David James Duncan speaks of “unsaying God”, that is, apophasis—theology defined by what God is not. God has been badly defined by so many people and so many traditions that we need to strip the baggage away from the name and treat it as we would any other—someone we are getting to know.

I had much the same thought yesterday, then lost it, so I was happy to read it again in God Laughs & Plays. My thought was that I need to return to a childlike curiosity about God, but I need to nuance that. I don’t seek to nor can I approach God as a tabula rasa—I have a lifetime of experience and learning crowding my brain but also informing my intuition. I often say the Christianity is the language I know, so that is the language I use about God. I can, however, discipline myself to approach God with a mindful approach, consciously muting all my preconceptions. How would I think about God if I hadn’t heard all this stuff? I’ll still have unconscious biases and preconceptions, hence the challenge, but I can seek them out and question them. How else can I think about this? What are my options?

It would be both arrogant and foolish to try to discover God without leaning on any existing traditions or thinking—there are a lot of good books (and essays and blogs and sermons and a long list of others) out there waiting to be consulted and critiqued and absorbed. The difference is that now I won’t accept them uncritically but will instead examine them for biases I don’t agree with and perspectives that I do. Hopefully I’ll find ideas I can’t classify one way or the other and have to cogitate and ruminate on until I’ve absorbed or excreted them as well.

I’ve been thinking about my approach to faith and how I am unsure of anything anymore, and I’m wondering how to describe it. Am I confused? I don’t think so. Confusion implies some level of discomfort, and I’m remarkably mellow about this. Perhaps my attempts to learn mindfulness have taken hold enough that I’m simply noticing and wondering—exploring the possibilities. I can be obsessively curious, but this doesn’t even feel like that. It’s more of a happy, childlike curiosity that leads to exploration than an obsessive search. I’m motivated but not driven, now that I no longer believe in eternal damnation if I don’t get it exactly right.

We create God from our insecurities—John Calvin certainly did. If we believe a perfect God must require perfect adherence to a minutely defined code, that sounds more like anxiety talking than a honest assessment of reality. If God is at all like a loving human parent, then God appreciates and loves our sloppy attempts to please him and give him refrigerator-art-worthy scrawls. God has lots of magnets and a universe-sized refrigerator to put them on.