“When we inch toward a recognition of the divine, we often police our longing for God." - Stephanie Paulsell

“When did you last touch a monkey?,” David Sedaris likes to ask. Or, “Do you know many people who use a wheelchair?”

Sedaris doesn’t want to start a conversation with something you’ve been asked before. That’s the point. He wants to talk about what feels fresh and real and interesting.

I’ve started trying to do the same, but my questions (surprise!) take a more theological turn. The classic being, of course, “What do you think God is?”

Try asking that in a cab or at a party—it’s fascinating! Mostly because so many of us struggle to articulate something coherent, even if we passionately disbelieve in whatever God is.

What often comes forth—especially among spiritual-but-not-religious people—is some sense that God is the experience of oneness.

Radical feminist Vivian Gornick writes beautifully about that transcendent feeling. She describes something inside her “flaring into bright life” in “a conviction of inner clarity” in which suddenly it is completely clear to her what it means to be alive.

I hope we can all relate to that experience. Even if it was just a taste.

But reading Peter L. Steinke’s book Healthy Congregations: A Systems Approach got me thinking: there’s a really important difference between two concepts swimming around here—oneness and wholeness.

Oneness implies melting into something bigger. It is the dissolution of self into a sea of unity. But wholeness, writes Steinke, “implies there are parts and the parts are connected. Wholeness is not about seamlessness; wholeness is not sameness. Wholeness means two or more parts are interconnected…In wholeness differences are not eliminated; rather, they become alive.”

Difference is not eliminated; but rather, each part becomes alive. Isn’t that beautiful?

Maybe this matters to me because of my experience with Internal Family Systems therapy over the last few years, or because I have what my husband calls a propensity to entitlement. But this framing of wholeness allows me to stay right-sized. If I am part of a single oneness, I may be tempted to try to think from, or act from, that sense of grand unity. But if I am a small part of a connected whole, my job is simply to come alive by being in relationship with other parts.

Perhaps you’ve been spared this particular personal failing, but there it is.

That’s why I smiled when I asked Noa Kushner, one of favorite rabbis, to define God a few months ago. She answered immediately—

“God is what I am not.”

“God says that you get to be a star in the sky, but not the whole galaxy.” Which is a relief, really, because, she explains, “At this cultural moment, the way to be good is to ‘be responsible.’ This leaves us on a continuum of nihilism to Mother Theresa. But no problem can be solved totally by being responsible. Climate change, systemic racism, election results—we can’t take it all on. And in the Jewish religious system we were never meant to carry it all. We have our part to play–and that is holy work, but it isn’t all ours.”

We are not the whole galaxy. Our job is to play our holy part. To come alive, flaring into bright life. And then to connect with the others.

That‘s all.

And yet through that, it’s part of everything.

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