Zah Academy

God, Stages of Faith, and the Limits of the Egoic I

Yesterday was an especially rich day at Zah Academy. Zah is what my grandsons call me, ever since my eldest failed to pronounce Zayde and started calling me Zah instead.

Zah Academy happens when one of these boys engages me in a deep philosophical conversation. Yesterday, the first topic was God, and it occurred as I drove my eldest to the comic book store. He doesn’t care for comic books, but I have a standing order.

“I don’t believe God is a being,” he said, apropos of nothing. “God isn’t a man or a woman. I think God is hope. Everything has hope. Even trees have hope. So God is in everything. What do you think, Zah?”

I was tempted to explain to him the very Judeo-Christian Stages of Faith described by James W. Fowler (1940-2015), who was Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University. I would have noted that, as a ten-year-old, he should be in the Mythic-Literal Stage, in which the conventional anthropomorphic image of God as a male judge and protector is taken literally. His notion that God is a universal abstraction, like hope, residing in all beings, is rare among humans and is found largely among the mystically inclined.

Instead, I said, “I love this idea and that you are thinking of God this way. I think God is like an infinite ocean, and all beings, including humans, trees, and everything else, are waves of that ocean. So God isn’t in us; we are in God.”

A long pause followed. Then:

“Wow! I like that. And hope is part of that! And if I’m a wave and God is the ocean and the ocean has many waves before me and many after me, I’ve had many lives before this one and will have many after this one. That is very hopeful!”

I was tempted to say that the ocean has many waves and hence many lives, but you have only one, but I thought we had covered enough theology for one car ride, and besides, it was time to see if the new Martian Manhunter was out. It wasn’t.

Zah Academy reconvened about an hour and a half later at my home when my three-year-old grandson and his dad stopped by to pick up his brother. After wrestling with Sophie, our Goldendoodle, eating falafel and hummus, and trying to balance a horde of plastic penguins on a plastic pirate ship, it was time for them to leave. Before they did, my son shared an event from the previous night’s bedtime when his youngest started stuttering the pronoun “I”: “I,I,I,I,I” and then shouted, “I don’t know what I’m talking about!”

The little one was sitting on my lap as this story was told. I turned to him and said, “Stuttering at your age is not uncommon. It is called developmental dysfluency, and it will likely go away on its own by the time you’re five. But the realization that the I doesn’t know what it’s talking about is a great discovery you should try to remember for the rest of your life.

“You see, I, I, I, I is the noise your ego makes all day long. That’s how it tries to convince you that it, the egoic I, is real and permanent and knows what it is talking about. But now you know that this I doesn’t know what it’s talking about, so whenever you hear the I telling you things in your head, you should stop and check things out for yourself. That is called critical thinking. It is very rare among human beings.

“In Torah, Jacob discovers the limitation of what the I knows when he realizes that God is “in this place but the I didn’t know it” (Genesis 28:16). The I, the ego, the self that imagines it is separate from all other beings cannot know God because God is all beings without separation, the way—and you can ask your brother about this—the ocean is every wave without separation.

“And if you should check out what the I in your head says, how much more should you check out what people outside your head say, especially politicians, clergy, influencers, and people on the Internet.”

It was another great Zah Academy session. Unfortunately, my student had slipped off my lap the moment I started lecturing and was wrestling with his brother on the floor for the entire lesson.

Win some, lose some. Class dismissed.