Naming God

What does it mean to name God in a way that you, as an individual soul, understand?

Faced with the aftermath of a spiritual awakening, many people wrangle with the knowledge that they may just have experienced ‘God’; not ‘God’ in the way they were taught as children, or even ‘God’ as its spoken about in popular culture, but 'God' in a very personal, individual, indescribable experience – one that they want to name, but don’t know how.

I’m no exception. As I’ve progressed through the years following my initial spiritual awakening, I’ve experimenting with naming what I experienced, attempting to bring it into a shape I could relate to. All I knew after that extraordinary event was that I was here, and so was ‘something else’. Naming the ‘something else’ has been a consistent thread in my spiritual explorations, as I’ve done my own wrangling of what to call an experience that's been defined by a name that I didn’t use, know, or resonate with.

At postgraduate, I briefly studied semiology: the study of signs and symbols. This approach suggests words are signs, within which are two components: the ‘signified’ (an idea) and the ‘signifier’ (the means of expressing the idea). The word we choose to use for ‘tree’ isn’t about the physical tree in front of you; it’s about the idea of the tree and its expression.

Imagine you ask a group of people to draw a ‘tree’. You’d expect most of them to draw the same shape: a fat rectangle with a bumpy cloud on top. No trees on earth look like that. And no-one draws a realistic tree; they express the idea of a tree rather than a specific physical entity.

But ask a group of people from a different cultural background to draw a tree, and they might draw something very different to express their idea of a tree. Develop observational skills as an artist and your ‘tree’ is going to contrast even more. Or what about someone without eyesight – what will they draw when you ask them to draw a tree?

It is the same when you say the word ‘God’ to refer to ‘an experience of spiritual presence’. Ask followers of different faiths what ‘God’ means and each group will tell you something slightly different. Ask a group of followers of the same faith and hardly any will agree. In semiotic terms, we have one ‘signifier’ for a complex, highly personal, deeply culturally-entrenched ‘signified’. So no wonder for many of us, calling what we experience spiritually ‘God’ just doesn’t seem to work.

For me, the words used in context of spiritual experience – not just ‘God’, but faith, religion, and belief – were laden with meaning: often negative, weighty, impenetrable meaning that made it difficult for me to use those words for my experiences. The words – the ‘signifiers’ – had dominated my life, and the idea – the ‘signified’ – was very fresh, fragile and embryonic. I knew the word ‘God’ as an extremely limited thing; I did not know the experience of it as an expansive sensation.

That’s because when I was growing up, God was a dirty word in my house. I was raised atheist; my father was antagonistically anti-religion and fanatically pro-rationality. Additionally, God was a dirty word because of my maternal grandmother, who professed Christian values but was frequently manipulative and cruel. To know God meant knowing her version of God, and she was hurtful. It mean knowing their version of God, the foolish faith-followers my father derided as uncritical and illogical.

God can be a dirty word for other reasons. Raised in strict, orthodox or narrow religious traditions, for some the name ‘God’ comes to mean someone who punishes, controls, and belittles what was different - including the individual souls 'God' seemed to want to save. Catholic scholar Gerard W. Hughes describes this God as ‘Good Old Uncle George’: a family friend loved by parents but a “bearded, gruff and threatening” figure to young people, whose basement was full of screaming and fire:

“And if you don’t visit me, dear, that is where you will most certainly go,’ says Uncle George. He then takes up upstairs again to meet Mum and Dad. As we go home, tightly clutching Dad with one hand and Mum with the other, Mum leans over us and says, ‘And now don’t you love Uncle George with all your heart and soul, mind and strength?’ And we, loathing the monster, say, ‘Yes I do,’ because to say anything else would be to join the queue at the furnace.”

For women and AFAB people, naming spiritual presence as ‘God’ may also bring to mind the centuries of female oppression organised religion has enacted on womankind. From casting Eve as the temptress to burning wise woman as witches; defining menstruation as dirty to seeing women’s bodies as sinful; to the influence of religion on law to suggest women themselves as the property of men and that within the covenant of marriage, even rape is okay … The 'God' of Good Old Uncle George becomes an absolute bastard, with a host of holy men there to prop up his suppression of the feminine.

Unsurprising, then, that when I experienced my spiritual initiation, I could not and would not use the word ‘God’ to describe what I was experiencing. It took me years to even allow the name 'God' into my awareness as a meaningful and useful descriptor. In my journal – the place where no-one other than me looks and therefore which shows what I am hiding from myself – I have entries where I am describing:

• G.O.D. – an acronym I used to describe Great One Divinity

• god – with a small g, as some sort of rebellious anti-authority stance

• Goddess

• Source

• Spirit

Anything to avoid using the word ‘God’.

