I Am Not God: Searching for a Path Toward Personal and Global Well-Being

By David J. LaGuardia

I am Not God contends that a world of seven billion people cannot become a place of peace, justice, and shared prosperity unless we, as individuals and societies, learn to consider the interests of those with whom we share our world. Both our theistic and nontheistic wisdom traditions remind us that we are not the center of the universe and call us to live for something beyond our own self-interest. Religious or not, it’s useful to consider what comes first in our lives. Unquestioning loyalty to a religion, nation, system, or ideology can be used to validate unjust realities when they are in our interests and can lead us to demonize and marginalize those we identify as different from us.
Only when we recognize that righteous living is not a destination but a continuous struggle, can we become our best selves and claim the freedom to choose who we are becoming personally and socially. This book is a challenge to grow in self-awareness recognizing the ways that a self-centered lens, which demands our way and believes that we are above others, hurts us as individuals and as a global family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483597157

Book preview

LaGuardia

Introduction

I have been teaching theology for sixteen years. While I am truly grateful for this experience, in many ways this period has been defined by struggle and search. Conventional wisdom suggests that the role of a teacher is to provide students with answers. Religion is the source of many people’s most basic answers, yet the years I’ve spent teaching theology have taught me that I do not have the answers. I question, doubt, and sometimes even disbelieve, but I continue to search.

As a teacher and a parent, I feel a strong need to find answers that can lead my students and my own children to happiness and peace in spite of life’s difficulties. As a social justice teacher, I spend significant time thinking about, researching, and mourning the problems in the world. Admittedly, I feel inadequate in these areas and unable to offer grand solutions. Nevertheless, I believe that all of us should try to do our small part to make the world a better place for those with whom we share it and those who will come after us.

Perhaps my error is looking for salvation in an answer. Many of the great religious leaders were not as answer-oriented as we have made them. Jesus and the Buddha invited their audiences to follow them and adopt different paths than their societies endorsed. They challenged their disciples to wake up and see the world and their fellow creatures. The Buddha invited followers to embark on the 8–fold path. Jesus challenged his disciples to take the narrow road and follow him along the way of the cross. It is a constant struggle for modern followers to discern what their paths and contexts ask of them.

Both practitioners of Taoism and the early Christian community described their spiritual tradition as the way. Perhaps these traditions indicate that the solution is not more people with the answers but more people on a journey. Because a journey is unpredictable, it requires openness and clear vision. It also demands awareness that our perspectives and judgments are not always reliable. Our vision can become distorted. As a result our sight frequently needs to be re-calibrated. Anthony de Mello, SJ, an Indian spiritual writer, observed:

Seeing is the most arduous thing a human being can undertake. For it calls for a disciplined, alert mind, whereas most people would much rather lapse into mental laziness than take the trouble to see each person and thing anew in present-moment freshness. 

He further asserted:

That is why the most painful act the human being can perform, the act that he dreads the most, is the act of seeing. It is in that act of seeing that love is born, or rather more accurately, that act of seeing is love. 

De Mello reminds us that seeing is more than just physically opening our eyes. It is a process that takes work. Answers offer a finality that seeing does not. Seeing is a lifelong journey of attentiveness and conversion, while answers give us the comfort and false assurance found at an apparent destination. Seeing demands that we respond to what reality asks of us; answers, on the other hand, can allow us to ignore reality’s inconvenient challenges. A focus on answers does not leave the space for us to identify our real problem. This focus does not require that we journey inward to grapple with what many spiritual writers have identified as our basic struggle and a source of our distorted vision — our ego.

As I will use the term, unlike the way it is defined by many psychologists, ego is the part of us that believes we are the center of the universe. In this sense ego, which keeps us stuck on ourselves and our limited interests, is the opposite of love, which is other-oriented. Love exists when we value ourselves and can see the other apart from the distorting, self-serving, and objectifying lens of ego. For ego other people’s value is not experienced as intrinsic; instead, it is determined by their ability to fulfill our self-centered desires and by the degree to which a relationship with them is advantageous to us.

