******************** God ********************

The following passage, written by Martin Buber, represents the truest most beautiful case I have read for why one should still hold on to God in a world where “in God’s name!” is the cry of the worst hypocrites and mass-murderers. It can also be found (in context) in the larger passage on Buber, but I thought it deserved a page to itself.

[God] is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it.

Generations of men have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of man with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their finger-marks and their blood. Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest! If I took the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby an unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of Him whom the generations of men have honored and degraded with their awesome living and dying. I do indeed mean Him whom the hell-tormented and heaven-storming generations of men mean. Certainly, they draw caricatures and write ‘God’ underneath; they murder one another and say ‘in God’s name.’ But when all madness and delusion fall to dust, when they stand over against Him in the loneliest darkness and no longer say “He, He’ but rather sigh ‘Thou,’ shout ‘Thou’, all of them the one word, and when they then add ‘God’, is it not the real God whom they all implore, the One Living God, the God of the children of man? Is it not He who hears them? And just for this reason is not the word ‘God’ the word of appeal, the word which has become a name, consecrated in all human tongues for all times? We must esteem those who interdict it because they rebel against the injustice and wrong which are so readily referred to ‘God’ for authorization. But we may not give it up.

How understandable it is that some suggest we should remain silent about the ‘last things’ for a time in order that the misused words may be redeemed!

But they are not to be redeemed thus. We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.