There are parades all across the country on Memorial Day commemorating our U.S. service members who died while in the military. But not all service members are honored for their acts of service, bravery, and patriotism.
In John A T Robinson's book "Honest to God," he stated that while he did not favor it, he could easily understand how some people could think that the word “God” might need to be dispensed with. If one then takes the word “God” as a proxy for the conventional and, for many, the utterly incredible way Christianity is articulated, how does one move beyond that? How does one dispense with the traditional (and scriptural) language that no longer works for many people, metaphorically or otherwise, and still talk about Christianity?
This is what mystics do, and this is what Eckhart is talking about. Ours is a time for the apophatic divinity, that is, the “God without a name who has no name and will never be given a name” (Eckhart). Thich Nhat Hanh has said there is nothing in Buddhism that is not in Christianity, but that Christianity must wake up to its apophatic tradition to recover its jewels that have often been covered over. When America puts “In God we trust” on every coin and dollar bill (and missile?), truly, we are cheapening the meaning of the word “God.” That is one reason Judaism cautions against writing or overusing the word. Respect and reverence for divine names are in order.
It is the mystic in all of us who can rename the divine and the Sacred in our time. And must do so.
I have tried to do this and invite others to do so in my small book, Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God…Including the Unnameable God (Little Bound Books, 2018). There, I offer 80 names for the cataphatic divinity and 9 for the apophatic divinity with a brief commentary on each. The cataphatic are the God of light, the apophatic the God of darkness, such as I alluded to above. Among the former are some names from today’s science.
Such names as these are pronounced: God is Love; God is Goodness; God is the One to Whom We Give Our Thanks; God is the Ground of Being; the Cause of wonder, the Mind of the Universe, the Planetary Mind Field. God is Life; the Beloved; Beauty; Truth; Joy; Energy; the Self of the Universe; Consciousness; Light; Compassion; Justice; Wisdom; the Web of Life; the Goddess; Shekinah; Black Madonna; etc.
Under the apophatic divinity, Superessential Darkness; The Great Mystery; the Unknown One; Silence, etc.
Hopefully, some of my names for God can trigger your own. Thomas Aquinas says that “every being is a name for God—and no being is a name for God.” So that makes for lots of names for God. Trillions upon trillions. Go for it.
I highly recommend the spiritual practice of Islam, where one recites the “99 most beautiful names for God.” (I have deliberately kept my names to 89 so as not to compete with their practice.) But it really pays off to chant the 89 (or 99 or other number) names for God, repeating them over and over as mantras. This takes the names out of our heads and into our hearts and bodies and intuitive or mystical brains. Mantras do that for us.
~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
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