Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 31, No. 2, Summer1992
Editorial
The N a m e s of God St. Paul has for centuries had the reputation of having been a powerful and persuasive preacher. But like all preachers, as well as others who seek te influence public thought and behavior, he did not always succeed. In Athens, the intellectual capital of the Graeco-Roman world, he did not make much of an impression. He gave one of his most eloquent and profound sermons, but according to the record in the book of Acts (c. 17), when it was over, there were many more skeptics than believers. Only two believers are mentioned by n a m e - - a woman named Damaris and a man named Dionysius, called the Areopagite because he heard Paul speak on the Areopagus Hill in Athens. Both of these people disappear into the mists of New Testament times. But Dionysius the Areopagite had a significant afterlife. Several centuries later, between the end of the third century and the end of the fifth century, there lived a writer who became known as the Pseudo-Dionysius. This shadowy figure is important because his work carried over into Christian philosophy and theology the influences of the great classical Greek thinker Plato (428-348 B.C.) and his principal follower in early Christian times, Plotinus (A.D. 205-270). Essentially, these teachers held that the fundamental reality is spiritual. Each person is or can be part of a larger life of the mind and spirit from which the individual can draw wisdom and strength for ordinary human life, thus giving the human experience a more permanent, even a divine dimension. This is the basis of all mysticism, whether Christian, Jewish, Moslem, or Oriental. William James concluded his study of The Varieties of Religious Experience with the reflection that our life "is continuous with a larger life from which saving experiences come." Dionysius the Areopagite, the Pseudo-Dionysius, wrote a book, On the Divine Names. God through the ages has had many names appropriate to the cultures and circumstances under which men and women have had experiences of the divine in the midst of life. Some of the divine names have been Jahweh, Aten, Isis, Osiris, Zeus, Ahura Mazda, Mithra, Krishna, Christ, Allah, Father, Mother, and innumerable others. Along with these family-cultural names there have been many derived from certain qualities admired and sought after by human beings: Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Great teachers and seers have been unable even when they wanted to, and most of them did want to, curb the tendency of their followers to deify them, and so there are huge numbers of Buddhas or Bodhisattvas, incarnations of the Buddha, Christian saints, and holy people 89
9 1992 Institutes of Religion and Health
90
Journal of Religion and Health
and sages of every culture and faith. In short, it appears that God, conceived as the primal energy and meaning behind and within the whole cosmos, is revealed in countless different ways, images, incarnations, and processes. The ultimate foolishness is for a particular culture, church, people, or creed to suppose the names that they have chosen for their own are the only possible ones. If human beings could break the habit of attaching finalities to their gods, cultures, rituals, and ways of life, many sources of conflict and destruction could be eliminated. We do not have to give up the values we treasure and love; we only have to accept the idea that whatever they are, they are not final and complete enough to exhaust the scope of cosmic reality and possibility. As one scientist, the astronomer Vera Rubin, has said, "Some of the most mysterious features of the universe have yet to be discovered." Nature's imagination is indeed much greater than ours. The way to deeper knowledge and understanding is through intellectual and spiritual humility and an open mind and heart. With this attitude we may turn to some of the possible names of god in the world we inhabit and in some small measure know. We can put the whole creationist controversy to rest by the simple, humble acceptance of the fact that the beginnings of the cosmos are shrouded in mystery. We can leave it there for now. Astronomers and physicists, as well as other theorists, have several hypotheses. They will discover many more. It looks as if there was a big bang to begin with. It does not look as if any god was there to touch it off. We do not think that the whole structure of religious and ethical life will collapse if we just accept that mystery. Acceptance of the mystery is better than the faith that an earth-bound god, perhaps 6,000 years old, assembled the whole cosmic process with his own hands and gave it a push to get it started. Alexander Pope wrote, "An honest man's the noblest work of God." Robert Ingersoll, some two centuries later, was saying, "An honest god is the noblest work of man." We tend to agree with Ingersoll while honoring what Pope had in mind. It seems quite likely that the idea of god emerged out of human reflections about the most important values and deepest meanings of human life in both its social and personal dimensions. As people pondered their own experiences and learned about the experiences of others, they became aware of a continuing identity of memory and value, larger by far than any one person's life, larger than all remembered generations, so large that it seemed always to have been there, a reality both terrible and beautiful, unchanging in some ways, yet always new in its manifestations and meanings. They called this reality god and associated it with important things in their lives: rivers, springs, trees, mountains, the sea, the sky, the seasons, the sun, the moon, and the stars They also associated god with human life, with birth and growth, health and sickness, food and drink, love and hate, good and evil, life and death, in short, with all the complexities, mysteries, tragedies, and ecstasies of the life they knew. To do this they needed one basic and unique human
