Whenever we have a discussion on the nature of God, we often end up finding that there are as many ideas of God as there are Unitarians in the room; possibly more, because some of us have more than one idea of our own. We usually think of God as infinite, and this brings me to an idea that I had years ago.

This has a ladder leading from each person right up to the stars. Most people are stuck on the first few rungs of their ladder, but then we may see a bright sort of person who thinks himself or herself very sensitive to these matters and they stand on the tenth rung of their ladder and they shout out with glee, “See how far I’ve advanced. I’m nearer the stars than any of you lot!” Hmm, only a few billion light years to go, then?

Some people (I’ve done this myself) think that the last step we made must be better than the one before it. Well, that may be so, but not all new ideas are improvements. As Unitarians, we are open to new ideas and we respect the beliefs of people from other faiths and those of our own, especially concerning the nature of God, which may be new or old, as far as we are concerned, so we try to be open-minded. In our immediate lives, teachings of religion, such as charity, compassion and understanding all begin at home, so we aim to be gentle to the ideas of others.

If somebody tells me that God is not an old man in the sky, but a spirit (or even Spirit, with no article “a”). All well and good, but we are dealing with symbols, from the picture of the Old Man in the sky, an easy symbol, to a singular idea, not so easy. Most of our ideas are symbols, often standing for the ineffable; words are symbols, so much of poetry, music and art is symbolic, because we are unlikely to know the deepest meaning of whatever we have in our sights. And who are we, standing on the second or third rung of our ladder (maybe our tenth rung) to say that we are measurably nearer to spiritual reality than the believers in God-the-Old-Man (or Woman) or Father, Son and Holy Ghost – or whatever, as we may now say.

What works for one may have no meaning for another, and the important thing to remember is that belief in the Old Man with a beard can be just as meaningful to some as ideas taken from the upper reaches of philosophy: the Old-Man-believers are not saying that God is that Old Man, or even like him, but that the Old Man is the best they can do as a meaningful symbol. So the Old Man can appear to someone on the first rung of the ladder, or the tenth rung – or the hundred-and-fiftieth rung!

Rev. Roger Tarbuck