Whose God?

“God in All Worlds” read the title of the book. I paged through it recently, finding mostly Christian quotes with a few philosophers and sages of other religions thrown in for universality. But I sure liked the title.

How could God, a designation for Ultimate Reality, be less than any or all of the ways in which individuals and faith traditions have sought to understand that Being who is Being Itself? Religions and their apologists have an annoying tendency to point fingers at what they consider competing views of God. The ‘monotheists’ disparage the ‘polytheists,’ the ‘pantheists’ are at odds with the ‘monists’ and everyone seems to be down on the ‘atheists.’ Interestingly, all of these categorical views include the word ‘theos’ indicating God.

I grew up in the monotheistic tradition of Christianity (as a Southern Baptist) which posits a Transcendent Supreme Being. Later I discovered that my mother’s family were Quakers who came seven generations ago from Germany to Pennsylvania. I was also told by my mother that we had a Cherokee grand-relative in our family tree as well. Over the years, I was able to study with teachers and practitioners of these and other religious traditions. The Quakers are more inclined to commune with God as the ‘still small voice’ Who speaks to us when we quiet our mind/ego through prayer and meditation. The Cherokee, like most Native American traditions, honor a Great Spirit Who interpenetrates the world and can be seen, felt and heard within its natural phenomena.

These three views of God—as Transcendent, Immanent within ourselves, and Immanent within the world—all made sense to me. In fact, I felt over time that I was able to touch the Spirit Who is God through all of these avenues of communion.

My wonderful Baptist Church community in rural Georgia gave me a profound sense of God as the Supreme Loving Being. Although some of our ministers were a little intense for my taste, the deep-feeling hymns which we sang every Sunday and Wednesday night spoke of a God of beauty, wisdom, grace and mercy. However, after leaving home and meeting people of many denominations and faiths, the exclusivist doctrines of my boyhood church no longer resonated with my experiences in the greater world. I had been satisfied devotionally, but later disappointed theologically.

Baptist? Quaker? Native American? Were these views contradictory, half true or false? Was one right and the others wrong? For a few years I ignored religion, for it seemed that perhaps all religious views were arbitrary attempts to find ‘the one true way’ to the exclusion of all others. One day in Graduate School I came across a little book called “How to Know God.” It turned out to be an English translation of the quintessential yoga text—Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. The philosophy and theological perspective of this and other Vedic texts of India finally gave me a universal view which made sense--incorporating, at least for me, ways of seeing God or Truth which were complementary instead of contradictory.


The Vaishnava Vedic lineage that I eventually embraced as a monk even had venerable Sanskrit names to describe these three ‘faces of God’ that I had discovered in my Protestant Christian, Quaker and Native American heritages. Bhagavan described God as the Supreme Person, Brahman described God as interpenetrating Spirit within the world, and Paramatma described the God within, the ‘still small voice’ of the Quakers.

I was at last able to integrate the devotional heart of a Christian with the deep meditational practice of a Quaker, and the ecstatic harmony of an Indigenous oneness with Nature. God within all worlds came to be the God within my world. And for this, I will always be grateful to the Sanatan Dharma* tradition of India.


*Sanatan Dharma is the name preferred by practitioners of the ancient religion of India for their faith. Sanatan means ‘Eternal’ and ‘dharma’ means ‘the Way.’