What are we actually talking about when we use the word "God"?
Here is how I understand it.
The concept of "God" is one of humanity's oldest and most persistent questions. An attempt to encircle something we sense, but never quite can grasp, own or understand. When we say "God", we are not (only) talking about a (often symbolic) figure on a throne in heaven/beyond, but about a mystery that precedes all figures and thrones.
When we say "God", we are talking about what makes us lift our gaze from the ground and ask -
"What is the meaning?
What is true?
What is good?"
We are talking about a source for EVERYTHING - and within that, everything that carries and leads to meaning, direction and purpose.
For some, God is a creator.
Spirit and intention, who has breathed life into the world.
For others, God is a source of light and love, a "Thou" one can turn toward in prayer and hope.
For still others, God is the deepest dimension of the self - an eternal echo of meaning and consciousness, which gives the world a tone of something greater.
But regardless of the words and images, it is ultimately an attempt to point toward something that is greater than ourselves. Something we sense as the outermost horizon, the deepest interior and the highest source. The incomprehensible outermost point on every axis. That is why it is often described symbolically as "the highest high, the most beautiful beautiful, the strongest strong, the King of Kings" etc. Something we can neither own nor control, but which we can open ourselves to.
And it is important to understand -
The experience of God does not belong to one single religion, one people or one language. It is an experience woven into human history EVERYWHERE on earth. Everywhere humans have risen toward the sky, they have directed their attention toward the invisible and asked -
"Who am I?
What is this place?
What is it that carries me?"
From the ancient Egyptians' Osiris and Isis, to the Greek myths of Zeus and the Olympic order. From the indigenous tribes of the Amazon and the great plains of North America, who sang to Mother Earth and the Spirit World, to the Christian cathedrals that rose as attempts to create God's glory on earth in medieval Europe.
Everywhere we find prayers, rituals, sacrifices and song - not as random decoration, but as humanity's eternal attempt to reach out toward something we know deep within ourselves is there - a source of all life and all meaning.
Here it is worth seeing an important distinction, which is also often overlooked - God can be both a metaphysical idea and a personal experience.
For philosophers like Aristotle, God was the unmoved mover, the first principle behind everything - a pure necessity, not a being with feelings.
For mystics and believers in the monotheistic religions, God is also a "Thou" - a living presence, a conversation, a hope.
To understand this distinction - between God as the eternal principle and God as the living relation - gives us a richer and more nuanced picture of why the word has so many layers.
In that light, the modern human, with its atheism and its rational worldview, is actually the anomaly in the great pattern.
Not because it is - necessarily - wiser, more enlightened or more right than the billions of people who lived before us. But because it has lost the understanding of what faith actually is - and why endless generations of humans have chosen to weave their cultures and societies around this mystery.
For modern atheism is not a sign of independence or enlightenment alone. It is also an expression of a loss - a loss of the symbolic language and the ritual that connects us with the eternal and the holy.
Why did we lose this?
Because our world was transformed by the triumphs of natural science - Galileo, Newton, Darwin - who taught us to measure and calculate everything. Because industrialization moved us away from nature's rhythms, and because the Enlightenment taught us to place the individual above all else.
But what we unfortunately forgot is that humans do not live by bread and data alone…
We live by meaning.
We live by feeling connected to something greater.
And it is not accidental that all great civilizations have organized themselves according to what they perceived as God or the holy.
For in God - or whatever we have called it - they found an anchor point. Something that could hold society together, create direction and order, and give the individual human a place to stand firm.
When we lose that anchor - when God no longer stands as the highest principle - a void emerges. And history shows that the void NEVER stands empty.
Instead something else intrudes - ideologies that promise meaning, but which can never reach beyond humanity's own greed or lust for power.
We saw it in the 20th century, when the mystery of community was replaced by totalitarian systems - fascism and communism - that offered collective salvation dreams and certainties - but no soul.
We see it today, when the abstract power of the market and the state attempts to take the place that in humanity's deepest nature belongs to something holy.
And we see it in a world where technological progress can feel like a replacement for hope, but where the cold logic of machines can never fill the space in the heart that was created for God.
So when we say "God", it is not just a word.
It is a testimony that there has always been something in us that senses we are not alone. That there is a source that precedes everything - and that we are born with an echo of this source within us.
It is a call to look up, not because we are weak, but because we long to find home - there, where everything begins and ends.
And perhaps that is precisely what we have forgotten -
That humanity's deepest strength is not found in our power or knowledge alone - but in our capacity to bend the knee in humility and lift the mind in reverence.
To reach out toward what we can never fully grasp - the incomprehensible mystery - but which we can ALWAYS receive.
❤️🔥🪽
