The Name of God

True religion must come from a place of unknowing: a deep and profound experience that understands we don’t know much. But even typing that sentence, part of me revolts. There’s a slice of pride embedded in me that points to my library, to my experience, to my job, to my credentials to say not only do I know about God—but I know God. But if we believe God is unknowable, claims like this are absurd, flirting with blasphemy, like an ant explaining astrophysics. But we can’t help it. We’re human.

We want to know things,

and want people to know that we know things,

and want people to know that we know that they know we know things.

We place boundaries and restrictions on God with our theology, which most of the time, only serves as stale, God-inspired fan fiction₁. We put the infinite in a flimsy, cardboard shoebox so we can feel the comfort of grasping the Divine Mystery. We cling to the box and say “I’ve got it! Eureka! I’m right!” We take pride in our small-minded ant-thinking--an insect’s understanding of reality’s vast infinitude. But when we watch God’s behavior in our experience and in scripture, we see the movements, evasions, and attacks of The Great Iconoclast, leaving behind shattered porcelain fragments of our inflexible doctrines and rigid ideas.

When Moses is told to return to the Israelites, letting them know God would deliver them from the oppression of the Egyptians, Moses asks God’s name. He wants to understand who he’s speaking with—to nail down some concrete aspect of the Infinite so he can pack it up neatly in his shoebox and present it to his buddies at the base of Mount Horeb like the kid whose parents splurged on the newest Jordans.

But God dodges Moses’s longing for a definition or a boundary, saying to Moses: “I AM WHO I AM… This is my name forever, and this is my title for all generations.”

So God’s name is…

A verb?

God’s title is not a noun. It is action and doing. God is not so much an “It” but an “Is.”  

Maybe instead of a being, God is being itself.

In Hebrew, this name has four letters, YHVH, probably pronounced Yahweh. Some scholars say (and apparently there’s controversy behind this, so take it with a grain of salt) the letters are breathing sounds, consonants that have rough exhalations. So you would say the four letters of the name of God with definitive breathy sounds:

Yod (sounds like “yode”)

He (sounds like “hey”)

Vav (sounds like the initial vowel in “lava”)

He (sounds like “hey”)

So, transliterated: Yode, hey, vahv, hey (breath out when you say them like a dramatic high-schooler, and you’ll catch the drift).

I heard a teaching a few years back that took this idea₂ a few steps further: If the letters that make up the name of God are merely aspirated consonants, is saying the name of God the sound of our breath?
 

Day in and day out, it would be like we were evoking the name of the Divine—

when we wake,

when we wash dishes

or send emails.

When we walk the dog

or sit in the presence of those we love—

Maybe the name of God is constantly on our lips. In this way, God is not an IT, but an IS--the very fabric of our existence, woven into every moment of our precious realities, despite our beliefs or behaviors, despite our religions or ethnicities, despite our genders or sexualities, despite our sin or righteousness.

God IS.

May we feel the presence of the I AM, as we breathe in—

As we breathe out,

As we endlessly whisper the holy name of BEING itself.

Amen.

₁ Thanks, Science Mike

₂“Breathe”. #14 of Rob Bell’s Nooma Series