“In the beginning Man created God, and in the image of Man created He him.”

Ian Anderson, “Aqualung”

They lost me at the personification. I never could get past it. Amid all that is, in the vast and indescribable cosmos, space dust and starshine and towering sequoias that crack the sky, they chose the naked ape as the revelation and manifestation, and my gut reaction was and ever will be, “No, I don’t think so.”

I was listening to a podcast featuring Rupert Sheldrake, proponent of the concept of morphic resonance, which I don’t really understand, in which he and host Charles Eisenstein take aim at scientific reductionism and the idea that if it can’t be measured it doesn’t matter.

The reductionist worldview is at odds with the notion of God.

I, too, am at odds with the notion of God, specifically the notion of an anthropomorphic God, more specifically still of a gendered anthropomorphic God. Yet I am also at odds with the reductionists, and the idea of a world — a cosmos — denatured and divested of the sacred.

“I don’t believe you, you got the whole damned thing all wrong.
He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday”

Ian Anderson, “Wind Up”

I want to hold space for the sacred, for the inherent value of the world, the anima mundi. Can I do this without also holding space for the notion of God?

I hope so. Because I cannot seem to rehabilitate the word God — it will always and forever be the pissed off old man with jealousy issues — but I do have a visceral sense of the sacred, that ineffable quality that defies reductionism, rather like Sheldrake’s morphic fields, which — insofar as I can tell — hold the knowledge of the living world through time and across generations within accessible fields of awareness.

Which may be nothing more than a complicated way of saying “God.”