While grappling with our ego may not represent a complete solution to our personal or social problems, there are strong reasons to think it is a sensible place to start.

I offer this reflection as a humble addition to the work of many wise people who have tried to bring humanity’s attention to the problem of self-centeredness because I am convinced that the first step to solving a problem is realizing that it exists. Perhaps if a critical mass of humanity is able to recognize and struggle with this problem in ourselves, we will be able to make progress in solving our specific problems.

Going Forward (A Few Notes)

(1) While I have read and found life-changing inspiration in much non-Christian spiritual literature and find tremendous value in the discoveries of modern science, my personal background is the Catholic, Christian spiritual tradition. As a result I reference the Christian tradition, and to a lesser extent Buddhism, more frequently than other traditions. This is a reflection of my personal context and does not indicate a belief that the Christian or Buddhist spiritual traditions are superior to other traditions. If I had to name the superior wisdom tradition, I would say it is whichever tradition leads an individual to find contentment while challenging that person to be aware of and responsive to his or her hurting sisters and brothers. I believe most of our faith and wisdom traditions have the capacity to inspire adherents to live just and peaceful lives.

In spite of my limitations, this reflection will try to demonstrate the universal character of the call to, as described by an interreligious ethical statement titled the Charter for Compassion, dethrone ourselves from the center of our world. Initiated by Karen Armstrong, a British spiritual writer, the Charter testifies to the widespread agreement on ethical ideals. It affirms that the principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical, and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. It further invites everyone to restore compassion to the center of morality and religion.

(If my limitations prevent me from demonstrating the universal quality of this vision, I hope readers from traditions with which I am not as familiar will visit my forum and share relevant quotes and teachings from their own tradition.)

(2) I also ask you to read this book critically. It is a part of my own ongoing journey. I spend considerable time thinking about this journey and, admittedly, some time trying to escape my thoughts. I believe these thoughts may have value to the reader. It is critical for humans to recognize that seven billion people cannot live peacefully together if all of them believe that they are the center of the universe and orient their lives primarily toward their own interests, especially considering that the apparent interests of different people are often in conflict.

I recognize that I have blind spots; therefore, I ask readers to decide whether they feel my observations are true rather than assuming that because the thoughts are in print they must all be correct. The insights of this book are the results of engaging and wrestling with the wisdom of various influential thinkers as well as the thoughts of friends, family, and students. I hope to refine these thoughts in a continued conversation with the reader. 

(Details on how this conversation will be conducted as well as opportunities to share relevant wisdom from your own traditions are included in the conclusion.)

(3) In advance I acknowledge that I frequently incorporate quotes. While I have great admiration for many of the cited thinkers, the quotes are not incorporated to invoke the thinker’s authority or name-drop. Though I have never met any of these people, I have vicariously experienced many of them as friends, companions, and teachers who have inspired, supported, and encouraged me on my journey. Their thoughts are included to give them credit for insights they have helped me to experience. They also express important ideas more effectively than I can. The inclusion of their words is an invitation for you to engage an idea and make judgments about the value of the thinker’s observation for your journey. The exception to this point is that sometimes these quotes are incorporated to show that many of these ideas transcend religion, culture, and era. The universal nature of these insights at least encourages us to seriously consider their validity. 

