The Question of God Makes Me Hungry
Last night I saw Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God. What a wonderful film. Julia Sweeney amazed me with her wit, dialogue and personal inquiry into God.
I noticed as the film progressed and Julia got deeper and deeper into exploring her belief in God, religion and personal meaning – she started looking more and more yummy to me. At first, I thought it was about her as a person, but I soon realized that it was the exploration that was arousing my appetite – the more she talked, the more I wanted to tag along with her. The humor was delicious, the dialogue was a veritable cornucopia of spices, and her facial expressions were a feast for the eyes. I was relishing the experience.
Like Julia, one thing that continues to intrigue me is how many people take the Bible as the literal word of God – and rely on others to explain it to them. It is a rare and exceptional person, like Julia, who will sincerely question sacred cows.
One of my favorite spiritual books is Prayers of the Cosmos by Neil Douglas-Klotz (from the publisher – Reinterpreting the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes from the vantage of Middle Eastern mysticism, Douglas–Klotz offers a radical new translation of the words of Jesus Christ that reveals a mystical, feminist, cosmic Christ). This little book can really open one’s eyes to the “word” of God.
What Douglas-Klotz does is to take the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes back into Aramaic and then provide the reader with a broader perspective on the scope of each line. From each line comes much more breadth and depth. What is immediately apparent is how much is lost in translation. When we consider the question of what might get lost in translation (from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English), it makes sense that a deeper, more personal exploration of “the word of God” is a worthy endeavor.
I thoroughly enjoyed the path and process of Julia’s exploration. Her resolution of more openness and mystery to replace dogma, conditioning and reification seems logical to me, though the question of the non-dual never really gets addressed.
Have you seen Letting Go of God? What did you think of her exploration? The dialogue? The wit?
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