September 8 2023

A friend of mine asked me about my concept of God and my feelings about Jesus. The two of us know each other well, so I could talk freely and experimentally — we trust each other, so there was no fear of any of our ideas as being concrete or that we were attempting to convince the other to believe or accept anything.

I thought about how I would respond to the same question from someone I didn’t know, a person where the trust of a long relationship hadn’t been built. If I were in my courage, I would sit there in silence with them for 20 minutes.

Any words I use to speak of God are inherently wrong. Every word I utter of God does not come within a billion light years of communicating God’s being. The very best I can do is to sit in silence, to be still and know.

If I were even more courageous, I’d get up from my seat and dance a wild dance.

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In Japan for an international conference on religion, Joseph Campbell overheard another American delegate, a social philosopher from New York, say to a Shinto priest, "We've been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a few of your shrines. But I don't get your ideology. I don't get your theology."

The Japanese paused as though in deep thought and then slowly shook his head. "I think we don't have ideology," he said. "We don't have theology. We dance."