Trying to Imagine God

Daily Spiritual Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

The way millions upon millions, in fact more likely billions, picture God isn’t really very different from the king the Little Prince encounters on the first planet he visits.

If I had to sit on a throne all day—and for all eternity, at that!—I’d be bored out of my mind.

Always superior to everyone, forever trying to control how things go but never succeeding because there’s a big mess here on Earth, it would have to be an awfully lonely and discouraging job to be God.

The king is miserable, but he doesn’t know any other way of being. He’s aloof, distant, grandiosely detached from the rest of creation.

Of course, God is nothing like the way the vast majority of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and people of other traditions think of God.

There is no being “out there somewhere” who is separate from creation. There is no one you will ever meet, shake hands with or hug.

Just imagine the lines, with all the trillions waiting for that one handshake from the throne—far worse than hoping to get a handshake from the Queen of England or the Pope as they pass among a vast crowd of admirers.

We have no problem imagining the king on his throne of loneliness and frustration, but it’s impossible to imagine God.

Which is why even the term “God” isn’t really very helpful anymore precisely because it does conjure up the sort of imagine the author of The Little Prince draws for us of the king.

If you ask me what God is, I really have no idea in terms of a conceptual answer.

When I look out at the sky at night, or see some of the photos of the heavens taken by advanced telescopes such as the Hubble, I realize that anything I could possible imagine God to be is quite ridiculous.

At our best estimates, there are something like a hundred billion galaxies, each of them containing a huge number of stars.

The dwarf galaxies run somewhere around ten million stars, while some of the larger galaxies are up around ten trillion stars. The Milky Way, our galaxy, has about 200 billion, which some consider about average.

If we can’t imagine vastness, how can we imagine no beginning and no end?

For that matter, have you ever tried to imagine nothingness? You can’t. You will end up imagining something, even if it’s just empty blackness. But nothingness isn’t empty blackness—it has no space at all.

The divine is simply way, way beyond human conceptualization.

In fact the divine is about as transcendent of anything we could picture as is the universe transcendent of that tiny little region the king imagines to be everything, and even more mistakenly imagines he controls.

Yet I would suggest that the divine can be known in an intimate sense, as the heart of our being—as the self we truly are, beneath the egoic “self” we imagine ourselves to be.

We can’t imagine God, for we can’t even imagine ourselves. In fact, try imagining yourself something—your inner, true being.

You will come up with nothing in particular. This nothing in particular is what the divine is.

Sorry you don’t get to sit on a throne like that of the king for all eternity. I know you were looking forward to the boredom, and I so hate to disappoint you!

But then, if you once begin enjoying who you are in connection with everyone and everything, you might just find that to be an expression of the divine source is truly thrilling in this moment, right now—and every moment yet to come, as each moment unfolds.

Perhaps after all we are practicing to be divine without thrones, but surrounded by and immersed in loving relationships.