Harry C. Meserve
91
creation: language. Essential messages of hunger, fear, protectiveness, parental care, and even love and mutual aid can be communicated without language as such. But when we get to spiritual values, social forms, laws, institutions, explanations, and the realms of mind and feeling, we have moved beyond instinct and stepped into a new dimension. Thus, it seems that the opening words of the Gospel of John m a y be closer to the mark than Genesis. The author of John wrote, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." We believe that it was in the beginnings of language that god was born, at that boundary of evolution where the curious, clumsy being reached out beyond the instinctive behavior of the tribe or the pack or the herd and stood on the threshold of self-consciousnesso It was then that humans began to be aware of all that lay behind them and all that might lie before them and became aware of both their uniqueness and their deep needs for community, understanding, and love. This moment or period was not, in terms of cosmic time measurements, so very long ago. It was perhaps a million and a half years ago that the first human-like creatures emerged. That is nothing as compared to the vast stretches of cosmic and astronomical time. But in terms of the duration of h u m a n civilizations, which so far have lasted for a few centures at most, it is quite respectable. One can feel a profound reverence and sense of identification with a god who was born a million years ago. That is quite long enough to be older and wiser than any of us, by far. The reality of the wisdom and experience out of which this god grew is quite sufficient to attract, fascinate, nourish, and strengthen any ordinary h u m a n being. One of god's names today is certainly "the word." Not the word as a final answer, but the word as the means by which h u m a n beings meet and communicate with one another and with all that has happened in the h u m a n story. A half million years may not be eternity, and it is a short time in the story of the cosmic system of which we are such a tiny part. There is ample room for the feeling that in god we are part of something much larger than ourselves. As St. Paul said, "In God we live and move and have our being." God is a verb, a process, an activity. Many years ago Harry and Bonaro Overstreet wrote a book called The Mature Mind. In it they pointed out that the w a y ethical values are expressed is not through theory and intellectual concept, but through acts. We ought to be "godding about," they said. One does not wait for the perfectly rational and coherent framework of what needs to be done. One acts in the context of what is nearby and necessary and lets the theory emerge from that action. Discussion of religious and ethical values can become a kind of game like crossword puzzles or chess, in which the mind is challenged and tested b u t not much in the real world is changed. It is easy, and one of the major intellectual temptations, to spend one's energies on the details of the game, a preoccupation we see frequently in churches, the academic world, and politics. An astute political commentator remarked that we have reached a point in our communal life where " . . . there has been no
92
Journal of Religion and Health
hiatus since the last campaign--campaigning and governing have become virtually indistinguishable." That the electorate is beginning to find out about this situation m a y be one of the reasons why fewer than half of the people in our country who are eligible to vote bother to do so. How we are to move in religion as in politics from the elaborate, humanly sterile game to the realities of h u m a n suffering, sickness, injustice, poverty, and cruelty and change these evil and unnecessary conditions is an absolutely basic problem in the developed societies. It should be one of the most pressing concerns of religion, education, and government in the next decades. So far, we have seen examples of god as a verb only in small committed groups like the Quakers, the Mennonites, some monastic groups, and a few idealistic communities where small numbers of people have banded together to work out practical expressions of their ideal values. Ideal community efforts have their dangers and distortions. They seldom win the approval and support of masses of people and the established order, but we have permitted to grow up in our society so profound a degree of moral slipperiness and ethical insensitivity that the only w a y m a y be a direct challenge, not by force but by a counter-culture of decency. If one chooses to think of god as a verb, one decides that winning is not so important as integrity. Reflecting on ideas and names of god, we were led back to a book by Paul Tillich, in our view the greatest theological thinker of this century, published some forty years ago. It is called The Courage to Be. The substance of it was based on the Terry Lectures at Yale Divinity School in 1951, and it is pretty hard reading, but rewarding. If we understand its essence, Tillich says that there are three kinds of anxiety in the lives of h u m a n beings. There is the anxiety of mortality and death, which tells us that whatever we are and whatever we say and do, it is done with when we die. There is the anxiety of guilt, which tells us that we are limited, human, imperfect, and that all our efforts fall short because of spiritual blindness and ethical impurity. Then there is the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, which tells us that life m a y not mean anything at all. It may be, in Macbeth's words, " . