The Main Thing

Good Lord and Holy Mackerel! I’ve been thinking about the idea of God again. I’ve come to see what a boon the idea of God can be to the imagination of a small child. For instance.......

As I understood the basic idea when I was about five years old (and taken to the synagogue regularly), God was the Lord of the Entire Universe. To take that thought seriously, it was necessary to imagine the universe that God was Lord of, an immensity worthy of His greatness. Also, if God were thought to be other than such a universe, such otherness would obviously be a limitation, and the whole point was that God meant no limitation, meant something absolutely comprehensive and ultimate. So, I concluded, God must be everywhere and must be in everything, and I announced my conviction (pointing to a few common objects in the kitchen, as well as the cat) to my whole family one evening ---my parents and older brother, my two aunts, my uncle, my grandfather. Everyone thought it cute and simply ‘darling’ that I’d come up with such a notion, except my brother, who was annoyed as usual.

Of course God created the entire universe, Who else? But that didn’t really seem to be the main thing, nor were the stories such as the little guy (David!) killing an enemy giant or the Red Sea parting down the middle or a man actually wrestling with an angel. It didn’t seem particularly important to believe any of that stuff---it all just seemed like trimmings compared to the main idea.

Obviously the experts at the synagogue were in charge of the main idea---as well as all the trappings, the Sunday School stories, the cantor chanting, the dense sounds of Hebrew as the rituals were enacted. One assumed they understood what was what. In fact those in charge didn’t talk all that much about the main idea, the idea that God was the most comprehensive reality that can be conceived, i.e., Lord of the Universe. But that was something you could imagine as a thought rather than as an image, which seems to be something else worth thinking about.