From Flirting with God to Bowing to the Mystery

The open horizon from the beach at Wells-next-the-Sea

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Gathering of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
 
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Let me begin by making clear the limited aim of this piece. It’s important to realise that this is simply an invitation and not a systematic argument. I am not saying that theological questions are unimportant, or that reason and critical reflection have no place. I am saying that liberal religion can become so preoccupied with getting its concepts right that it forgets the more fundamental need to participate directly in the mystery of life with full attention, humility and reverence. The movement I am encouraging is, therefore, not from thought to thoughtlessness, but from abstraction to embodied encounter.

So, recently, I’ve been mulling over a fascinating idea: what does it mean to ‘flirt’ with God — or, if, like many people, you do not like the word God, then what does it mean to ‘flirt’ with the concept of the divine?

I came across this idea in Koert van der Velde’s book Flirting with God. He uses the phrase to describe how many people today feel: no longer holding conventional religious beliefs, yet still searching for ‘something’ they feel must exist. In the Netherlands there is a word for this: ietsism, or ‘somethingism’. Many people today can count themselves among the ‘somethingists’, and if you are interested, my blog has a couple of pieces exploring the idea in more depth.

But Van der Velde raises a tricky question. Can you really be said to be ‘flirting’ with God or the divine if, deep down, you no longer believe that anything of this kind actually exists? 

In everyday life we often ‘flirt’ with new ideas, new paths, or new friendships. But what is the point of that tentative engagement if there is no chance it will ever develop into genuine commitment? And, here I want to push a little further than Van der Velde does and say that if there is nothing real on the other side to connect with, flirting becomes merely a daydream — an illusion playing out entirely in our own heads.

This can push us into a binary. If you cannot believe in the reality of God or the divine, perhaps you must admit you are an atheist — so why pretend to flirt? If you do believe, why flirt at all? Are you not already in some kind of committed relationship?

But I’ve never been comfortable with this ‘either/or’, not least because it leaves no room for the somethingists. Somethingists may not believe in traditional understandings of God or the divine, but they find that they certainly believe in something.

So how do we find a middle way? Well, I think the secret is to stop worrying about what that ‘something’ is, and start asking where it is, or might be found.

For centuries, religion in our part of the world has been obsessed with the ‘what’. We become trapped in exhausting philosophical and theological arguments, trying to pin down exactly what God or the divine is or isn’t, and whether we should believe in it, him, or her.

But when we let go of that obsession, even a little, a new space opens up. We begin to see beyond the rigid binary and glimpse an alluring, open horizon of possibility. The primary question becomes not the ‘what’ of God or the divine, but how we might journey towards the mysterious, unknowable ‘where’ of God or the divine that makes such a horizon possible in the first place.

To undertake that journey, we need ways to be in dialogue with the cosmos — ways to experience ourselves as meaningful participants in the Great Life (Daiseimei) of the universe. But how do we do that without slipping back into the old binary? One way is through practices of deep attentiveness and profound reverence.

Perhaps the most obvious gesture (of this) is bowing. Yet for many modern people — including many somethingists — bowing can feel like submission to the traditional ‘what’ of God or the divine. Understandably, many feel our world has moved on and that we no longer need to bow before anything.

But I think this misunderstands the gesture. When you realise that the horizon is not an object you can grasp, nor a ‘what’ you can capture in a creed, but a boundary line of sheer mystery that continually calls us forward, bowing makes sense again. We are not blindly submitting; we are aligning the compass of our lives — our mind and body — towards that mystery.

This is what the Japanese Unitarian and free-religionist Imaoka Shin’ichirō meant when he said that ‘free-religion is bowing to each other.’ When we bow to another person, we are not necessarily signing up to some kind of orthodox belief. Instead, we are acknowledging that within them, too, lies that same infinite and mysterious horizon. We are recognising that we are travelling towards that mystery together.

And this, I think, is how we escape the trap of merely ‘flirting’ with God or the divine. Flirting is safe. It stays in our heads; it remains an act of imagination that never has to touch reality. It keeps God or the divine at a distance, treating it as what the French philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel called a ‘problem’ — something separate from ourselves, which we can ‘lay siege to and reduce’.

But God or the divine is not a problem to be solved; it is a mystery. And a mystery, Marcel said, ‘is something in which I am myself involved’, a sphere ‘where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning’ (Being and Having, p. 117).

The moment you bow to the mystery in your fellow human being, or pause in reverence before the vast, mysterious horizon of the cosmos, you are no longer playing make-believe. You step out of your imagination and into reality. You are no longer merely flirting with the idea of God or the divine; you are participating in a real, lived relationship with the universe, with the mystery and miracle of life.

And for me, this attitude should lie at the heart of any free-religious community. We do not gather to argue over the ‘what’ of God or the divine, or to demand conformity of belief. Our shared purpose should be to help one another keep our compasses aligned towards that mysterious ‘where’ beyond the horizon. By bowing to the infinite mystery in each other and the cosmos, we step out of solitary imaginations and into the Great Life (Daiseimei) of free and unobstructed creative evolution. We stop merely flirting with God or the divine and, together, begin more truly to live, move and have our being within it. What we then make of and do with what we discover is, of course, another question — but it will, at least, be one we are better placed to explore together.