows children to die by the tens-of-thousands of famine and disease around the world, and suffers the infant to be born only to die of AIDS soon after? What of the God that does not intervene? What of the God that stands by, hands-off, unmoved by such suffering and tragedy?

What the religions of the West fail to do is to see God in His or Her entirety. Entirety, like infinity, is difficult for us. It is much more comforting to seek relationship with One who is not ambivalent to our concerns than it is to wrestle with the jackal who will not be pinned down. We want a deity who attends to us particularly, not a God who is equally concerned with the other five billion human beings on this planet, let alone the whole of the Universe. We want the kind of special treatment that only the personal God can deliver.

But God cannot but be equally interested (or as they say in the East, disinterested) in the whole of Creation, in that the Holy Spirit enjoys union with all. I am by no means saying that the concept of the personal God is erroneous, only that it is incomplete. God is not exclusively personal, nor is God exclusively impersonal. We must move beyond yet another "either/or" dichotomy if we are to approach God in His or Her entirety.

It may help us to know more about the impersonal God as our Eastern brethren see It. For the Taoist who practices the native religion of China, God-the Tao-is an eternal principle, neither loving nor hating, exhorting nor condemning. The Tao gives birth to all things and unto It all things return. "It is the Mother of the Universe," says Lao Tzu, author of the primary Taoist scripture, The Tao Te Ching, and yet "It does not choose sides." Through looking at Nature, the Tao is self-evident. There is an order to the Universe in the midst of seeming chaos; there is unity in diversity. With the Tao one always knows where one stands. The Taoist knows where he comes from, and where he is going. With the Tao the human being knows herself to be a part of Nature, and does not attempt to wrestle it into submission. The Taoist sees God in the same way Nature does. "Look at the lilies of the field and the birds of the air," says Jesus, "they do not sow, nor do they reap, and yet the Creator feeds them." For the Taoist, the perspective of the sparrow or the trout or the wind is the perspective of the human as well. Humankind occupies no exalted position or special dispensation. She is part of the cosmic community. This is indeed an impersonal deity, yet It is by no means a deity who is aloof, separate from Its Creation, but instead permeates All. Even though the Taoist doesn't expect the Tao to intercede in her interest, she perceives a general sense of "rightness" or goodness in the world as it is and of which she is a part. Far from expecting the deity to "make everything all right," the Taoist sees her life and fate (whatever that is) as an integral part of the "rightness" of the Universe. And this is the gift that Taoism (and other faith traditions that espouse an impersonal deity) bring to us: a perception of the Universe as community.

The Taoist sages have provided us a model in the familiar symbol for the Tao: two "tadpoles," to use Jeremy Taylor's description, one black, one white, which, in chasing each other's tails, form a perfect circle, a unity. Neither black nor white, but both. Not two separate things, but one. Not male or female, but male and female; neither warm nor cool, but warm and cool.

This model of the Tao is particularly useful for us in the West when approaching the nature of Divinity. Even within our Western tradition Meister Eckhart acknowledged this paradox and designated the impersonal aspect of God as "the Godhead." "God accomplishes," he writes, "but the Godhead does not do so." This perspective helps make sense of a God who is neither exclusively personal nor impersonal, but inclusive of both.

We are privileged beings indeed who are invited to enter into relationship with a personal God who intervenes incessantly on our behalf, while also being sustained by the God who provides our ground of being and embraces all the Universe as one, this God that stands by.