Cosmic force, personal God

There are many different ways of looking at God, and many of these ways cross religious boundaries. There is an old Sufi parable that tells of blind men feeling the parts of an elephant saying, "God is like a snake," (the trunk) or "God is a large flappy ear," or "God is like a tree trunk." (a foot.) None sees the elephant.

I am a Catholic, and so by definition I have a very personal concept of God. We treat God as family, and we look at our forebearers as extended members of that family - "the communion of saints." That said, we treat the Godhead with a certain majesty as well, inscrutable and infinite in unfathomable ways. This is so apparent in St. Augustine's "Confessions" Book 11, where he struggles to understand what time is, whether the past and future can be said to exist, and comes to the conclusion that time is a finite property of the universe, and does not predate it. He writes to God:

Furthermore, although you are before time, it is not in time that you precede it. If this were so, you would not be before all time. It is in eternity, which is supreme over time because it is a never-ending present, that you were at once before all past time and after all future time.

It is as such that St. Augustine says that people who ask what came before creation are asking the wrong question - there is no before creation because before is a temporal concept.

However in Christianity and many other religions, we do use temporal language, as well as three dimensional language in describing God. Phrases such as the "right hand of God," "ascending," and "God's footstool" are an important part of religious language. Mystical language, like the Tetragrammaton, the Logos, is part of religious language too, but the faithful are generally more comfortable with the anthropic terminology. Even the Buddhists can do this at times - I remember reading about how Buddha "came back" from Nirvana for Ananda, language that inevitably makes Nirvana seem like a physical place.

Is it so bad? We're physical beings, and our struggle for our place in eternity is by necessity a physical struggle. In the Book of Genesis, Jacob wrestles with a man at Peniel, demanding a blessing, refusing to give up until he gets it. For this, he is given the name Israel - "He who strives with God," as though he was wrestling with God Himself. The human mind, the most complex object known in the universe, has become aware enough to realize that it may be the product of an intelligent force, and strives to reach out and meet that force, to know that it is not alone. But as complex as our minds are, they are products of our physicality. We can't reach out past the cosmos for God without thinking the way finite beings with arms, legs, and a metabolism would think.

In short, we need the angel of Peniel, or in my faith, Jesus himself - human avatars for something cosmic in scope. We can't get there without them.