Landscapes of the Sacred #1

What struck me reading Lane's Landscapes of the Sacred was the following quote from page 9: "Knowing God, like falling in love or living through a near-death experience, is inescapably contextual." Lane classifies a relationship with God as a "limit experience" where one seems to come just short of the end of what is possible and experiences the thrill and terror of doing so. These experiences, he says, are inherently tied to context, and specifically the place in which they occur. I think of my high school and all the memories tied to that building when I walk into it, how easy it makes it to reminisce and remember things I might otherwise have forgotten when I'm there. However, there's something different about the examples given; while falling in love or having a near-death experience can certainly tie memories to the place where it happened, knowing God is fundamentally a totally different sort of limit experience.

There are, of course, many definitions of God: Christians often think of God as a Him (although it is agreed that "he" does not have any requirement to fit human gender), but more importantly as a all-knowing and all-powerful God who fights against Satan and judges us for allowance to Heaven after we die. There are many other religions who fit a similar viewpoint, as well as those that do not. Some see God as "The Universe," or a similar non-anthropomorphic deity, possibly just an "energy source" that underlies all things. In all of these examples, though the notion of "God" is very fluid the understanding that He or She or It is completely separate from us does persist. We agree that whatever lies beyond our dimensions and ability to understand is God.

It is curious, then, why we should say "knowing God" is an experience that takes its context from the place it occurs. God is inherently a non-place idea, one that completely transcends the three-dimensional space that we live in as well as the whole concept of time that we are bound by. Because of our human instinct to associate our experiences with where we are and the time that it took place, we attempt to root God in a place that "he" doesn't exist, or at least exists wholly outside of. In other words, we put God in a box.

Still, we do this all the time. This practice takes place in as fundamental texts as the Bible, because although we agree that God is outside of time and place, we still record the events and miracles which take place in our reality. The most prominent example is obviously the life of Jesus in Christianity, which records God himself placing himself on the same stage as his "subjects," coming fully down to their level and restricting himself to our time and space. These biblical stories are of course where many of the holy lands and places come from, where we believe that God himself once walked as a man. In our personal experiences today we continue to want to make these associations in our experiences with God because, for us, we experience them in a certain time and place.

I believe that we do this to believe that we have an understanding of the character or nature of God; if we can say that a specific spiritual event took place at a specific hour in a specific place, we can go on to make assumptions about the purpose of such an event. If we collect many of these events together, we can designate specific places as "holy" and make further claims as to what God is doing because of the things we know about those places or what happened in our reality. Should we do this? I don't know.