How I Define God

I use the word God. I have, for many years, because it’s a container big enough for the things that break language: awe, grief, belonging, and the shape of that which makes sense of it all.

Years ago I put down a book because the author spoke of God. I recoiled not at the thought itself but at the weight of the word; the stories it carries, the churches and arguments and childhood bench-squirming that had held the word small for me. In my twenties I could be territorial with language. If a word felt laden with an old story I’d rejected, I would throw that baby away with the bathwater.

Now I relish the appearances of the word. I have lived enough to know that names are maps, not territory. They point. They do not contain. So when God appears in text, bearded and commanding, or soft and mothering, or an equation of physics and awe, I let the name do its work and then I see what it opens in me.

Here is how I hold the name now:

God is the vast, incomprehensible oneness that is the whole of everything — all time, all matter, every interior and exterior layer. God is the universe and the small instant of cellular regeneration. God is the thunder and the whisper, the scientist’s proof and the mystic’s silence. God is Shiva and Kali, Divine Mother, the Earth itself, the unexpected kindness in a stranger. God is every face the divine chooses to wear.

This definition is intentionally wide: it removes right and wrong, borders and boxes. It allows for ebb and flow of meaning across cultures and moments. If you call God “no one,” a feeling, an idea, a law, or nothing at all, that shape is honored here. If you never use the word, you can still find the thing I point to: the sense of absolute love and an intelligence that births form.

Sometimes I meet God in the simplest places. In the steam curling from my tea, in the stranger who holds a door open, in the breath that arrives without my asking. These are not grand revelations, just ordinary moments. But that’s the point: if God is everything, then nothing is outside the sacred.

There is one boundary I keep: for me, God is love. This is not sentimental, but the organizing quality of the cosmos that births and holds being. Call it the universe loving itself into form. That is my due fidelity to the word.

God is not in how I name God but in how I meet God. Your experience is your definition. Mine is mine. Both can be true. Both can live in the same room.

So when you meet the word in my writing, let it be your doorway. If you carry a hard aversion, be gentle with it. Don’t shove the book away. Instead, let the sentence land and see what opens. Maybe nothing. Maybe a small, strange softening. Maybe a larger recognition. The point is not conversion but invitation.

P.S. The definition above is a map, not a doctrine. Take what helps. Leave the rest.