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." What every hum a n being faces, says Tillich, is the necessity of affirming the self in the face of these existential anxieties that are part of the h u m a n condition. For our age, one might say we have grown used to the first two: we know we shall die; we know we are guilty, b u t we feel real despair when we confront the possibility that the hopes and fears, the pains and exaltations of this life may mean nothing at all. The answer to these deep anxieties, says Tillich, is the courage to be, to affirm ourselves and our meanings and meagre efforts to do well in spite of them, through them, even because of them. We know we are limited by fate and death; we know we are imperfect and often mistaken, sometimes wicked; we know about our doubts. Still, we can, with the courage to be, affirm that we are what we are. If we do, says Tillich, we shall find the "God above God," not a promise of immortality, not a personal father-mother
Harry C. Meserve
93
figure who will make everything all right in the end, not a creed or philosophy t h a t will remove all our doubts and uncertainties, but something deeper and better t h a n any of these, the courage to go on as best we can with what we have and are. This kind of faith lies on the other side of theological complexities and all arguments about theism and atheism. It can speak through creeds or without them. It can exist in churches, but it does not need them. It seems to arise out of the h u m a n condition itself when one has learned to accept oneself with all the limitations and possibilities t h a t are part of every selfhood. At this point, Tillich would say, one is in touch with the ground of being and draws strength from it as roots draw their life and strength from the soil. Not m a n y people read Tillich now. But the kind of life he is talking about is expressed in other ways. We offer three examples from three contemporary observers, none of t h e m religious teachers in any formal sense. The first is from the closing lines of Carl Sandburg's long poem, "The People, Yes." In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march In the night and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march. "Where to? What next?" That shovel of stars might be one of god's names. The second example is from the journals of an American writer, the late John Cheever. Cheever can hardly be called a hero of faith. He was bitterly unhappy, felt t h a t he never achieved what he was capable of achieving and could have achieved, had an unhappy marriage, an unresolved sexual identity, and was bedeviled by alcohol. But he told his journal after one of his best novels, Falconer, had been accepted: I think the work is successful . . . . Why should it seem so strange to succeed? I do not mean pride or hubris; I mean only to have solved most of my problems and to have exploited, to the best of my intelligence, my raw materials. Take your rightful place, I say, standing at the bathroom window, free of the fact that I have always been content with second best. I am not better than the next man, but I am better than I was. A third example is suggested by a contemporary theological thinker, Sallie McFague, of Vanderbilt University. The earth, says Dr. McFague, is God's body. God is the earth itself, and we as creatures of earth are part of God. But we are destroying God, the waters, the soils, the oceans, the air, the wild living creatures, even our own kind of creatures in our bemusement with power, with race, with nationality, with the myths of ownership, with the viciousness of war. Thus, says McFague, God is at risk in our h u m a n hands. Once upon a time in a bygone mythology, human beings killed their God in the body of a man. Now we once again have that power, but, in a mythology more
94
Journal of Religion and Health
appropriate to our time, we would kill our God in the body of the world. Could we actually do this? No. . . . But the incarnate God is the God at risk--we have been given central responsibility to care for God's body, our world. So in the spirit of the Pseudo-Dionysius we offer some modern names of God: 1. The honest god who is the noblest work of humanity, its intelligence and caring. 2. The active god, who is a verb and says, "Do some godding in the place where you are, and you will find out who, what, and where I am." 3. The god who is the word, the language, the way we tell one another w h a t life means and how to live with it together. 4. The god above god who is there when we have the courage to be what we are. 5. The god of every day who is there in the shovel of starsoverhead, in the one who tells us t h a t we may not be better t h a n the next person, but can be better t h a n we were. 6. Finally, there is the god who is our endangered earth and prays to us, "Treat me gently, wisely, lovingly, for I am yourselves, together, not apart." These varied names reveal a god we can trust, worship, and love with all our powers. Harry C. Meserve