(4) I have chosen not to capitalize god in this reflection. I feel that everyone’s perspective of god, truth, and/or mystery is unique and limited. The story of the blind men and the elephant is a good reminder of our limited ability to convey reality. It tells of six blind men whose curiosity leads them to seek out an elephant. Each of the blind men runs into a different part of the same elephant and then defines the elephant based on his limited perspective. The one who runs into the leg assumes the elephant is a tree. The man who feels the ear believes an elephant is a fan. The men who encounter the tail, trunk, tusk, and side of the elephant, respectively, understand the elephant as a rope, snake, spear, and wall. The blind men eventually argue with one another, convinced that their limited experience represents the total reality of the elephant. The story reminds us that we see most clearly when we recognize our perspective’s limitations and encounter the world with humility, as a mystery, rather than with pride, as a reality that we define. St. Augustine encouraged humility regarding god when he suggested, If you have understood, then it is not God. The Jewish custom of not using a name for god recognizes that in naming we claim ownership and might lose sight of the fact that we are ultimately talking about a mystery that is beyond words.

If there is a creator god of this inconceivably vast universe, it is difficult to believe that it would care whether its name is capitalized or not. Honoring a god makes much more sense in the context of a well-lived life. If a god is the source of this universe, then all is sacred, and we ought to live with a sense of awe and wonder.

I do not believe that experiencing the universe with awe and wonder is exclusively the prerogative of the believer. Albert Einstein, who described himself as an agnostic, affirmed:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He, to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

The real challenge, whether one believes in a god or not, is learning to live reverently. 

I understand that monotheistic traditions often use god as a proper noun, but I want to avoid an insinuation that any one religion’s god is more valid than other gods. It is not the aim of this book to endorse a specific faith’s god or even the belief in god; this is a book about the suffering that results, personally and socially, from acting and thinking as though we are god.

(5) Finally, this is an idealistic reflection. Idealism does not always come easily for me, but I believe it is a more sensible choice than status quo thinking. What is popularly assumed to be practical, realistic thinking has led us into war after war. It has validated great injustices and abuses in our history. If we don’t believe that we, as a species, can do better, we doom ourselves to a continuation of violence, oppression, exploitation, and alienation. We might think that practical, realistic thinking works just fine, but this assessment is often a result of the tendency to hide the negative aspects of our society and world. While we celebrate the fact that we abolished slavery 150 years ago, our current economy is seemingly indifferent to the fact that there are more people in slavery today than during the era of legal slavery. We do not even consider whether we bare any responsibility for the slaves who harvest our seafood, sugar, cocoa, or produce. Such a consideration seemingly does not have a place in realistic thinking. If we wish to live in a world where life is valued, we must acknowledge the various lives that are ignored, forgotten, and hidden. Then, we must be willing to change the thinking that requires us to ignore the widespread suffering of our brothers and sisters. At the risk of being labeled an optimist or an idealist, I choose to believe that we can do a better job as individuals and societies of respecting each other, even if that requires thinking a little differently than the norm.

Overview: A Spirituality Everyone Could Agree On

Ultimately, this book is an invitation to examine the orientation of our lives and consider whether our direction promotes well-being for our world and ourselves. Examinations of various religions and wisdom traditions, some of which believe in gods and others which don’t promote faith in gods, indicate there is common ground. Regardless of people’s faith, there is a potential for widespread agreement on the premise that none of us is god. Everyone can observe the personal and global harm caused by selfishness and recognize the damage done by an unwavering need to get our own way. As we become more aware of our world, the prevalence of hurting invites us to reflect on whether we contribute to that hurting or promote well-being. 

A major obstacle to becoming more aware of our world is the assumption of our rightness. This book will examine how religions and ideologies can be placed at the service of our preferences or can lead us to constantly discern how to live rightly. I will look to my own Western, Christian tradition as a case study in the human tendency to subject religion to our preferences and consider how this tendency can lead us to ignore or even cause the suffering of marginalized peoples in our global community.

Turning from social to personal, the book will invite the reader to strive for greater self-awareness. Recognizing that we are not god demands that we struggle to see beyond our limited perspective and battle to discover our biases. As we will see, our way of relating to other people can reflect the objectifying tendencies of ego; we will also explore how seeing and valuing other people can be a path toward greater personal and social well-being.

This book is built on a belief that we can choose what we become as individuals and as a global community. Our religions and wisdom traditions challenge us to choose to