God, Finding God, and the Search for God

The first thing that has to go is God. This is to say our idea of God, but with us there is no separation. To our way of thinking, our idea of God IS God, so God has to go. God is not a fact. God is the supreme value, the value before which all other values pale and recede. God is the Prime Necessity at the heart of being, and this Prime Necessity which we call God is indistinguishable from who we are called to be.

Joseph Campbell has said, “This whole idea is basic to Tantra: to worship a god, you must become that god. No matter what you call the god or think it is, the god you worship is the one you are capable of becoming.” Before you leap to call this heresy, consider:

Jesus said, “The Father and I are one.” “Yes, well,” you say, “Jesus was the Son of God.” To which I would say, “Jesus never called himself the “Son of God.” He always referred to himself as the “Son of Man,” a phrase that easily lends itself to the translation: “a human being.” Stay with me here. In John, Jesus prays, “That they (that is, his followers) might be one even as we are one, thou in me and I in thee.” And the command, which somehow didn’t make the top ten, that God gives the people in the Old Testament is “You must be holy as I am Holy!” And, again, "You must be perfect as I am perfect." In other words, "You must be as I am!" In the New Testament, Paul declares, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Clearly, the position that we must become the God we worship is not foreign to Biblical theology.

The call of God, then, is the call to become who we are, to be ourselves—our Self—the Self we are capable of being. The spiritual journey is the hero’s journey, the spiritual quest is the search for the Promised Land and for the Holy Grail. It is described by T.S. Eliot: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

The face of God is a mirror reflecting those who behold the face of God. Thou Art That. Amen! Ain't it so!