(Not) Talking About God

of metaphor and meaning

Friends, welcome to The Book of Common Words, where we explore the Christian spirituality of being human through poetry and essays about lectionary passages, my life, and the church. I’m your writer, Aaron.

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I spill a lot of words talking about God.

Trying to understand God, to make sense of the source of existence itself seems futile when you stop and think about it. Even still, something in me drives me to decipher the divine. There is an urge in me, a hunger really, to understand what we mean when we talk about God. This force, this storm, in my heart and my head forces me to contemplate just who God is and what meaning God has in the world.

And I do mean it exactly the way I phrased it as well: what meaning does God have in the world? I was raised to believe that God gives meaning to the world, and while I still believe that the definition of what is rests solely upon the essence of what we call divine, I am at the same time driven to ask what good understanding a glimpse of that divinity is—or does, for action begets action—in the tangible, matter soaked world we walk in, live in, are born into, and die in the middle of.

What good is God?