Editorial
The N a m e s of God St. Paul has for centuries had the reputation of having been a powerful and persuasive preacher. But like all preachers, as well as others who seek te influence public thought and behavior, he did not always succeed. In Athens, the intellectual capital of the Graeco-Roman world, he did not make much of an impression. He gave one of his most eloquent and profound sermons, but according to the record in the book of Acts (c. 17), when it was over, there were many more skeptics than believers. Only two believers are mentioned by n a m e - - a woman named Damaris and a man named Dionysius, called the Areopagite because he heard Paul speak on the Areopagus Hill in Athens. Both of these people disappear into the mists of New Testament times. But Dionysius the Areopagite had a significant afterlife. Several centuries later, between the end of the third century and the end of the fifth century, there lived a writer who became known as the Pseudo-Dionysius. This shadowy figure is important because his work carried over into Christian philosophy and theology the influences of the great classical Greek thinker Plato (428-348 B.C.) and his principal follower in early Christian times, Plotinus (A.D. 205-270). Essentially, these teachers held that the fundamental reality is spiritual. Each person is or can be part of a larger life of the mind and spirit from which the individual can draw wisdom and strength for ordinary human life, thus giving the human experience a more permanent, even a divine dimension. This is the basis of all mysticism, whether Christian, Jewish, Moslem, or Oriental. William James concluded his study of The Varieties of Religious Experience with the reflection that our life "is continuous with a larger life from which saving experiences come." Dionysius the Areopagite, the Pseudo-Dionysius, wrote a book, On the Divine Names. God through the ages has had many names appropriate to the cultures and circumstances under which men and women have had experiences of the divine in the midst of life. Some of the divine names have been Jahweh, Aten, Isis, Osiris, Zeus, Ahura Mazda, Mithra, Krishna, Christ, Allah, Father, Mother, and innumerable others. Along with these family-cultural names there have been many derived from certain qualities admired and sought after by human beings: Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Great teachers and seers have been unable even when they wanted to, and most of them did want to, curb the tendency of their followers to deify them, and so there are huge numbers of Buddhas or Bodhisattvas, incarnations of the Buddha, Christian saints, and holy people 89
9 1992 Institutes of Religion and Health
90
Journal of Religion and Health
and sages of every culture and faith. In short, it appears that God, conceived as the primal energy and meaning behind and within the whole cosmos, is revealed in countless different ways, images, incarnations, and processes. The ultimate foolishness is for a particular culture, church, people, or creed to suppose the names that they have chosen for their own are the only possible ones. If human beings could break the habit of attaching finalities to their gods, cultures, rituals, and ways of life, many sources of conflict and destruction could be eliminated. We do not have to give up the values we treasure and love; we only have to accept the idea that whatever they are, they are not final and complete enough to exhaust the scope of cosmic reality and possibility. As one scientist, the astronomer Vera Rubin, has said, "Some of the most mysterious features of the universe have yet to be discovered." Nature's imagination is indeed much greater than ours. The way to deeper knowledge and understanding is through intellectual and spiritual humility and an open mind and heart. With this attitude we may turn to some of the possible names of god in the world we inhabit and in some small measure know. We can put the whole creationist controversy to rest by the simple, humble acceptance of the fact that the beginnings of the cosmos are shrouded in mystery. We can leave it there for now. Astronomers and physicists, as well as other theorists, have several hypotheses. They will discover many more. It looks as if there was a big bang to begin with. It does not look as if any god was there to touch it off. We do not think that the whole structure of religious and ethical life will collapse if we just accept that mystery. Acceptance of the mystery is better than the faith that an earth-bound god, perhaps 6,000 years old, assembled the whole cosmic process with his own hands and gave it a push to get it started. Alexander Pope wrote, "An honest man's the noblest work of God." Robert Ingersoll, some two centuries later, was saying, "An honest god is the noblest work of man." We tend to agree with Ingersoll while honoring what Pope had in mind. It seems quite likely that the idea of god emerged out of human reflections about the most important values and deepest meanings of human life in both its social and personal dimensions. As people pondered their own experiences and learned about the experiences of others, they became aware of a continuing identity of memory and value, larger by far than any one person's life, larger than all remembered generations, so large that it seemed always to have been there, a reality both terrible and beautiful, unchanging in some ways, yet always new in its manifestations and meanings. They called this reality god and associated it with important things in their lives: rivers, springs, trees, mountains, the sea, the sky, the seasons, the sun, the moon, and the stars They also associated god with human life, with birth and growth, health and sickness, food and drink, love and hate, good and evil, life and death, in short, with all the complexities, mysteries, tragedies, and ecstasies of the life they knew. To do this they needed one basic and unique human
