I saw a description of the Divine

Context
My Quaker meeting is reading excerpts from Patricia Loring's Listening Spirituality. One person was particularly struck by this sentence, found in the chapter entitled "Discernment: the Heart of Listening Spirituality: "Both interpretation reflect Friends' felt sense of the Divine as a dynamism rather than as an entity." After some discussion, I added "some" before "Friends'" to my copy of the reading.

Commentary
Quakers are non-dogmatic, which means that although we may spend time talking about what we believe as individuals, we never say that someone else's belief is incorrect. At my meeting, at least, that means that people come to the table with many different conceptions of God. The person who most tends toward the atheistic side of the spectrum like to tease me by asking if I believe God is an old white man in long robes. The completely honest answer to this question is, "Sometimes."

Realistically, I think it's quite a stretch to expect that any human being's understanding of the divine would be entirely accurate. We end up using different language to describe the various aspects we do understand, but those aspects change over time, if only because we choose to emphasize different ones. Even if we decided to remove a great deal of cultural vagaries by talking only about Roman Catholics, a child's idea of her God would vary from a Jesuit's about to graduate from seminary, and his would likely be different from the one held by an elderly woman who's recently been widowed.

So I don't object to people seeing the divine as a dynamism rather than an entity. I even kind of understand where the idea comes from. I think many people prefer this conception because being a discrete entity, or a person, as some of us would have it, would seem to establish inappropriate limits of time and space on the divine nature. On the other hand, I think non-personal language like "flow" or "energy" or, say, "dynamism" is inappropriately limiting as well, in that it takes away the idea the God has a will.

Loring has an answer for this. In the very next paragraph of our reading she discusses a recording of Thomas Merton (referenced in this list) in which he jokes with students about wasting time looking for the map God has planned out for history so they'll know exactly what to do. In Merton's mind, there is no pre-designed map; the road is constantly changing according to the decisions we make and the actions we take.

From my perspective, Merton and Loring are batting .500 as a team. I do agree it's not a good use of our time to try to figure out what God's entire plan is, but that's because the "trying to fit divine-sized stuff into a human brain" problem occurs again, not because the plan doesn't exist. In the final analysis, I feel much more confident living my little Lynn-sized life if I know that God has everything around me in hand (Eeek! A personification!), and everything will work to the good.

What did you see today?