The God Beyond the God We Have Named

Prepare to Have Your Categories Blown

“I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call 
Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
A Buddhist, a Jew.

The truth has shared so much of itself
With me

That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel
Or even pure
Soul.

Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turn to ash
And freed
Me

Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known.”

—Hafiz

There comes a point in every true believer’s life when they must lay aside all of their years of training and theology, all of their doctrines, all of their traditions, and all of the beliefs about God they have carefully cultivated over the years, and dare to meet with God just as God is — naked and unfiltered, beyond all the words we use to describe God, including the word “God,” as this is just our name for it.

We must do this not because all that we have believed about God is necessarily wrong, but because we have come to realize that all of it is too small, too limiting, too reductionist, to ever contain the Raw Reality of the One our heart desires. God transcends all the words we use to describe God, even the ones that are very true. Theology and doctrine are, at best, merely icons that draw our attention toward the Actual Beingness of God. They are like waypoints that direct our path toward the Light that transcends all light. But they are in themselves crude and fragile constructs of human ingenuity. They are out attempt to name and contain what transcends all naming and can never be contained — not by any human mind, and certainly not by any religion.

To encounter the God beyond the God we have named is, not surprisingly, deeply unsettling. Any direct experience of that Great Oneness, even the briefest flash of that pure essence, obliterates all our carefully crafted categories with the casual ease of a single ocean wave demolishing a sand castle on the shore. And that is just a single wave! Imagine what a baptism in that ocean might do. You dissolve. You become the ocean, and the ocean becomes you. This is what the Christian scriptures rather crudely describe as being “one with God.” But the experience is so very much more than any of our imaginations can describe.

All that we can describe is the change that happens to those who encounter the Divine in this way. For all the souls scattered through time who have experienced such a union, these three evidences are remarkably consistent in their lives:

One, they exude a sweet humility, full of grace, when it comes to their beliefs.

Two, they give up judging other people.

And three, they stop concerning themselves with anything other than the advancement of love.