"...to which everyone gives the name of God." TA
"This all men speak of as God." TA
I was with Tom all the away... right up to the end of each paragraph. It was a beautiful painting, an amazing portrait, not a visible flaw at all... and then he signs it and for me all beauty was lost in the three letters he penned at the bottom of his painting...
GOD
It felt like he took all the baggage that three letter word brought and dumped it right on the canvas. How can I see the portrait anymore when I have to look at millenniums of meanings of "God".
Labels have been a sore point for me. More often than not, I feel like labels have hidden the artwork of life. It seems like people spend more time trying to figure out what to call a tree and less time enjoying the beauty and artistry before them. Instead of admiring how the wind dances with the leaves and boughs, they are trying to figure out... "Is it Oak or Maple?" At this juncture of my life's journey... I want to spend more time admiring the dance than cataloguing the identity of the dancers.
Last summer I found myself frustrated at how to communicate how I saw the source of life. I came up with a phrase borrowed from a language I've never spoken, from a country I've never seen, in a continent I've never been to. "IKIMPA UMWUKA" are the two words I found when I ran "It gives me breath" through Google Translate. The language is Kinyarwanda which is the official language of a country in Central Africa called Rwanda. I shared the story and a poem in my poetry blog.
In my world, I feel if I use the word "God", I have to add a two thousand year old, virgin born, resurrected Jesus to that identity. I have to add church as a necessary place to find that "God". I have to perform rituals proving that I believe and follow and worship. None of those things connect me anymore with the source of who I am and where I am. I understand I am connected to something, and my agnostic brain says that I have no clue what that is, how big it is, how old it is or how involved it is. All I have in my arsenal is admiration for an artist that made something incredible. Who or what that artist is... no clue.
I also don't have to explain or prove anything. I can stand before the tree and watch how the wind dances with the leaves and boughs, and just forget for the moment that the rest of the world needs to know if it an Oak or a Maple. I can breathe and experience a cosmic presence in my very breath. I can imagine more than I know. I can learn new things and I can be fascinated instead of being stressed.
So... NO... Thomas Aquinas... not everyone calls THIS "God".
