PSYCHOSCAPES: Can "Being" be thought of as a Person?

Sculpture consisting of two stacked beach stones
Photograph taken at Seapont Beach, ME and manipulated in Photoshop

"I have read many theological tomes, which do their best to explain the meaning of God, but I am still not much the wiser. God is presented as the source and ground of everything. For Thomas Aquinas, God is... "Being itself." But how do you believe in “the source and ground of everything” let alone in “Being itself”?

The New Testament tells us that God is Love and that He sent his only begotten Son into the world. But how can the ultimate source and ground of everything have an emotion like “love” or an intention to “incarnate”? In what possible sense can Being itself be thought of as a Person?

At this point, you learn that God is unknowable and utterly beyond any concept you can have of Him, that all descriptions of God are mere figures of speech, imperfect metaphors required to render intelligible something so mysterious and sublime that the human mind is incapable of ever grasping it.

I had the funny feeling that I was being led around in circles." *

* quote from Steven Batchelor, Stephen , Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist(Kindle Locations 2790-2804)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: The circle seems a perfect shape, and then it can be stretched and twisted to the mobius of the reclined infinity symbol. There is, after all, no way out---("...in the room women come and go speaking of michael angelo...") --even as the Voyager leaves our greater, unseen world.
Meanwhile, tired and edgy, I sit on the porch, cats soaking up a late summer sun, runners running to catch up and pass themselves, all circles. The whorls of sunflowers, the rings we count to age a tree, or place on a finger symbolically, planets spinning---the sphere---I wish for soap bubbles i which to drift, happy as a child in a moment of glee of movement and just being. God seems a non-starter. You think?
Would like to hear more of your own thoughts, less quotes----I still come upon sheafs of quotes my late father copied out in his awful scrawl and I still search for the odd, stray personal thought without success. Too much of the buddah can do that to a person.; September 9, 2012 at 12:40 PM
psychos capes said...: Thank you Anonymous,
Your words are evocative, poetic, and personal.
Your request is well founded: I admit to, especially lately, articulating what I feel primarily through my photography rather than in my own words.; September 9, 2012 at 12:50 PM