The God Who Does Not Exist

I Pray God to Rid Me of God

There is no such thing as God.

Not the God you imagine, nor the one you deny. Not the figure your childhood prayers were addressed to, nor the abstraction your adult intellect now dissects. Not the bearded man in the clouds, nor the cosmic therapist who smiles warmly at your personal growth. Not the distant clockmaker of Deism, nor the tribal chieftain of evangelical fervor. Not the feeling of peace during a walk in the forest, nor the voice you’re certain you heard that night under the stars.

Whatever you think of when you think of God—He does not exist.

Because that God is a concept. And the Infinite cannot be reduced to a concept without distortion, violence, and, eventually, idolatry.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

— Isaiah 55:8–9

This is not atheism, though the sentence might sound like it. No, this is a deeper orthodoxy, the kind the mystics whisper in stone chapels after matins, or write in tears between the lines of their journals, hoping no one ever reads them but God.

The Idol of the Mind

It begins, as all heresies do, with a good intention. We need a name, after all, to speak of Him. We need symbols. We are linguistic creatures, caught in a net of nouns. So we say God.

But quickly, the word hardens. The symbol ossifies. We take the placeholder for Presence and mistake it for the Presence itself. The metaphor is domesticated, tamed, and painted on chapel walls.

A sculptor once carved the invisible mystery into an image of gold, and when Moses descended from the mountain, he smashed both the tablets and the illusion. We forget the tablets were God’s writing, but He let them break rather than allow Himself to be caged in golden form.

We do the same in the mind. Only now, the golden calf is not forged from metal—it is forged from ideas. God as the projection of our moral ideal. God as psychological comfort. God as principle, as force, as energy. God as metaphor for the better angels of our nature.

These are all shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave.

They are not the fire.

A Word Beyond Words

The true Name of God is not a word at all. When Moses stood before the burning bush and dared to ask the Name, he was given a reply that is not a name, not in the way we mean it. Ehyeh asher ehyeh—I Am That I Am.

The mystics have always known this. Gregory of Nyssa said, “Every concept of God is an idol.” Meister Eckhart dared to say, “I pray God to rid me of God.” St. John of the Cross wandered blind into the noche oscura because the God he sought could no longer be found in any form or feeling.

And yet we persist in building conceptual temples and then bowing before our own blueprints. We make God manageable. We render Him unto Caesar, then sell Him back to ourselves in the marketplace of ideas.

We name Him, and thus we bind Him. But the God who is will not be bound.

The Theological Abyss

Theologians speak of the via negativa, the apophatic way. It is not a clever rhetorical device but a surrender. God is not this. Not that. Not light, not darkness. Not male, not female. Not being as we know it. Not existence as we mean it. Not, and only ever not, because the human mind, however vast, is still a created thing.

There is more theology in silence than in a hundred volumes of dogma.

Even Aquinas, at the end of his life, after writing the Summa, after cataloging angels and hierarchies, justice and mercy, fell into silence. “All that I have written seems to me like straw,” he said, after a vision. He saw something, or Someone, and realized his words had never come close.

We must be brave enough to follow him there. To let even the word God fall from our lips and shatter like pottery at the altar.

When the Word Dies

The cross, too, is the death of the Word. Not just the flesh of Christ, but the Word-as-concept. God hanging limp between two criminals is not the God of the philosophers, nor the God of our political platforms, nor the God of self-help books and inspirational wall art.

It is the silence of Saturday that tells the truth: God has died, and your ideas of Him with Him. You are left with nothing but absence, absence so profound it echoes.

And it is there, in that echoing hollow, that the real Presence arrives.

The God Beyond God

To encounter the real God, you must go beyond the God you know. You must allow the collapse. You must sit in the ashes of your theology and wait, not for an answer, but for the One who is not an answer.

He will not fit in your mind. He will not affirm your opinions. He will not be useful. But He will be there. Not as a thought. Not as a feeling. Not even as a voice. As fire. As stillness. As the trembling silence between your breath and your death. You will know Him only when you are no longer trying to.

End of the Beginning

And so, say it with full conviction: The God I believe in does not exist. Not as I imagined Him. Not as I wanted Him to be. Not as anyone has described Him.

He is not in the image. He is not in the idea. He is not even in the word. But He Is. And that is enough.

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