Praying to Einstein’s God (or Spinoza’s)? Dominican discernment journal (2 of _)

Second of (__) journals based on my answers raised by questions sent to Dominican Associates in advance f an Aug. 24 retreat at the motherhouse in Springfield. See HERE for more info in the first journal. Today’s questions, on our Relationship with God, ask: “Who is God for you today? How has your relationship with God changed over the years? How do you encounter God? How do you pray? When do you pray? What are the ways that you share your faith with others?” — 2024 Discernment Materials for Renewal of Associate Commitment prepared, Springfield Dominican Sisters.

I have no idea what God looks like. But I’ve got a pretty darn good idea of what God doesn’t look like, at least not to me — I can’t see God in the vision that came to Ezekiel, of “something that seemed like a human form” with loins of gleaming amber seated on a sapphire throne in a chariot carried by four “living creatures.” And this: “downward from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendor all around.  Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”

Not that he was wrong about any of this. I’m sure he saw what he saw.

But what Ezekiel saw “in the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin” — about 600 BCE, give or take a few years — “in the land of the Chaldeans by the River Chebar,” doesn’t necessarily translate well to the 21st century –at least not as I’ve experienced it.

Nor do I think God looks — or sounds — very much like a character in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 movie The Ten Commandments.

Others, apparently, don’t believe as I do. Louisiana has mandated that a copy of the Ten Commandments using language from DeMille’s movie be displayed in every public school classroom in the state. In fact, one plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the law “also took issue with the law’s spelling out of the word ‘God,’ which he avoids,” as the Times of Israel noted, because, “Like many Jews, he instead writes out “G-d” to prevent taking God’s name in vain.”

This much I do know: I’d better tread lightly when I’m talking about God. And I’d better respect other people’s efforts to describe what’s infinitely beyond description.

To the questions:

‘Who is God for you today?’ Albert Einstein, who was capable of coining aphorisms as well as equations, is credited with saying on more than one occasion, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.” Well, I don’t know enough about Spinoza to have an opinion, but I can safely say I believe in Einstein’s God — and I’ll take his word on Spinoza’s.

Einstein is quoted several times on the subject in a remarkable Wikipedia page (compiled mostly from secondary sources) on the “Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein. Two quotes will suffice:

• I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist … I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings. [Ellipsis and links in the original.]
• My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem—the most important of all human problems.”

While he thought the idea of a personal God who dishes out rewards and punishments was childish, Einstein held a “conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world,” and added, “This firm belief, a belief bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.”

To 99 percent of which I say amen, brother!

At the same time, I still pray to a personal God. You might even say I believe in a personal God in much the same way I believe in E=mc². I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it. But I accept it on faith.

So that’s who God is for me today, as nearly as I can get it in writing. Moving right along through the discernment questions. How has your relationship with God changed over the years? How do you encounter God? How do you pray? When do you pray?

Taking them in order:

‘How has your relationship with God changed over the years?’ When I was a kid in conformation classes, I remember saying God reminded me of an Episcopal bishop. Purple vest, clerical collar, gray flannel suit (after all, this was in the 1950s); a nice guy, benign, even avuncular but somewhat removed from my daily life. I was probably trying to be ironic (I had a snotty, sarcastic streak as a teenager), but I suspect it was more accurate than I intended.

More immediately, I grew up believing in something like Einstein’s God. My father was a forest ecologist for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and he passed along to me Einstein’s “admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly.”

Dad was a PK, a preacher’s kid, the son of a Norwegian evangelical Lutheran pastor who passed down to him a love for choral music. So I also grew up listening to LPs of Bach cantatas, Lutheran chorales and choral music by German composers like Heinrich Schutz and Praetorius that no one else ever heard of. When God speaks to me, God speaks in four-part harmony.

That served me well enough until the 1990s, when I experienced the need for a spiritual awakening in 12 step recovery and tried to put the 11th Step of Alcoholics Anonymous into practice

[We] Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

‘How do you pray? I still make a distinction between prayer and meditation, although I’m learning to see them as parts of the same process — what some of the Jesuit authors call a conscious conversation with God. Prayer is one part of the conversation, when I speak to God, and meditation is one way I allow God to speak to me.

When I was “working the steps” in early recovery, I did a lot of reading. The meditation half of the equation. Prayer came harder. I was most familiar with rote prayers, mostly in church but also a childhood table blessing, “Bless this food to our use, and us to thy service; and make us ever mindful of the needs of others.” (The more I think about it, I think it sums up the core of the Christian religion. Probably all religions, for that matter.) Growing up in the Episcopal Church, however, I was left with a lingering feeling that if something doesn’t have a lot of Thee’s and Thou’s in it, it isn’t really a prayer.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. I joined a Lutheran church, sang in the choir, taught at a Catholic liberal arts college, read lots of books — the way I practice the 11th Step meditation piece — and gradually learned to pray more intentionally as I began spiritual direction with a Dominican sister and read authors like Frs. James Martin and Richard Rohr. Also a young adult-novel by Judy Blume about a pre-teen girl’s relationship with God. It’s titled Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, and it taught me you don’t have to pray in archaic language or a holy voice.

So I guess you can say my spiritual mentors are varied. Martin Luther. Yes, I’ve read Luther. And a school of Lutheran theologians in Finland who write about the indwelling of Christ in the faith of a believer. Jesuits, Franciscans. And a secular Jewish author of young adult books.

When do you pray?’ That’s pretty varied, too. I don’t claim to have a model prayer life, and I’m still working on it. The more I learn, the more I realize I have yet to learn.

In fact, I’m pretty haphazard about it. I pray in church, of course. Sometimes if I’m driving and I pass an ambulance running on emergency traffic, I’ll make the sign of the cross — nothing like a liturgical prayer, but I hope they’re OK. It’s something I picked up from Debi, who learned it from a Latina roommate back in the Quad-Cities.

Mostly, I pray for guidance, or, as the 11th Step of AA puts it, “for knowledge of [God’s] will for us and the power to carry that out.” There’s a quote from Mother Theresa (St. Theresa of Calcutta) that makes especially good sense to me:

I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I’m supposed to do, what I can do. I used to pray for answers, but now I’m praying for strength. I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things.

A lot of my prayers start, taking my cue from Judy Blume, with something like hey, God, are you there? It’s me, Pete. Sometimes I’ll paraphrase the morning prayer in Luther’s Small Catechism:

I thank You, my heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, Your dear Son, that You have kept me this night from all harm and danger; and I pray that You would keep me this day also from sin and every evil, that all my doings and life may please You. For into Your hands I commend myself, my body and soul, and all things.  Let Your holy angel be with me, that the evil foe may have no power over me.”

When I’m on the top of my game I’ll broaden it out, following the Buddhist Metta Sutta or loving-kindness meditation, to include my family and friends, my parish and the Dominican community, the larger community in Springfield, the state, nation, humankind, all sentient beings and all of God’s creation.

Are God and God’s holy angels in Luther’s morning prayer the same as Einstein’s God, and Spinoza’s? I don’t know. I suspect they are, but I don’t even try to work that out logically. I just pray.

Next: My thoughts on My Relationship with Church/Community (link HERE, when I get it written). Link HERE for a post on the discernment process, for an Aug. 24 retreat at which I intend to recommit as a Dominican Associate.

[Uplinked Aug. 9, 2024]