What is God? Or is the question, who is God? Or should it be god? Or is “god” no longer a useful or meaningful word? Words are supposed to communicate, allowing us to convey meaning to or receive meaning from another person. Does the word “god” still do that?

Words are often ambiguous. If I point and say, “Look at that tree,” you will know that I am not referring to the house or parked car in the direction I am pointing. But if we’re walking through a forest, I haven’t communicated enough information. “Which tree?” will, of course, be your response. Then I’ll have to provide more words (tall, short, crooked, dying, maple, pine, etc.) for you to know what tree I mean.

Today “God talk” is still a thing. God is talked about in churches, of course, but also comes up in everyday conversations. Gallup and other organizations regularly ask people if they believe in God. And the vast majority say they do. But do they all mean the same thing by “God”? The surveyors realize they don’t, so what do all these affirmative answers mean? Or the negative ones, for that matter.

And while God does come up regularly in churches, if you listen carefully, you realize that not much is actually being said, beyond innocuous platitudes (“God is love”). Through most of its history, the church couldn’t stop talking about God, whether in enormous theological tomes or hour-long sermons. But where in the past theologians and preachers couldn’t find enough words to say all they wanted to about God, today they hesitate to say anything very direct, profound, or interesting about God. Since the Enlightenment, God talk has become kind of an embarrassment.

But there has always been skepticism about the value of God talk, the notion that words can be used to express meaningful ideas about God. In the Old Testament, the Wisdom books are especially skeptical of the value of talking about God. Job and his accusatory friends both come in for God’s rebuke for their endless theological arguments. A similar notion of verbal restraint is reflected in the Jewish tradition that the use of the word God or of God’s name, YHWH, should be avoided whenever possible.

Closely connected to the Hebrew wisdom tradition are the later Christian mystics, who also had little interest in theological speculation about God. Perhaps the most famous expression of this is Meister Eckhart’s declaration, “I pray God to rid me of God.” By which he meant that he wanted to be rid of all human notions of God. In that desire he reflects the saying of the Tao Te Ching that, “The Tao which can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” In that vein Eckhart also says, “There is nothing so much like God in all the universe as silence.” And in that, he echoes the famous Psalm verse, “Be still and know that I am God.”

The psalmist’s word “know” is an important distinction. “Faith seeking understanding” is a famous definition of theology, associated with both Saints Anselm and Augustine. In other words, theology is the use of words to explain our faith, our experience of God, which comes first. So, theology helps us know about God, while faith is our knowledge of God, our knowing God.

In other words, you won’t find God in the dictionary or in the Bible. In these and other books, you’ll find lots of words about God, but not God. In a famous TV interview near the end of his life, the renowned Swiss psychologist (and religious critic), Carl Jung, was asked, “Do you believe in God?” Jung first responds, “That’s difficult to say.” Then he gets a twinkle in his eye and continues, “I don’t need to believe. I know.”

In the Tao Te Ching it says, “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.” From ancient times, the ineffability of God, the impossibility of expressing the nature of God in words, has been common wisdom. Yet that is where religions have mostly put their focus, in expressing and explaining God in literalized stories or in abstruse theological concepts and doctrines. But as the quote above implies, so much speaking has led to very little knowing.

“God is greater than God,” Meister Eckhart says. The true and ineffable God is beyond and far greater than the God of our words and concepts. But then how do we find or come to know God? Preceding Eckhart by a generation as professor at the University of Paris, was the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas. Following Greek philosophy, Aquinas brought “natural theology” into Christianity. He said that the first “book” of the Bible was not Genesis, but the Universe, God’s creation. Echoing him a few decades later, Meister Eckhart said:

Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.

To know God, we must first open our eyes and all our senses to the world around us. Those who dismiss religion and say, “I find God in nature,” are not wrong. Not at all. But nature is not just on mountain tops or at the ocean shore. It is all around us, wherever we are, and that includes the people around us, and we ourselves. As Eckhart profoundly declares,

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

And so, in addition to opening our senses to the world, we must open our hearts. “The kingdom is within you,” Jesus says in Luke and the gospel of Thomas. This is why silence is the ultimate sacrament. This is why, for mystics around the world, meditation, or contemplation, is the foundation of all spiritual practice. For it is in the silence of our heart, in our spirit, that we find our true selves and God, which are one. It is within us that we come to know God.

Catholic teacher and mystic, Richard Rohr, has caught more than a little flack for his statement that “the church is one of the best places to hide from God.” But he’s right. People think that being part of a God-organization is all they need. They treat belonging to a church like belonging to a gym. “You mean you have to use the equipment too?”

Religion expresses our belief in the God-out-there. But it doesn’t lead us to know the God within and all around us. And “god” may not be useful for us anymore, since the word is so connected with that white-robed man in the sky. It’s probably time to find new ones, as culture has often done. (“Source” is one I’ve recently encountered and may be gaining some traction.)

But more or new words are not the goal. What we need, and what I believe people want, is genuine experience, real “knowing”, which isn’t an imitation of past stories but arises out of real life now. Facilitating such knowing and such experience is what church and religion should be about, but typically haven’t been. Regardless of that, knowing God is ultimately personal, the most personal and intimate experience there is, which comes about only through our own initiative, desire, courage, faith, and trust.

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