Harry C. Meserve
91
creation: language. Essential messages of hunger, fear, protectiveness, parental care, and even love and mutual aid can be communicated without language as such. But when we get to spiritual values, social forms, laws, institutions, explanations, and the realms of mind and feeling, we have moved beyond instinct and stepped into a new dimension. Thus, it seems that the opening words of the Gospel of John m a y be closer to the mark than Genesis. The author of John wrote, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." We believe that it was in the beginnings of language that god was born, at that boundary of evolution where the curious, clumsy being reached out beyond the instinctive behavior of the tribe or the pack or the herd and stood on the threshold of self-consciousnesso It was then that humans began to be aware of all that lay behind them and all that might lie before them and became aware of both their uniqueness and their deep needs for community, understanding, and love. This moment or period was not, in terms of cosmic time measurements, so very long ago. It was perhaps a million and a half years ago that the first human-like creatures emerged. That is nothing as compared to the vast stretches of cosmic and astronomical time. But in terms of the duration of h u m a n civilizations, which so far have lasted for a few centures at most, it is quite respectable. One can feel a profound reverence and sense of identification with a god who was born a million years ago. That is quite long enough to be older and wiser than any of us, by far. The reality of the wisdom and experience out of which this god grew is quite sufficient to attract, fascinate, nourish, and strengthen any ordinary h u m a n being. One of god's names today is certainly "the word." Not the word as a final answer, but the word as the means by which h u m a n beings meet and communicate with one another and with all that has happened in the h u m a n story. A half million years may not be eternity, and it is a short time in the story of the cosmic system of which we are such a tiny part. There is ample room for the feeling that in god we are part of something much larger than ourselves. As St. Paul said, "In God we live and move and have our being." God is a verb, a process, an activity. Many years ago Harry and Bonaro Overstreet wrote a book called The Mature Mind. In it they pointed out that the w a y ethical values are expressed is not through theory and intellectual concept, but through acts. We ought to be "godding about," they said. One does not wait for the perfectly rational and coherent framework of what needs to be done. One acts in the context of what is nearby and necessary and lets the theory emerge from that action. Discussion of religious and ethical values can become a kind of game like crossword puzzles or chess, in which the mind is challenged and tested b u t not much in the real world is changed. It is easy, and one of the major intellectual temptations, to spend one's energies on the details of the game, a preoccupation we see frequently in churches, the academic world, and politics. An astute political commentator remarked that we have reached a point in our communal life where " . . . there has been no
92
Journal of Religion and Health
hiatus since the last campaign--campaigning and governing have become virtually indistinguishable." That the electorate is beginning to find out about this situation m a y be one of the reasons why fewer than half of the people in our country who are eligible to vote bother to do so. How we are to move in religion as in politics from the elaborate, humanly sterile game to the realities of h u m a n suffering, sickness, injustice, poverty, and cruelty and change these evil and unnecessary conditions is an absolutely basic problem in the developed societies. It should be one of the most pressing concerns of religion, education, and government in the next decades. So far, we have seen examples of god as a verb only in small committed groups like the Quakers, the Mennonites, some monastic groups, and a few idealistic communities where small numbers of people have banded together to work out practical expressions of their ideal values. Ideal community efforts have their dangers and distortions. They seldom win the approval and support of masses of people and the established order, but we have permitted to grow up in our society so profound a degree of moral slipperiness and ethical insensitivity that the only w a y m a y be a direct challenge, not by force but by a counter-culture of decency. If one chooses to think of god as a verb, one decides that winning is not so important as integrity. Reflecting on ideas and names of god, we were led back to a book by Paul Tillich, in our view the greatest theological thinker of this century, published some forty years ago. It is called The Courage to Be. The substance of it was based on the Terry Lectures at Yale Divinity School in 1951, and it is pretty hard reading, but rewarding. If we understand its essence, Tillich says that there are three kinds of anxiety in the lives of h u m a n beings. There is the anxiety of mortality and death, which tells us that whatever we are and whatever we say and do, it is done with when we die. There is the anxiety of guilt, which tells us that we are limited, human, imperfect, and that all our efforts fall short because of spiritual blindness and ethical impurity. Then there is the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, which tells us that life m a y not mean anything at all. It may be, in Macbeth's words, " . