amo: volo ut sis
What is the difference between the questions,
Do you believe God is? and,
Do you want God to be?
The relationship between the two questions strikes me as more important than any answer to the two questions we could give in response. If the questions act as stages (i.e answer one in order to then unlock the ability to answer other…) then I can see few quibbling with these definitions as deeper ways of thinking about the relationship between faith & love.
But if the questions operate independently of each other, one mattering while another does not, then (depending on the victor in this interrogation of being) a paradigm shift must ensue:
If wanting God to be is an ancillary question to affirming God’s existence, then a majority view is upheld and evangelism requires continued dialogical attempts to bludgeon dissenters with logic, reason, and “evidence”…
…But (and I say this with the uncertainty and trembling heart of one looking straight down into a chasm of unknown depth) if believing God exists is a mere intellectual assertion as impactful to our lived reality as confessing that gravity & natural laws govern the universe, then the question’s displacement introduces a host of deeper questions, implications, and mysteries.
Sages and saints claim the journey of faith is one of lessening understanding and deepening enjoyment.
We sit in the presence of the “ground of all being” and are content being surround by infinite complexity and, I’ll admit, this is an impossible claim to verify. As St. John of the Cross said, "Our greatest need is to be silent before this great God… for the only language he hears is the silent language of love."
Science does nothing for us in the face of mysticism.
Truth claims for half a millennia have required propositions and logical proofs to corroborate their veracity. Without a positive assertion of what is implied and required of a claim, your hopes are “just poetry” (something lauded for all of human history now used since “the enlightement” as a pejorative by many). The fruit of their life is the only “requirement” of the claim made by the saint who contemplates the divine.
As stated above, these questions might be dependent on one another and part of a cycle we deepen over time. The fundamentalist would agree and not press beyond affirming both with a solid “yes” while a more thoughtful disciple would see the importance in an evolving & nuanced, but still nominally affirmative answer to both questions over a lifetime…
…But (at risk of forming a final word about the matter) the ponderous musings above are posed to those curious if one question is unnecessary while the other is vital, and I don’t believe this line of thought can be completed by anything but the poetic for now.
But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence we call God...
It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our own fathoms…~ R. S. Thomas.
