A GOD BY ANY OTHER NAME
If I could find God I think I would find my wife.
I’m not referring to the God of Sunday School and the God of organized and disorganized religion — a divine being surrounded by bright light who lives in a magical place called Heaven.
By God I mean the mystery behind the universe.
The word God is a paltry three-letter inadequacy for the universe. The mathematical precision alone that keeps it all together, spinning and constantly moving at unbelievable speeds is miraculous. One centimeter off and it all goes haywire.
God needs a more spectacular name. Take the word supernatural. That’s an impressive word. But God and the supernatural are not synonymous, because God also includes the natural world — the earth and the oceans and mountains and cities and houses and people and animals, everything we see around us with our available senses, the senses that currently are the only ones available to us.
But in the supernatural word, other senses must come into play, senses we aren’t yet aware of. There may be living people who have some supernatural sense, or think they do. But I think only in death does the supernatural world, that otherworldly dimension possibly become available to us and we become part of it, part of the universe, part of the miracle.
Unbelievers will say this sounds like the same pie-in-the-sky stuff as the God in Heaven surrounded by divine light. It requires the same faith or suspension of disbelief, certainly.
Faith carries a heavy burden for a five-letter word. The word for God should at least have five letters. Miracle has seven.
Seven. Now we’re getting somewhere. In Biblical studies, seven is the number of “completeness and perfection.”
The Bible itself was originally divided into seven parts: the law, the prophets, the writings or psalms, the gospels and acts, the general epistles, the epistles of Paul, and the book of Revelation. The total number of originally inspired books was forty-nine — seven times seven.
That works for me. God is the Miracle. The Miracle of the universe. If we become part of that when we die, we find the undead.