The God Box

A question I usually confront myself with when assessing my religious views is, “What is my God box?” What is a God box? A God box is an individual’s current image of God and everything that God is.  For instance, a simple example would be a God in a toga, who looks like Zeus and lounges on top of a cloud throwing lightning bolts. This God answers your prayers and controls every facet of the universe. Many of us have shared this God box before.  Another God box would be “God is Love”.  In this image, God is more than just a concrete being. He transcends reality and becomes a concept as well. Depending on how you say “God is Love”, this could be seen as a more mature God box. These two examples are what I meant by  ”God box”.

My God box is constantly under evaluation, constantly evolving. Currently I see God as many things: He is the omnipotent father of all things, He is the historical/spiritual Jesus, and It is a spiritual entity that is nebulous in nature and can only be described by what It is not. This could be referred to as the Trinity. My God box is meshed with the concepts and realities of Allah and Buddha, not because I extract what I like from each religion to make my own “cafeteria-style” religion, but because I see how they are the same.  I say He is Love, but I don’t say it like others usually do. My image of God is One who does not do what you ask of Him. He helps you, but not in the way you often want. His will is beyond our will, implemented on behalf of not only our own sakes but everything else’s.

The best way to describe it is the will of a doctor and the will of a patient. We ask the doctor to cure us of our ailments. He cuts us up, he tears things out, he gives us pills. We go through all this invasive treatment with promise of feeling better… and at the end of the day we still feel nauseous and dizzy. Our sutures burn with pain, our insides are roiling inside of us, and the adverse effects of the medication makes us feel even worse. “How does this make me feel better?” the patient asks. The patient and the doctor shared the same goal in curing an ailment, but there was a difference in wills. The patient’s will was to be comfortable. To FEEL better. The doctor’s was to actually fix the problem. The patient was looking for instant gratification while the doctor was addressing the immediate medical priority AND the long term health of the patient. The doctor’s will may not be immediately inherent, but when you stand back and look at what all is going on and also realize that he is not just diagnosing you but hundreds of others don’t you think that what the doctor provided the patient was ultimately more beneficial than what was asked for? Trying to keep myself from writing a novel of a blog, this is the best I can describe what I see God as right now. There’s so much more to God than what I can describe at any point in time.

That’s what determines the scope of my God box: my ability to intuit God. My God box only exists to break God into digestible, bite-size pieces. It’s like a television, which is only capable of showing you what is able to fit onto film. What you see on the screen implies so much more, but you are not able to experience it in its entirety. As time passes, my God box seems to grow bigger and bigger to accomodate for my rapidly expanding image of God, and with each passing evaluation He becomes harder to contain into a box. My God box becomes more strained as I stretch it out. So what is going to happen when it reaches it’s limit? Is it going to halt in it’s tracks? Or is it going to split at the seams and bottom out? Is it going to be too much for me and I’ll just give up on it all? The problem becomes more than just being able to find out what God is. It also becomes an issue of preparing myself to experience more of what He is. It becomes an issue of my integrity as a vessel for God.

And after all that is said and done, after we have established a God box…what does it matter? What was it’s purpose? All we did was construct an image of Him, we never found Him. Wasn’t the God box constructed to help us see God in His entirety? How does it do that by cutting it into pieces? How does it help us see the big picture when all it is capable of doing is showing us a small window into what God is? How can we know who God is by making up our own idea of Him? One thing we must be aware of when constructing this God box is that what we see in it IS NOT GOD. It is our projections that we place onto what we believe God is. What we see in the God box we are more than willing to name God Himself. As DeMello said in Awareness, “people fall into idolatry because they think that where God is concerned, the word is the thing.” We construct a description of who we think God is then we fall into the rut of worshipping that, forgetting that it was only a guess at who He is. DeMello wrote about how he was confronted by a world-renowned scripture scholar. “It never struck me that I had been an idol worshipper all my life! My idol was not made of wood or metal; it was a mental idol.” DeMello reminded his readers that those that had constructed their own mental idol were the more dangerous idol worshippers because “they used a very subtle substance, the mind to produce their God.”

Maybe I was never meant to contain God in a box. Maybe I wasn’t meant to contain Him within me, this body serving as a Temple. How could all of what God is be within me? Maybe I’ve been using the wrong word this whole time. I’m not a vessel, I’m a conduit. I am a channel through which He flows through. Right now, the God box seems irrelevant. My experience and my ideas of God right now have surpassed any words that I am capable of expressing right now.  Right now it doesn’t feel like I could fit what I’m feeling inside a box and I’m all the better for it.