Who is God?
by Jorge Vargas
You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it - Samuel Butler.
Perhaps this piece may prove quite difficult to write, were it not for two conversations that I had some time ago, almost a month before Christmas Eve, the most commercialized holiday in Western history and a holy day for Christians around the world. After a grueling week of work and commute related problems, fate would find me sitting down to breakfast with a trusted colleague and, above all, friend, as I attempted to explain to her the manner in which I, a Catholic, express my faith.
I explained to her that my relationship with God is a personal one, and it’s powerful enough that even if God were not real and simply a means by which religious institutions could control people, I would still practice my religion simply due to the fact that without such a large and underlying current in one’s life, one wouldn’t be able to cope with the harsh realities that exist in our world. It’s easier to imagine a being that created this world and put us in it to test our strength than to simply accept the fact that our world makes no sense, is marked by cruelty, is inhabited by people who spend hundreds of dollars during Christmas while not giving a second thought to the thousands of children who will be starving to death on December 24th and 25th of 2005.
To further explain to her the complexity of my beliefs, I delved into the largest passion of my life: Peru. I have often been referred to as patriotic, and it’s likely that I am, but I also consider myself to be something deeper than that, something more substantial, for I, unlike many others, have taken considerable time to question what it is that I believe in. What is Peru? For that matter, what is the United States or Rwanda or France or China or Russia or Brazil? The nation that lives in my heart is, of course, Peru, the nation of my birth, so it would be natural for me to question that Andean country.
Why would I mention Peru in my quest for attempting to understand God? I don’t truly know the answer but I can venture the following guess: perhaps it’s the case that Peru and God are both complex in the same way and can only be understood by the same means.
Peru, for instance, can be understood by its national character. The Peruvian, in general, is kind and generous, humble and honest, strong yet easy-going, but this in and of itself doesn’t fully explain my notion of ‘Peru’ and why I love it, for not all do. In a recent interview of locals in the Peruvian Andes, a reporter asked the person being interviewed – a man who lived in the Peruvian countryside – about his opinions regarding the Peruvian state only to hear the man say the following: “To me, Peru is a disease.”
I don’t agree with that view, obviously, yet I am not so foolish as to not consider it for the Peruvian state is indeed a motley place. The Spanish pillaged throughout the Americas, mixing with the native populations, as well as bringing in black slaves. Peru, lying on the Pacific coast, received a large wave of immigrants from Japan and China, as well as receiving its fair share of Italians in the early 1900s and, finally, Jews, Germans, and people from other Northern European lands in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. And, of course, Peru has its fair share of Argentines, Bolivians, Colombians, and Ecuadorians, along with people from other nations of the Latin American region.
Racial variety is not the only type that exists in Peru, a nation which boasts most of the major climates found on planet Earth, more so than any other country in the world. The Peruvian Republic also suffers from huge economic ‘variety’ which finds extreme poverty in the countryside alongside wealth in the elite neighborhoods of Lima – an income gap similar to that found in the United States.
Does Peru lie in the poor struggling to put some sort of meal on the table the next day or is it found in our middle class which is being reduced constantly, or perhaps in the fair-skinned elites who dominate the streets of downtown Lima and the halls of Congress? Does Peru lie in the slums of Lima, in its historic center, in the foothills of the Andes, or in the jungles of the Amazon? Was Peru born when the first Spaniards began raping the natives or was Peru born when the last Spanish army was wiped out in Ayacucho in 1824? Is Peru represented by the national soccer team or the military, by the Church or in the UN?
We, unfortunately, live in a world of abstractions where flags are meaningless and, short of charging armies, patriotism is merely rhetoric. What does any of this have to do with spirituality?
At first glance, nothing, but in essence, everything. My love for Peru is tied into the same principle for my own religious and spiritual beliefs; it’s similar to the reason for why I pray often yet rarely attend mass. Yet, the ability to believe in abstractions lies at the root of both issues, except that, of course, matters of religion are far more difficult to explain than matters of nationalism.
However, once all is said and done, the question of one’s nation can easily be answered: we all associate with one particular nation or nationality. But what of one’s spirituality? How can one define the unseen? How can one claim any stake in the idea of a God by simply going through the motions of Catholicism, Islam, or Judaism? Does a particular religion bring us closer to God than another?
That is a topic with a simple answer, proven by the test of time: No religion has any advantage over another. Religion without spirituality is nothing. Religion without belief is nothing.
There are skeptics who argue about the existence of God and about why we haven’t seen any burning bushes or parted oceans, and one can’t easily counter that argument. Of course we have no proof of God’s existence. No organized religion claims to be a science and so therefore they shouldn’t be held up to that standard. Let the scientists cure the diseases that exist in our planet, but don’t let them assume that by doing so, they’re better than God – perhaps He is simply testing us?
But this begs the more important question that we’ve had in our collective conscience for time immemorial and which I won’t presume to have an answer to: Who is God? Or better yet, what is God? Is God simply a misfiring of neurons somewhere along the line that made the early civilizations begin to believe in some sort of higher power that eventually adapted into God? Or is God maybe a coping mechanism by which we can accept the cruelties existing in our world because they’re a part of some master plan? Perhaps God is a sentient being who’s watching us as we go about our lives, making mistakes, hurting each other, loving each other, befriending each other, and, ultimately, dying?
I offer one answer, leaving it up for the readers and the theologians to debate: God is a sentient being who through His kindness made it so that we can view him as merely a coping mechanism and use Him as such. God is simultaneously a being who watches our every move, although to what purpose is unknown. And lastly, God is a mystery that we’ll never understand, not because of His great complexity, but rather due to His striking simplicity. We’ll never understand God and religion and ourselves until we stop trying.
The concept of Peru or the United States or South Africa is a concept that stares us right in the face every day, so we’ve learned to understand it, but the concept of God is so present in all things that we can’t break out of it and therefore, we can’t analyze it, which does away with our entire ‘scientific method.’ Like in Marx’s economic system, the presence of it is so extreme that people can’t even notice it. Or, in a more concrete term, God is like our air, a substance that keeps all of us alive but that we take for granted during every breath because there’s no use caring about it.
On the same morning as I was speaking to my friend about my own beliefs, I eventually found myself standing on the northern end of a fountain in a park in the middle of New York City, facing south toward my home and toward three Catholic crosses on the roofs of two buildings, and I, as I tend to do in that particular location, prayed. A homeless man was sitting nearby and, upon hearing me speaking to myself and realizing what I was doing, asked me why I didn’t go into the chapel to pray. To that I could only counter with a somewhat cliché, “Why not here under the sun, if God is found in both places?”
