Seeing God in a different light

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

 MANILA, Philippines - Madelline Romero holds a degree in Broadcast Communication from the University of the Philippines. She is constantly fascinated by religious ideas, and has begun reading on non-monotheistic religious traditions.

 As is typical of a Filipino born to a Catholic family, I was introduced to “God” by an army of Mass-attending, sin-confessing devotees led by my late rosary-bearing grandmother. That plus 12 years of formative education at an exclusive nun-ran Catholic school for girls had pretty much made sure that I knew my sacraments, “understood” the mystery of the Trinity, “accepted” as truth the notion of Incarnation, and had a good relationship with the historical figure, Jesus, the “Son of God” — of the Catholic God, the conceptual evolution of which was never really taught to us in school.

Karen Armstrong’s A History of God brilliantly summarizes the intellectual history of the three dominant monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — and traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God from the time of Abraham to the present. And to the disappointment of many a religious person who has taken the concept of “God” for granted and as a matter of fact, it is shown that the conception of God, at many points in history, was shaped and altered to suit the social and political needs of the religious followers.

From among all the pagan gods in the ancient Middle East, Yahweh Sabaoth — “the God of Armies,” who opened the sea for the Israelites and closed it for the oppressive Egyptians — with help from confessions of priests and prophets who “personally experienced Him” was elevated to the status of one true God in the minds and hearts of Israelites shortly after the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587, which had dislocated and displaced the Jews. The cult of Yahweh, of which Moses was able to convince the Israelites to be the same God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and which proved to be the beginning of monotheistic religious traditions — enabled people to find hope in impossible circumstances, and spoke profoundly to their conditions. From the Spanish Jews who were expelled from Europe in yet another wave of Anti-Semitism in the 15th century came a new form of Kabbalah — one whose mythology and disciplines discovered a profound significance in their homelessness, which became the Jewish movement to be almost universally accepted and which wrought a profound change in the religious consciousness of world Jewry.

In the midst of political upheaval in the Muslim world (disintegration of the Baghdad caliphate, devastation wrought by Monghol hordes in Muslim cities) during the 12th and 13th centuries, Sufism, an ascetical form of Islam that first developed during the 8th and 9th centuries, ceased to be a minority movement and became the dominant Islamic mood in many parts of the Islamic empire because the people wanted a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote and legalistic God of the rational ulema, the religious “authority.”

By the end of the 16th century, a new brand of Christianity said to have effected the second wave of the Reformation (Calvinism) had been established as an international religion, inspiring the Puritan revolution in England in 1645 and the colonization of New England in the New World in the 1620s. Its attractiveness was to the bourgeoisie in the newly developing cities of Europe whose inhabitants wanted to shake off the shackles of a repressive religious hierarchy.

Concepts about God and religion — far from being “divine revelations” dropped like manna from heaven — naturally required movers and shakers, the legacy of whom are evident to this day in the religious institutions that evolved and in the conflicts created, some of which still characterize our present world.

In the battle of ideas in the early Christian world, Athenasius, assistant to the bishop of Alexandria, managed to have his theology on the inherently divine nature of Christ (Nicaean Creed of 325) win over that of others’ in a debate that characterized many a point on which the Great Schism would eventually draw its lines, dividing the Christian Church into two warring camps: the Latin Western Church and the Greek Orthodox Church. Western Christianity would later become a “much more talkative religion and would concentrate on kerygma, the public teaching of the Church based on scriptures,” while the Greek Orthodox Church would emphasize dogma, which “represented the deeper meaning of biblical truth,” and would hold that “all good theology would be silent.” From Augustine, considered the founder of the Western spirit, came the doctrine of Original Sin, and traditions of “neurotic misogyny” and contempt for sexuality: “Woman’s only function was the childbearing which passed the contagion of Original Sin to the next generation, like a venereal disease.” The hostility between Muslim Sunnis and Shiis had its beginning in the 16th century when a new type of Twelver Shiism was championed — and forced on Shiah subjects with a ruthlessness never before seen, by Shah Ismail, founder of the Safavid dynasty, and eventually became the state religion in Iran.

Reading about the history of God brought my attention to a recurring pattern throughout the development of concepts about God and religion: that there had always been a yearning to return to the earliest form of man’s relationship with his God, a very personal connection unconfined by any formal “correct” theology nor unencumbered by obligatory obedience to sanctioned hierarchy, when institutions with all their frills and trappings, ironically, became insufficient to satisfy man’s natural predisposition towards the spiritual.

That God — at least as I had known Him — was a concept came to me, not surprisingly, in the university setting and in the face of a multitude of ideas, which until then had remained inaccessible within the confines of dogmatic sectarian education.

The realization brought me to a reassessment of my feelings for and knowledge of my God — and just like the early Jews, Christians and Muslims who had found a theology-based God too elaborate yet profoundly inadequate — and I began to slowly shed encumbering doctrines, notions and preconceptions.

To my delight, I felt nothing but freedom, the liberating freedom to experience God — that innate, deeply embedded longing within me to connect to the endless wonder and mystery of this world — whichever way: in a wild cathartic creative explosion of forms and movements or in deep silent meditative prayer, no matter where: in the temple, church or mosque. As mystics across all religions universally claim, “there are as many roads to God as people.”