What and Where is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern Soul — John Shaqi
What and Where is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern SoulSwain, Richard La Rue
Religion
What and Where is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern Soul
Swain, Richard La Rue
Christianity; God (Christianity)
An intelligent lawyer friend of mine once said to me, "Of course I do
not believe in a personal God." I asked him if he meant that he did not
believe in a God who has a _form_ in heaven. But he answered:
"Oh, no, no, I have been beyond that for twenty-five years! God, if He
means anything, means the infinite, while a person means the limited.
Now, who ever heard of such a childish thing as a limited infinite? No,
pig-iron, as much as anything, is God."
I replied, "With all your intelligence, you haven't the remotest idea of
what constitutes personality. You are not aware that by personality we
mean a certain type of experience, and not a substance. Personality is
realized only as the experience of self-knowledge is achieved. You are
not as yet much of a personality, you are hardly more than a candidate
for the office, but by making a good campaign you may get elected. You
are not very personal because you are not very self-knowing, and if you
should drop the plummet into the depths of your experience to sound
yourself, by that very act you would acquire new depth, and would need
to try again to fathom yourself. So at best, you are only becoming
personal. None but the Infinite Experience can know itself perfectly,
and therefore, God alone is completely personal."
My friend had no idea either of God's personality or his own, and his
philosophical conception of nature was only a little less crude.
It was a long step in the right direction when I came to realize that I
had never seen my mother, with whom I lived for so many happy years. Yet
there was one thing that I felt sure I knew--absolutely, as I knew
nothing else--and that was my mother. Not her face, not her voice, not
her attitudes nor her actions, though all these I knew too and loved.
But back of all these there was a real mother, of whom these were only
manifestations. And this real mother, that I knew as I knew nothing
else, was silent, and invisible. And then I found that I knew myself
too--hardly as well as I knew my mother, but in the same way, and I knew
myself also to be invisible and silent. My spirit, or personality, is as
invisible and silent as God. I have no more seen myself than I have seen
Him. Neither has my naked soul ever made a sound. All the words that my
soul desires expressed are produced by a sort of animated phonograph
which we call the mouth. At the wish of my invisible self the physical
organs of speech set the air vibrating, but my self-conscious Will is
eternally silent. There is much to be said about the relation of
Personalities to their instruments, but this must be left until a little
later. It will avoid confusion if we try to take but one step at a time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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