FREE GOD !

I jumped for joy because Jesus made me free. We humans use the language of metaphor like this not only to tell inspiring stories like this but also to attempt the reverse: we strive to enslave God. We use words, dogma, doctrine, interpretation of scripture or religious commentary, and even prayer to try to gain control of That Which Cannot Be Controlled. The following section of this chapter will show how language can describe God approximately, but can never enclose His Essence. Only meditation, silent, unarticulated peaceful attention, can even approach God and this we can do only roughly. But even so, we hope our crudely articulated representations of God get better and better with time, over millennia. We trust that God's Revelation to us makes this happen.

Except in our insistent, articulating lexical minds which are slaves to inevitable bad logic, God is unlimited. God is, was and ever will be unbound, whether we like it or not. God does need to be liberated, however. He needs to be emotionally freed from the shackles we place on Him in our own minds and speech. He needs to be freed from the boundaries we place on Him in our irresponsible use of various kinds of languages. He needs to be freed from the wordy prison in which we put Him in order to make Him do as we please. We say He must be our servant or we will never let Him out of our logical dungeon. Sometimes, Christians even try to directly command God by saying “I bind Thee” in public prayer. If this all wasn’t so funny and foolish, it would be blasphemy.

God can be freed by acknowledging that nothing we can say about Him is perfectly certain or one hundred percent complete. The lexical and other linguistic boundaries we try to put on God do not exist. Due to their intrinsic indescribability their very non-existence poses questions and consequent answers that are contradicted only in the Residuum.

There is a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty about articulated statements pertaining to God (and about everything else, actually). Language and even the ideas they represent and the very mind itself generally act in a quantum physical way. If you want to know where a small particle is, you cannot know much about its motion. If you know its inertia, its tendency to move, you can never deduce where exactly it is. There is an uncertainty principle for language. The sum of all our uncertainties is enclosed by the Residuum.

Words and ideas, even images, can not only superpose, interfere and reinforce, they follow a law of irreducible uncertainty that is defined only by how much effort we are willing to put into refining them. There is a point where more effort and more description and more information become counterproductive to improved understanding. One more word, one more noticeable brush stroke, one more sigh raises more questions than it settles. God is freed when we open the door to His cage into the Residuum of the inexpressible and unexpressed plausible unknown.

The best way to open the door is to shut up. Dogma, ritual, doctrine and all artistic representations of truth are all fundamentally limited and uncertain. The time comes when it is appropriate only to be quiet. Conflict and violence over words reduces this time, expands the Residuum of Plausible Deniability. Silence in the presence of God is required or He will not be present. Still and peaceful apprehension must be employed to find Truth. Thus, we can free God and find God Unbound in the Residuum.

By now you may have noticed that the Residuum must constitute a sort of Christian Tao, a compendium of profound unanswered and unanswerable questions having a spiritual or existential component. The Residuum reverberates to quantum statements of Joseph Campbell’s take on Teilhard de Chardin.