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." What every hum a n being faces, says Tillich, is the necessity of affirming the self in the face of these existential anxieties that are part of the h u m a n condition. For our age, one might say we have grown used to the first two: we know we shall die; we know we are guilty, b u t we feel real despair when we confront the possibility that the hopes and fears, the pains and exaltations of this life may mean nothing at all. The answer to these deep anxieties, says Tillich, is the courage to be, to affirm ourselves and our meanings and meagre efforts to do well in spite of them, through them, even because of them. We know we are limited by fate and death; we know we are imperfect and often mistaken, sometimes wicked; we know about our doubts. Still, we can, with the courage to be, affirm that we are what we are. If we do, says Tillich, we shall find the "God above God," not a promise of immortality, not a personal father-mother
Harry C. Meserve
93
figure who will make everything all right in the end, not a creed or philosophy t h a t will remove all our doubts and uncertainties, but something deeper and better t h a n any of these, the courage to go on as best we can with what we have and are. This kind of faith lies on the other side of theological complexities and all arguments about theism and atheism. It can speak through creeds or without them. It can exist in churches, but it does not need them. It seems to arise out of the h u m a n condition itself when one has learned to accept oneself with all the limitations and possibilities t h a t are part of every selfhood. At this point, Tillich would say, one is in touch with the ground of being and draws strength from it as roots draw their life and strength from the soil. Not m a n y people read Tillich now. But the kind of life he is talking about is expressed in other ways. We offer three examples from three contemporary observers, none of t h e m religious teachers in any formal sense. The first is from the closing lines of Carl Sandburg's long poem, "The People, Yes." In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march In the night and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march. "Where to? What next?" That shovel of stars might be one of god's names. The second example is from the journals of an American writer, the late John Cheever. Cheever can hardly be called a hero of faith. He was bitterly unhappy, felt t h a t he never achieved what he was capable of achieving and could have achieved, had an unhappy marriage, an unresolved sexual identity, and was bedeviled by alcohol. But he told his journal after one of his best novels, Falconer, had been accepted: I think the work is successful . . . . Why should it seem so strange to succeed? I do not mean pride or hubris; I mean only to have solved most of my problems and to have exploited, to the best of my intelligence, my raw materials. Take your rightful place, I say, standing at the bathroom window, free of the fact that I have always been content with second best. I am not better than the next man, but I am better than I was. A third example is suggested by a contemporary theological thinker, Sallie McFague, of Vanderbilt University. The earth, says Dr. McFague, is God's body. God is the earth itself, and we as creatures of earth are part of God. But we are destroying God, the waters, the soils, the oceans, the air, the wild living creatures, even our own kind of creatures in our bemusement with power, with race, with nationality, with the myths of ownership, with the viciousness of war. Thus, says McFague, God is at risk in our h u m a n hands. Once upon a time in a bygone mythology, human beings killed their God in the body of a man. Now we once again have that power, but, in a mythology more
94
Journal of Religion and Health
appropriate to our time, we would kill our God in the body of the world. Could we actually do this? No. . . . But the incarnate God is the God at risk--we have been given central responsibility to care for God's body, our world. So in the spirit of the Pseudo-Dionysius we offer some modern names of God: 1. The honest god who is the noblest work of humanity, its intelligence and caring. 2. The active god, who is a verb and says, "Do some godding in the place where you are, and you will find out who, what, and where I am." 3. The god who is the word, the language, the way we tell one another w h a t life means and how to live with it together. 4. The god above god who is there when we have the courage to be what we are. 5. The god of every day who is there in the shovel of starsoverhead, in the one who tells us t h a t we may not be better t h a n the next person, but can be better t h a n we were. 6. Finally, there is the god who is our endangered earth and prays to us, "Treat me gently, wisely, lovingly, for I am yourselves, together, not apart." These varied names reveal a god we can trust, worship, and love with all our powers. Harry C. Meserve
