On Your Spiritual History

Recently I was interviewed by someone who wanted to know my thoughts about God. This interview was fascinating in many ways, but the initial question took me back a bit. The interviewer wanted to know about my spiritual history: how had I related to questions of God from my earliest beginnings?

            You know, I found this question hard to answer. I realise — looking back on my reply — that I answered largely in terms of my experience of institutional religion. I said I was brought up on the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (1662) in the High Church Anglican tradition. And as a result, my vision of God was of a King, a supreme monarch, and that there were good reasons for this perception, rooted in the Reformation. I related how this came to feel antique, mediaeval, and somewhat oppressive, and how the arguments of my atheist boyfriend encouraged me to leave off going to church, although I didn’t agree with his position.

            And this in spite of being grateful today for Cranmer and King James as the gift of the English language, its beauty, and its spirituality in a form that is in one way at least, eternal.

            My travels through various forms of religious involvement, both within Christianity and outside it, I described by naming things, places, denominations. Where did I go, when God was no longer a king?

            Although later in the interview we fell into a deep discussion of prayer, I found on looking back that my awkwardness in answering that first question hid something interesting. And that, I think, is story.

            We all have a spiritual history. This same atheist boyfriend had a small sister, who used to make up tales about ‘the people who made us.’ He thought that was quaint, the way people deceive themselves without ever having been taught.

            And a history is a story, as accurate as we can make it, about something real, as real as we can make it. It will be profoundly influenced by our own makeup, our times, prejudices, impressions, sins, and failings. Our own history would ideally describe our sensations, emotions, hopes and values as well as events: the meaning is in our ability to find meaning. I feel that a story should flow. A choppy set of facts is no story. It may, of course, not yet have flowed to its destination. But it should be in motion. God, above all, isn’t static.

            It’s good to think about your spiritual history. Each step in it is going somewhere. You may see where you found your ethics, and how you relate to other people. You may see when you were rescued from danger, when you were injured, and when you were amazed into faith. You may learn to trust. Not everyone wants to cogitate on doctrine all the time; not everyone is a philosopher. But you may learn that there is nothing more real than God.

            And this was the last question of my interviewer: the one-word definition of God. Of course this can’t be done. But some have tried to define the Divine. Aquinas thought it was ‘the activity of existing or being’: I AM in the Judaic tradition. I have heard it said that God is love: Dante wrote a Comedy about that. And there are many other views. You will have your own answer. It’s only the best you can do.

            After some thought, I said: ‘Reality.’