(The Nationalist, 26 May 2006)
Could anyone describe to a child in the womb what life outside the womb was like? No; it’s impossible. There is no common language, and no shared experience of life to enable it. In a similar way, whatever is said about God has to use the language of poetry, image, symbol, metaphor, analogy or parable. No one knows what God is, so it is not possible to describe God in the language of human experience. Any attempt to do so will certainly be inadequate, probably be inaccurate, and possibly be misleading.
But what else have we got except human language, images and ideas, if we are to say anything at all about God? So, for example, we use the language of human personality in talking about God (Father, he, him, his etc.) That may suggest that God is a person, as we understand personality, that God, for instance, is a bigger and better version of us. That would be misleading. God is infinitely greater than anything the human mind can ever imagine or conceive of.
The Bible uses symbols and images in talking about God. It calls him father, shepherd, king, etc. These are a help, as long as we don’t take them to be factual descriptions. A flag, for instance, is a symbol of a nation, a visual statement of its beliefs or aspirations about itself. But no one in their right mind confuses the flag with the country, the symbol with the reality. The value of a symbol is that it points beyond itself. It’s as if it says, ‘Don’t look at me, but at what I point to’. The road-sign pointing to Dublin is not itself Dublin. Think of icons: we are meant to look, not so much at them, as through them, at what they point to. When you look at those images, or listen to the language of metaphor, analogy or parable, you know they indicate something greater than themselves. They are not meant to describe things as they are, much less to define them; but they give a hint of something essentially beyond our capacity to grasp in ordinary terms.
Think of the Ascension of Jesus. The Bible describes it in symbolic language, saying that ‘a cloud took him,’ and that he ‘was carried up into heaven’. Despite religious paintings that suggest otherwise, I don’t think this means that Jesus took off as in a helicopter or invisible lift, or that a cloud actually came down and scooped him up. I think that such a view diminishes, even trivializes, the reality. In the Bible, clouds were sometimes seen as symbols of God’s presence.
What is it then that is being suggested about Jesus when Christians celebrate his Ascension? One response is that of William Temple, the wartime Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘The Ascension of Christ is his liberation from all restrictions of time and space. It does not represent his removal from the earth, but his constant presence everywhere on earth. During his earthly ministry he could be in only one place at one time. But now that he is united with God, he is present wherever God is present, and that is everywhere’. (Fellowship with God.)
For those in a hurry: ‘For those who make their inner thoughts wholesome, God makes their outward appearance wholesome’. (Hadrat Ali, a Sufi mystic, Living and Dying with Grace: Counsels of Hadrat Ali, Shambhala, Boston, 1995)