Vocation

I have a habit of scrawling messages to myself on sticky notes. Usually it’s 11 pm and I’ve almost fallen asleep when suddenly my brain decides it’s going to be helpful—a thesis for that paper that’s due, a list of errands I need to run, an idea for a poem or a character in a novel, or ideas for what to write about in this blog. When I wake up the next morning and squint at the spiky, nearly unintelligible handwriting that pays no heed to the lines on the paper since I was too lazy to turn on the light, I wonder why I was so excited about the idea. Although I may have thought ‘spewing words from the ends of my hair’ was an edgy, ingenious line of poetry during my sleep-deprived delirium, the light of day tends to bring me back to some sort of sanity. So when I woke up to see the words ‘God is an elephant’ scrawled across the pink sticky note on my desk, I wasn’t entirely sure if I should start worrying about my mental health or turn it into a blog post. While the mental health bit is still on the table, I’ll settle for the blog post for now.
What prompted this late night epiphany equating the Divine to a pachyderm was thinking about how many religious conflicts and divisions have resulted out of people arguing about who or what God is and how we should relate to God. And, in my near-dream state, my mind immediately went to the story of the six blind men who are told to examine an elephant and describe what it is. Each man feels a different part of the elephant so one thinks it’s like a rope because they felt the tail and another thinks it’s like a pillar because they felt a leg and this continues down the line. Even though they all examined the same animal, they each experienced different aspects of it and came away with very different perceptions of what an elephant is. So if people who can’t see an elephant—a relatively small, tangible animal in the world—can come away with such drastically different understandings of it, how much more might we—who can’t see God—come away with drastically different understandings of God, who is neither small, tangible, nor solely in the world. And yet, we still think we know what God is and how God wants us to act.
Since none of us really have any idea what God is like and we can’t even definitively prove the existence of God, arguing that ‘our’ God is real while everyone else’s is false has always seemed pretty arrogant to me. If God can create the entire universe, something so massive and complex we don’t have the language to describe its massiveness and complexity, why should we be able to describe the creator of that universe? In some ways, I think that how we envision God says more about ourselves than it does about God. It feels like a ‘choose your own adventure’ where we each get to choose the God that we want to believe in. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I take great comfort in picturing a loving, forgiving God full of grace that cares for me and has called me by name. And other people find comfort in picturing a stern, austere God that requires some sort of penance in order to grant forgiveness. And, while it may not seem that way, these views don’t have to be in opposition. Someone else’s view of God may not resonate with me, but a world where everyone believes and thinks the exact same thing that I do wouldn’t be a very interesting one. Besides, no matter what else I may claim about God, I don’t think that God is one-dimensional, so it’s probably unrealistic to designate God as solely loving or solely austere or forgiving or vengeful.
So where does that leave me? Probably more confused than I was before and really glad that I’m almost done with this blog post because it’s making my head hurt. But I think it also opens up possibilities. Instead of viewing our interpretations of God as being at odds with each other and fighting about who is correct, we could instead engage each other in dialogue and learn from each other. Instead of assuming that we have experienced all of God that there is to experience, we could think outside ourselves and try to put our experiences in the context of the experiences of others. Just as an elephant is more than its legs or its tail, we should remember that God is probably more than words can describe and definitely more than any of us can grasp on our own. It might be good to scrawl a few messages on sticky notes to remind ourselves that maybe God is an elephant.