Beware the God of Your Understanding
Later today I am to give the first of two keynote addresses at the annual Haymarket Center gathering of mental health and addiction counselors at Elmhurst College. I am to speak on the topic of “The God of Your Understanding,” a completely apolitical presentation on the radical theological openness at the heart of 12 Step Spirituality. Given the horrific massacre (is there any other kind?) in Orlando yesterday I have shifted my tone. Here are the central ideas I will be exploring.
- Twelve Step programs don’t work; Twelve Step people work, and work very hard
- At the heart of Twelve Step work is turning your life over to God, as you understand God.
- In the context of the Twelve Steps it doesn’t matter how you understand God. What matters is that you place yourself in the service of this God.
- But God, however understood, is more than the Ultimate Sponsor, and once you turn your life over to God you are at the mercy of your God’s desires.
- It may be that your God wants to put an end to your addiction, and I am happy for you if that is the case. It may also be that your God wants to put an end to Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, Secularists, Humanists, Feminists, and the entire LGBTQ community. It may be that while the God of your understanding wants to welcome you into heaven of your understanding, he or she may also want to condemn others to eternal torment in the fires of hell—also according to your understanding.
- This is because the God of your understanding is you. That’s why the God of your understanding happens to share the ethics and morality of your understanding as well. Your God loves those you love, fears those you fear, and hates those you hate. And if you insist that you don’t fear or hate anyone: see whom the God of your understanding fears and hates and work backwards: if the God of your understanding condemns anyone to death in this life and eternal damnation in the hereafter chances are you want them dead now and damned then as well, even if you cannot consciously admit as much.
- God matters even if God doesn’t exist. God matters because God is the embodiment of everything you believe about yourself, others, and the nature of life and how best to live it.
- The God of Omar Mateen, the terrorist who slaughtered innocents in Orlando, is Muslim, but He is not the Muslim God. There is no Muslim God, only the Gods of 1.2 billion Muslims, each of whom understands God differently. The God of Omar Mateen’s understanding was Muslim because Omar Mateen’s understanding of God, life, and how best to live it was infused with his understanding of Islam. The God of Omar Mateen’s understanding was Muslim because Omar Mateen understood Him to be Muslim.
- The God of Omar Mateen’s understanding hated lots of people, perhaps the LGBTQ community most of all, because Omar Mateen hated lots of people, and perhaps the LGBTQ community most of all.
- In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan argues that without God all things are permissible, that is to say, without God there is no morality. Omar Mateen argues the opposite: with God all things are permissible. Omar Mateen didn’t act contrary to the wishes of the God of his understanding, but in fulfillment of those wishes.
- What is true of Omar Mateen is true of all terrorists, be they Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Nationalist, etc.: all of them act with the moral certitude that comes from abdicating reason in favor of blind obedience to an Absolute that is nothing more than a projection of their own psyche.
- So, before you engage in Step Three and turn your life over the God of your understanding, you had best investigate just who this God is and what this God demands of you.
- To do this I suggest you asking several questions of your understanding of God: 1) Whom does the God of your understanding love, and whom does the God of your understanding hate? 2) Does the God of your understanding ask you to violate universal moral principles such as the Golden Rule? And 3) How does the God of your understanding treat those who understand differently?
- I’m Jewish, but the God of my understanding isn’t. The God I was raised with so loved the Jews that He (sic) chose us from among all the peoples of the earth, placed us at the center of human history, gave us His (sic) one and only book of instruction (Torah), and promised us the Land of Israel in perpetuity. The God of my understanding doesn’t choose one people over another, write books, or dabble in real estate.
- The God of my understanding is the manifesting source and substance of all reality: creation and destruction, light and dark, good and evil.
- Turning my life over to the God of my understanding isn’t turning my life over to a set of beliefs that abdicate me from the task of moral reasoning, but rather places me in direct confrontation with life and death, blessing and curse, good and evil, and demands that I choose between them this and every moment knowing all the while that I don’t always know which is which.
- Not knowing humbles me; not knowing liberates me from self–righteousness and certainty and for compassion toward all beings. Not knowing forces me to think and think again about the rightness of my choices. Not knowing allows me, at least for today, to not be Omar Mateen.
- I believe that the Twelve Steps are a spiritual practice with the potential to lift us beyond religion and into a direct encounter with reality (I will talk more about this on Wednesday morning), but like any spiritual system, religious or secular, it has to be engaged in critically. The extent to which we do this is the extent to which human transformation is possible. The extent to which we don’t is the extent to which terror in the name God is inevitable.