Chapter 5
WORDS FOR GOD
Days come and ages pass, and it is ever he who moves
my heart in many a name, in many a guise, in many a rap-
ture of joy and of sorrow.
The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God.
Wallace Stevens
Throughout the ages, in every culture and in all the innumerable forms of life, man has sought for his God. Among all the things that he has desired, it is God whom he has desired most and without whom he must forever remain unfulfilled. That which, in ordinary circumstances, man cannot see, cannot touch and cannot know, becomes his all-consuming goal and his life assumes the shape of a journey or quest for Something that is unnameable. However, the testimony of mystics over the centuries has proven that even as man searches for God, so God searches for the man who Pan receive Him and who will, ultimately, realise Him. In many different forms and hues God reveals Himself to the awakened soul and leads it ever forwards towards the summits of God-union. That same God who was first perceived as a vague, impersonal Force becomes near, living and personal a beloved Companion to the soul of man, a Guide showing him the path to the Infinite.
To one soul God will appear as Friend, to another as King or Guest, the Creator or the Beyond. The poet who would speak of God, therefore, finds himself compelled to use both a vocabulary of ultimates the Supreme, the Infinite, the Absolute and so on-and a vocabulary of symbols drawn from the physical world, symbols that express a relationship which is seen by the poet as harboring a divine analogy. Inorganic, biological and social relationships all contribute to mystical symbolism because they point to God and thus approach Him more closely than conceptual language. This symbolism does more than signpost a larger, untellable meaning. By opening up a level of meaning and being which otherwise we could not reach, each symbol actually participates in that which it unfolds. It carries us into the very presence of the Divine. It is for this reason that the words for God are accepted as sacred utterances and not merely as non-literal expressions or approximations.[1]
