An understanding of God

Back campus at Earlham

Today's Sunday School question (well, one of many): What informs your understanding of God?

We were talking about how in the Bible certain verses indicate that God is the source of evil, disasters, and suffering as well as good and glorious things. 

One of the things I've always appreciated about Quakerism is that personal experience is the basis of an understanding of God, not a creed learnt and recited. My understanding of God is informed by the ways in which I feel God moving in my daily life, and the trends which I feel I can attribute to God that happen over the much longer haul. God challenges me, forms me, puts me in certain circumstances, guides me, all of it. This I know because I experience it, not because it was ever told to me. 

And it wasn't. At Durham Friends Meeting we spoke of God very rarely, and no one ever tried to get me to see God in a certain way, except perhaps as a loving guide.

Lately I've been looking at more theological writing than I ever have, which has also affected my understanding of God. Or, rather, it has affected the way I think of people who know God. I feel like I'm seeing what they have seen - a world view based on God which is unknown in its detail to me, even if my world view has also been based on God. 

Anyway, these are the things I would say influence my understanding of God: my experience of God, and the reading of God that I do, and, more important than the reading in fact, are the conversations I have with Friends about God. I have so much to learn from people who have spent a great deal of time thinking about these things. 

Tonight it occurs to me that another thing has informed my view of God. Music. I don't know how directly the connection can be made, but it must be there. 

Last night I went to the Richmond Symphony, and the second half of the show featured Dvorak's Cello Concerto, which had me on the edge of my seat (literally) from about three minutes in. I came home, electrified, and immediately looked it up on youtube. I sat at my table, still dressed for the 32 degree evening, and watched the entire concerto again. 

Free will, and human agency came up during the Sunday School discussion today. Composers were given freedom to create incredible works like this one, and for that I am grateful. 

Other interesting notes this weekend: 

Earlham's back campus, with last (I hope!) remnants of snow.

A story of the extraordinary and quotidien (simultaneously) nature of the immigrant experience in the US on the New Yorker Fiction podcast.

A story of those blindsided by Trump's executive order to ban Muslims from seven countries in January on This American Life.


A poem called "We Refugees" by British poet Benjamin Zephaniah, which grade 9 looked at on Friday.

The stuffed shells recipe that the Young Adult Friends made for the Meeting's meal trains on Friday.