I struggle with pronouns around God. I think many of us do. But for me it is not the desire for a more reverential or consciousness-bearing form of the gender neutral “it.” For me, pronouns for God are difficult because, well, they are nouns. And God is not a noun to me. Not to say God is an action or a quality, but for me, God is the space between. YHWH. Unutterable, because God is that which relates, connects and makes mean that which is utterable.
This is not a new idea. "I am." This statement is not a naming nor really a statement of existence, but reads almost as “I am am,” except not. I am to be/being/been/will be/the nature and foundation of being. For me this is powerful in representing God as the act, state and manifestation of being, God as both relational and pervasive, God as that which both facilitates separateness and demands ultimate unity.
I’m bringing this up because last night I was a little past my usual threshold of inebriation and was talking with a friend about our self-understandings and our psycho-therapists. And he said to me that he is practicing differentiating the thinking mind from the “self,” trying to see that part of him that operates in language and creates structures for understanding as only another adaptive appendage, like the opposable thumb and external ear: functional.
My therapist and I have been working in a similar vein, but with emotions. We’ve been working at differentiating the experience of emotion from the self. It’s not that I’m trying to avoid the experience of emotion but only that I seek to be able to acknowledge that emotions are fleeting, unpredictable, temporal and as such may be expressions of the true self but are not themselves the true self. This differentiation means I can acknowledge my emotions and experience them without judging them or clinging to them.
Together with the chemicals in my system the other night, these two thoughts engendered in me a deep sense of peace but also a renewed sense of what it might mean to be made in the image of the God I believe in, the un-pronoun-able God.
If I am neither the I that thinks and proposes nor the me that feels, experiences and is acted upon, perhaps I am instead the “am” that connects them, holds them in tension and in relation to each other and in relation to the other “ams” of the world, just as God is in essence also relationship, tension and manifestation.
The self I seek so deeply to know then requires the exploration of both the self as relationship and manifestation, my “being” as noun, verb and state. Some might call this chi, others might call it soul. Others might call it a bunch of existential BS. I guess as a Christian I’ll probably stick with calling this idea soul, but soul not in addition to heart, mind and body, but soul as the unutterable “am.”
What does that mean for my life? Well, for one, it means that self-improvement does not have to mean “improving” any of the manifestations of the self, but instead can mean bringing those manifestations into more full relation to one another. For another it takes away the pressure to maintain a firm “sense of self” based on discrete manifestations. I can begin to free myself from manifestations of self that the world has used to identify me but have become stumbling blocks and unnecessary weight for my journey. And finally, this model of self as relationship and relational breaks down the wall between self and other by allowing for the possibility that the self is definitionally permeable and permeating and only by narrowly defining ourselves as individual discrete manifestations do we fool ourselves into thinking we are separated.
Help!