Being involved in contemporary spiritual circles I also heard many names used to describe spiritual presence, including Oneness, Divine, Great Mother, Great Father, and Energy. All of these only relate to monotheistic conceptions of God (one God rather than Gods) – and none of them resonated with me. In the most extreme cases, I experienced resistance and revulsion when some of these names were used earnestly and with depth of feeling, because I just couldn’t equate what I was hearing with the spiritual presence I knew was within and around me.

So can one word ever accurately reflect the personal experience of spiritual presence? For me, the word ‘God’ as a signifier has collected so much detritus both personally and culturally that is extremely difficult for it to feel as pure, beautiful and ecstatic as what it is attempting to signify.

And yet naming your experience of spiritual presence is important. It gives you something to hang your hat on; something to return to, a shape you can relate to – even if imperfectly, and knowing it can never fully represent what you are experiencing. If you want to get someone’s attention in a crowd, you shout their name; so if you want to pray – whether that is through words, dance, psychedelics or sex – who do you shout for, if you do not have a name?

What helped me take a step forward on my path was starting to examine not what God is named as but how God’s name is used in different lineages. I stopped focusing on the word and started focusing on the intention.

In Judaism, the name of spiritual presence is often written with letters omitted because of its innately sacred qualities, and to avoid it being erased or destroyed. In English this might look like G-d or Gd, or YHWH. In Hindu and Sikh practices, repeating the names of deities through the chanting and songs of kirtan is considered a highly sacred, devotional act. Here we have two different practices, with the same intention: to sanctify, celebrate and honour spiritual presence through how the name of that presence is used.

It was the second practice, participating in kirtan, that helped me take another step forward, tentatively chanting names for God I had never heard or said before, but that helped me start to reclaim my own name for spiritual presence which had felt so cumbersome and uncomfortable for me for so long. And I was able to take another step forward when I heard the following story from Krishna Das, originally told by Ramakrishna, a Hindu mystic in the 1800s.

Describing the practice of chanting, Ramakrishna describes the repetition of holy names being like the seeds of a tree, blown about on the winds and landing in different places. Some seeds float away on the river, some die in the hot sun, but one seed lands in-between the unfired clay roof tiles of an old house. That old house is who we believe ourselves to be.

The weather changes, the rain comes, then the sun, and the clay tiles soften. The seed is able to take root, feeding off the water and sunshine, growing stronger with each passing day. And as the months go by, the seed turns into a tree, and eventually the power of this tree destroys the old, crumbling house.

The seeds are the repetition of the names of God. The house is our ego, our self-ness, the collection of stories that keep us separate from each other and from experiencing bliss. By speaking the name of God, names that truly speak to us, we are planting a seed; a seed that will take root, grow, and break our old self apart, slowly but surely releasing us from who we think we are and bringing us to liberation.

Hearing this story awakened in me the knowledge that not only was I seeking a name for spiritual presence which allowed me to ‘shout its name’ when I needed its attention, but that by having a name for spiritual presence – a name I could trust – it would enable me to embrace deeper experiences of that presence.

Discovering a way of naming the spiritual presence you experience is a method of developing a closer relationship with that spiritual presence. In speaking the name that resonates with you, you are speaking into existence a deeper relationship with what is being named - just as your relationship with a friend deepens when they see you for the first time in a while, stand up from their seat and gleefully squeal your name as you walk towards them.

Through these steps of understanding along my spiritual path, I’ve been able to embrace new names for spiritual presence – or rather, I have liberated old names from negative associations and given them new meaning which reflects my soul’s journey. After years of exploration, I now comfortably choose to use the name ‘God’, knowing it means to me all the spiritual presence I have encountered, no longer attached to the perceptions of others about who or what God means. I chant names and sing hymns while I walk, yet I am not Hindu or Christian, because when I speak the name of God in all the forms that speak to me, I experience a deeper relationship with what is hiding behind that name. And the more I use the right words for my spiritual journey, the more the old clay house that is my separateness crumbles, and the greater my liberation becomes.

So let me call this process philotheonymia: a love of speaking the name(s) of God – whatever they may be for you.

The more we practice and experience philotheonymia, the more we will experience God, in the most personal and deepest way possible.

And in that practice, we’ll come to know the simplest name of all for spiritual presence: Love.