Where does the name God Swimming in God come from?
And might it not be slightly blasphemous?
Best get both questions out there right away. The name comes from the mental picture that I had when I first began to get an inkling of the concept of the unity of Spirit and Creation.
The question of whether it is an apt description of reality or an offensive statement depends on one’s belief system and perspective. Perhaps we can all work that out together as time goes on.
First, the origin.
In the 1990s, I had a habit each Lent of confining my reading to books with a spiritual theme, often dealing with meditation or the connections between religions. During the Lent of 1995, my reading included The Journey Inwards by F. C. Happold and Universal Wisdom by Bede Griffiths. I was amazed by Griffiths’ description of the Axial Age and his selections of early writings about this unity. Happold’s book provided a glimpse into how one might live in that unity rather than just read about it.
Lent was over, Easter came, but I just kept looking for more and more scriptures and writings on this theme.
After about a year of this focused reading, I experienced what many had come to call an “aha” moment. Up until then, I was fascinated by the whole unity concept and thought that it “made sense,” but hadn’t gone far beyond that.
It was late afternoon in Springfield, Illinois, and I was on a business trip, covering the state legislature for the Chicago Tribune. I had ridden my bicycle from the motel where I was staying to a park with a stream. The sun was beginning its way down to the horizon, and was creating beautiful sparkles on the water. I was sitting on the grass, leaning up against a tree, just enjoying the breeze, the sounds of children running around and the sight of the ducks, swimming and bobbing their heads down into the water to drink.
I wasn’t trying to meditate. I was just open. And it hit me. This is all God. The water is God and the ducks are God and the air is God and all these people are God. There is nothing but God. Yet in some mysterious way, we are all also individuals.
This is what I wrote about it at the time.
April 23, 1996
Sitting at the edge of the brook that goes through Washington Park in Springfield, Ill., looking at an incredible tree in the late afternoon sun, surrounded by ducks, water, grass, people, dogs.
It was so bright, it was sort of surreal. And then one of those “Aha!” moments happened. What people have started to call an epiphany. When an understanding, a way of seeing things, happens all at once, that you weren’t expecting. And you know you’ve turned a corner and will never go back to seeing things the way you saw them before.
The crashing-through-my-head thought was: All of this is God! Not just God is in all of it or it is all in God.
It IS God. God IS it.
It’s like the commercial of Michael Jordan running on his own head. We are God, walking on God; the duck is God, swimming in God, the crows and cardinals are God, flying in God.
Life is springing forth from God and is God.
This is not pantheism. There is a Bede Griffith scripture citation, in the Upanishads, that said it so clearly and beautifully–the mystery is that we are unique, separate individuals, while all being God.
Even the duck is God swimming in and drinking God — and I am God watching God swim in and drink God, yet the duck is a duck, the water is water and I am a self-aware, conscious human being.
This is the mystery Christ was trying to show in the Eucharist.
This is my Body. This is my Blood.I’m somewhat overwhelmed by the beauty of all this. How do I dance the mysticism into words to explain the insights? How do I harvest the experiences and put them into words to explain the journey?
For the next ten years, I worked to find a way to take what I felt in my bones and get it into my mind, or at least my fingers, so the concepts could be written and shared. That involved searching writings over the past 2,600 years, trying to follow the thread of the unity of Spirit and Creation. One of the surprises was that it ebbed and flowed throughout history and that the 20th and 21st Centuries saw an incredble upswing.
Half way through that journey I began collaborating with a fantastic artist, Christine Tobias, who took those writings and brought them to life with color and images, sensitivity and spiritual wisdom. From the Upanishads to 21st Century secular writing, we traced the thread and the result was In the Same Breath.
Here we are now, in the 2009 land of blogs and tweets, friends and follows, wuffie and the cloud, and it’s time to expand the reach of the physical book and invite more people to continue weaving the thread. Hence, the God Swimming in God blog.
During those ten years, I also sent a 275-word section of my journal, written in 1997 after my mother died, to my sister-in-law Jane Gaunt, also an artist, and we began working on a book that explores the theme in another way, One Spirit: A Creation Story for the 21st Century.
More on that journey when next we meet.
gswimg at earthlink dot net
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