Karen, you probably remember the passage in "The Chronicles of Narnia" where God "speaks" - or, better yet, "sings" - all creation into existence.
As I move into my 7th year "playing" with "19 Miles From Davis," I am increasingly aware how often the musicality of human voice becomes indistinguishable from the sound of a musical instrument, and often crosses this "permeable membrane" in such seamless fashion that we no longer know for sure if the human voice is singing words or evoking tones - and to what extent there is a difference between the two.
Then we have the immense mystery of how-and-why music -- which, at bottom, is physical vibration -- is so metaphysically moving.
Among the ancient Jews, it was common (as it was with John the Evangelist's use of the Greek word "logos") to conceive "The Word" (or, in orthodox Jewish terms, the unspeakable word "Yahweh") not as we modern humans conceive these two "references to deity" but as Creative Power, delighting in creative acts, "inviting" his creatures to particiate in that delight.
To conceive God not as the word "God," nor Jesus as the word "Jesus," but as "delightful, singing creation" is a conception of God-Love that is more genuine, more juicy, and truer than the amputational limitation we humans often employ to "cut divinity down to size," to make God manageable, to make God "more like us" so that we can "relate."
I am reminded of Jesuit friend Tom Weston's observation: ""You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do."
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/tom-weston-best-thing-ever-said-by.html
By virtue of our persistent mangling -- our diligent subjection of God to a Procrustean Bed of our own making -- we abuse God as surely as Jeffrey Epstein abused all those girls whose horrifying degradation makes you lust after punishment. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Procrustes
Although we cannot ultimately conceive God "as God really IS" -- since "now we see through a glass darkly" -- we can at least release God from the bondage in which we often hold "him."
If, as I believe, it is more accurate to use the poetic image of God "singing creation into existence," then, as I also believe, it is more accurate to see Jesus as The Incarnation of God/Love, the bedrock Reality for which we use the name "Jesus" only as a marker - a reference point - a nomenclatural convenience - to invoke the "Incarnation of Love" in whose image we are made, and in whose image we are "called" to re-make the mater-material of our lives.
"The Word made Flesh."
(Note that the literal meaning of "incarnation" is "enfleshment.")
Once freed from the verbal shackles we create, the world/God/universe -- and beyond -- becomes immeasurably bigger than we imagine, and bigger than we can imagine.
And we cannot fathom any wordless encounter with the limitlessness of God because we are finite, limited creatures and God is not.
And because we are not God, we do not get to define God.
The truest definition of God might be "that which cannot be defined."
The Mystery.
The Magnum Mysterium.
It appears that fixed definitions-of-God are acts of idolatry.
And when God defines "Himself" early in Genesis, he utters the bizarre statement, "I am who am."
A more existential sentence has never been uttered.
So, instead of getting cocky around fixed, static, ossified "definitions," we have opportunity to practice ever-flexible humility, bowing before the Magnum Mysterium whose central, utterly astonising feature is the existence of Love right here on earth. (It is also helpful to recall Dorothy Day's observation that, "We only love God as much as we love the person we love the least.")
"God so loved the world..."
The "direction" of Incarnation-Love is enfleshment, not retreat into the "abstraction" of "Sky God."
Once we escape the innate limitation of words and begin to posit the central, ineffable reality words represent, then we start to see how every reference to Jesus is a personalized reference to Love itself.
This personalization is important because through the person of Jesus-Love we are reminded of our own nature and at the same time of our personal need to embody Love -- to be true to ourselves and all our kind -- to love the least of our fellows.
To be of service.
Indiscriminately.
It bears repetition: "We only love God as much as we love the person we love the least."
By my lights, the will of God (at least the will of God as we experience it) is about Incarnation, the embodiment of God-Love on earth - and through earth - and with earth - and of earth.
The whole direction of God's creation thrusts us into the mater-materiality of enfleshment.
It is not about -- except perhaps coincidentally -- "getting back" to the celestial bosom of God where, as we suppose, everything is sweetness and light.
You know... "Where the skies are not cloudy all day..."
Everything that is apart from the real, actual, embodied incarnation/embodiment/enfleshment of Love in our individual lives is "commentary," verbiage that can be useful in its way, but it is NOT the lived Reality to which the name "Jesus" points us.
Sleep on it.
P.S. The word "definition" derives from two Latin words meaning "completely limited."
Tell me how we can define God within violating "the limitless" by imposing deliberate limits.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/definition
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