A Letter to Neale

Dear Neale,

In CwG, God says we can't define God. If not, how do we know that God is love? Also, why did God want to know Himself? I have gotten used to the idea that God is love and light and truth and abundance, etc. But to some people, love is defined differently. If the only love they've known is limited and self-serving, how can they know that love is understanding and forgiveness and non-judgment? My brother-in-law thinks that love is disciplining, that God is a disciplinarian. He is comfortable with that- probably because his father beat him. How do you tell people that love does not punish, that unconditional love does not force someone to anything by punishing them?
~Tracey, from E-mail.

Neale Responds

Dear Tracey, Let's go from the top. In CwG, God says that "Love is all there is." God also says that God is All That Is. Therefore, God is love. Everything in our heart tells us this, too, by the way, and the heart is never wrong. I did not interpret the book to say that God cannot be defined. I believe what the book says is that God cannot be limited to any one definition or description and by that limiting means be so defined. That certainly sounds true to me, though it does not negate or invalidate the description of God as "love."

As to your second question, CwG says that God wanted to know Himself experientially. The same, says the book, is true of me and you. It is one thing to think of yourself or know yourself as, shall we say, compassionate, or loving, but it is quite another thing altogether to experience yourself as these things. If you have no one to love, you can "know yourself" as loving all you want, but it is not the same thing as actually loving someone through action in the here and now. God wished to experience Itself as what It really was, and so the whole universe was created. Why? For the sheer joy of it, Tracey! For the joy of self expression.

Question three: The American Heritage Dictionary defines "punishment" as "a penalty imposed for wrong-doing." According to CwG, there is no such thing as "right" and "wrong." Therefore, "wrongdoing" is nonexistent, and so, too, "punishment." Most humans cannot accept this concept. They cannot understand how it could be so. Yet would a loving grandmother spank her toddling grandchild for breaking a dish or spilling her milk? Of course not.

God is very much like that loving grandmother. And we are very, very much like that toddler in our understandings and actions. And, as you point out, if the only love a person has known is limited and self-serving, it will be difficult to grasp, much less accept, the concept of a love which is unconditional.

As CwG points out, most people fall into this lot; most have never known a love which is without condition. And most people judge God to be operating on earthly norms. Yet to know God one must imagine a being much larger, much grander than anything one has seen in this life. One must not assign God earthly attributes, earthly understandings and earthly limitations, but rather, qualities that are unknown in our experience.

With regard to God, one must accept the possibility that there is something we do not know, the knowing of which could change everything.

You see, this is our chief problem: we think we already know everything there is to know about God. And so any description of God which does not fall within our current understandings is automatically rejected as "false," "wrong," and "blasphemy." Yet if there is such a thing as blasphemy, it would be to assert, announce and declare that we know everything there is to know about God, that our beliefs about God are the right beliefs, and that anyone who does not accept our beliefs is going straight to hell.

How do you tell someone with a limited understanding, based on their limited experience of real love, about the unconditional love of God? You don't. You don't tell them anything about it. You demonstrate it.

With Pure Love,