Zen and the Art of long distance travel

Last week I spent over 18 hours sitting in a car traveling to towns in Western Australia. Much of that time I spent listening to Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance. Twice I have tried reading the book and both times I stopped reading before I had finished. Which I believe is not uncommon. Twice I have had complete strangers come up to me while I have been reading the book in public warning me not stop reading before the end of the book as they had done and to tell me how great the book was. So the long traveling seemed the perfect opportunity to listen to the recorded version and finally get to the end.

It was quite stunning to look at the vast West Australian outback whilst hearing descriptions of the American country. Pirsig Author of Zen... talks a lot about "quality" and the "classic" and "romantic" (or square and hip) split in ways of viewing the world. As I listened I could not help but see parallels between this and God and the scientific and spiritual ways of viewing the world. Pirsig asserts that quality is not definable and therefore not measurable or quantifiable in a classic or scientific sense, that is you cannot be objective about quality. Yet quality is not entirely subjective either. For example a majority of people will usually be able to distinguish between a quality song and a bad song or just a random group of noises. The same is true for all of the arts and much of human emotion. His whole argument takes 6hrs to listen to (and that’s abridged I think) so this quick summary does not to do it justice. None the less the analogy between God and quality was fascinating.

To concede that God like quality cannot be proven scientifically is perhaps obvious but the next parallel concession is that we cannot then confidently say that God possesses one or another characteristic, no matter how confident we may feel. This just like when we talk about a quality piece of art. I often feel that define particular characteristics of God and make doctrines and creeds around that we end up with a God akin to a piece of disposable pop music, guaranteed to be somewhat pleasant but really of little quality. I prefer to think of God as akin to a musical masterpiece (a song of great quality) and it is hard to define what makes it beautiful. With art and music the more we define what characteristics makes some form of art beautiful the more we limit it and limit the potential of the artists.

I’m not sure what this thinking means exactly or where it might lead. Like many of my ideas it’s something I’ll just try on for a while and see how it sits. Having recently sat with a group of people who where very confident in saying what God's opinion and desires were in some complex ethical situations (God's thought's on the matter often seemed to be very simple, black and white and a bit harsh and judgmental). This has made me all the more wary of trying to define God. I quite like what Jack Spong said about this matter. "A human cannot describe what god is like anymore than a horse can describe what a human is like." (or something like that)

To try and describe the experience of God is one thing. Establishing our own creeds and doctrines is where things can get shaky and is the breeding ground for religious fighting and fundamentalism. Can I be confident about God without pigeon holing God? I don't know. I'll try it own for a while and see how it feels.