Overview

This book presents meditations and reflections on God – the God Beyond God, beyond all beings and beyond all gods. Each one attempts to speak the unspeakable, and in so doing to indicate how the irony of theological speech can be navigated in the practical context of the pulpit. The book will appeal particularly to Christians and other religiously interested theists who tend toward mystical beliefs about ultimate reality.

Distinctive Features

This book of meditations and reflections is directed to the thoughtful everyday mystics of religious traditions, the searching souls who never quite feel at home in the retail-religion context and long for someone to talk with them about their differently shaped spirituality. These people want to understand what they can of the “God Beyond God”, the divine ground of being that surpasses final cognitive comprehension, the mysterious depths of nature that resist our pervasive anthropomorphic drives to reduce God to a supreme being among beings. This book is grist for their mill, water for their garden, support for their struggles. It will help them make sense of the religious symbols we use in speaking of ultimate reality—without the vain pretense that these symbols refer neatly or cleanly to the reality they purport to describe, and without eliminating those symbols in a futile attempt to engage ultimate reality without language. We need our symbols for God. But we don’t have to allow them to enslave us.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill
Preface
God Is… Holy Mystery
God Is… Friend
God Is… Hope
God Is… Monarch
God Is… Wisdom
God Is… Coming
God Is… Death
God Is… Creator
God Is… Waiting