Dr. Cleve Tinsley is wicked smart.
I’m taking his class on liberation theology and wishing I could have 3 more hours of dialogue with him every week. Last week we read Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father in which she dismantles patriarchal white guy God, in fact depersonifies God all together.
As we were reading I had tiny glimpses and chill bumps imagining God as what we might call nothingness but what I imagine to be more like a force field, possibly gravity. My favorite analogy is dark matter - that which keeps things from flying apart.
Mary Daly says God is a verb.
Take that in.
God. Is. A. Verb.
Not a thing. Not a man, not a father, not even a clear lake of meaning from which everything emerges. God is a process. A process of evolving and becoming. “A verb is a word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence, such as hear, become, happen.”
Check out the examples used! “Such as hear, become, happen.”
God hears, becomes, happens.
Bill and I had a conversation the other day, somewhat about God as process and I loved what he said. Something along the lines of paleontologists constructed an entire dinosaur out of a fossil the size of a thigh bone. There was a lot of guesswork and intuition as well as a general understanding of how bones fit together. There’s probably a million ways the T-Rex could’ve turned out. Putting him together was probably akin to throwing a 5000 piece puzzle in the air and figuring out where they go. It’s a process.
In that same vein, as God is process, then so it is for everything. Some of it is about un-becoming. It involves looking at the things we inherited, at the puzzle pieces that landed in our field of existence and choosing where the pieces go or if we even want to use them.
To fully become, we have to un-become.
To happen with God, we have to allow the notions we have of the God we grew up with to fall apart and imagine something new. We have to enter the process that is most definitely not static.
God is a verb. A process. A way of being. Not a thing. We are inhabited by this process as much as we inhabit it. There is reciprocity at every turn. I like this idea - that God the process is figuring itself out through evolution, through consciousness, through general becoming.
Through You and Me.