Ludicrous God Talk Sam Keen Add three names to the list, send to three friends, who must, in turn, send to three friends. Within three weeks you will receive 30,000,000 new names for God.

The more earnestly I search for a way to talk about the great mystery of Being -- "God" for short -- the more confused I become. All the metaphors that suggest I am separated from and must search for the Totality are farcical. Who sets out on a journey when there is no road that could lead beyond the Encompassing? What sense can it make to think of approaching the Source that is inseparable from my being?

My existential condition seems like that of the seeker in the shaggy Zen story who could never find an ox because he was already riding on an ox.

A more hopeful approach is to create a new kind of religious language that is forthrightly comical -- a special kind of sacred foolishness, based on the Dionysian promise that "the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theologians could guard against becoming ideologists by becoming clowns, jesters, and tricksters.

To avoid falling into idolatry, proceed from silence to paradoxical speech and back again to silence. Unto everything there is a time, and a season to every purpose. After linguistic asceticism, a season for feasting; after silence, a time for the imagination to run wild.

This is the open secret: the Emperor of this Cosmos is everywhere present but nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, we are impelled to juggle a thousand names for the nameless One.

Stretch language to its breaking point. Invent names. Use once. Discard. Just for the fun of it, what if we name the Nameless One:

The Quantum Leaper

The Beyond Within

The Enigmatic Lover

Being-Becoming-Itself

The Whence and Whither

The Subject that Encompasses all Predicates

The Verb that Activates all Other Verbs

The All-Inclusive Noun

The Singular Plurality

The One for All, The All for One

The Encompassor of Good and Evil

The Web Master

The Great Holographer

The Cosmic DNA

The Erotic Whole

The Womb of Time and Space

The Source from Whom all Longing Flows

The Black Hole Where Love Embraces Death

The Creative Destroyer

The Alpha and Omega Helix

The Mad Experimenter

The Ground and Void of Being

The Eternal Not Yet

The Dissatisfied One

The Creating

The Sustaining

The Abiding

The Original One

The Double Helix: Cause and Consequence

The Source and Sorcerer

The Great Whomever or Whatever that is Within-Without-Besides-Before-After-and-During

Etc., etc., etc. without End

Add three names to the list, send to three friends, who must, in turn, send to three friends. Within three weeks you will receive 30,000,000 new names for God.

As I practice the discipline of playing with divine names and coining new religious language, I find that each new metaphor forces me to ask: What, exactly, do I mean when I speak about God? To what kind of experience am I seeking to give voice? In each case I am forced back to some specific experience, a personal epiphany, that involves one of the primal or ontological emotions -- wonder, awe, gratitude, joy, compassion, feelings of contingency, and the fear of death. Instead of searching for the one true Oxology, I am free to explore the nature of the Ox on which I have been riding while I was looking in vain for an ox.

But why not merely chuck the whole impossible project of speaking about the unspeakable?

Because I cannot refrain from asking impossible questions! Maybe it is like pushing with your tongue against a tooth that is about to come out. The slight pain is slightly pleasurable. We push against the unknowable mystery because it keeps us alive to the ultimate questions that persist, even for logical positivists and militant atheists. Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did the world come from? Why is there a heartwarming amount of beauty, goodness, and order and a heartbreaking amount of ugliness, evil, and disorder?

Each of the ludicrous names for God is a metaphysical story in a capsule, an existential origin myth that suggests the ultimate context that defines my existence. If God is The Eternal Not Yet, then my restless longing is a mark of my participation in the ongoing process of Divine Becoming. The Buddhists suggest that the right attitude we should have toward theological speculation is not one of belief but of entertaining the myths as stories that give us a sense of direction. You are a fool if you believe these stories, they say. But you are also a fool if you do not. There is something about living in the ambivalence of theological questions and stories that protects us from closing our horizons and living in a claustrophobic world.

Paradoxically, silence and playful speech protect the unknowable horizon that defines our existence. They are forms of iconoclasm that inoculate us against the idolatry of literalism and fundamentalism that reduce God to a knowable entity. After writing endless pages about how we may know and name God, Thomas Aquinas concluded by saying, "We remain joined to Him as to one unknown." Mystics, like lovers, speak about their ecstatic experience of union only to refer to something that is manifest but cannot be said clearly.

The experience of the holy carries within itself the impossibility of articulation. All mystics tell us it is ineffable. The chemical composition of the bread and wine can be described in exact detail, but not the epiphany in which believers experience the presence of the living Christ within the elements. Any sociologist can assemble a catalogue of injustices, but there is no explaining why a man or woman may suddenly experience the suffering of a neighbor as a call from God to work for justice. No matter how mundane the medium, the experience of the holy is beyond predication or description. We don't have the linguistic or conceptual needles with which to knit it. It comes as a shock, a disruption, an experience outside of time and space. The vehicle that carries the experience may be a perfectly ordinary, secular object. A flower in a crannied wall. Eternity in a grain of sand. An ordinary Jewish prophet with wild ideas about the kingdom of God, thought by some to be insane. But the mystery can only be expressed indirectly by metaphor, through which we get an enchanting glimpse of what cannot be seen in the raw. Sacred language, at best, is suggestive, seductive, an invitation to wonder.

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Sam Keen has just completed a book titled Minor Epiphanies: Confessions of an Agnostic Christian. His other books include the bestseller Fire in the Belly and Hymns to an Unknown God. He holds two M.A.s in theology from Harvard and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton.

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