Technology and God

“I liken some people’s relationship with God to my relationship with technology.”

That’s me quoting myself from my essay for admission to Claremont School of Theology in 2018. I continued my thought with this:

“I’m not a fan of technology, but I’ve come to depend upon it. So, when there’s a glitch with my iPhone not working, I get upset and think how can I trust it will be there for me when it’s so capricious? It suddenly refuses to work for no reason. One day when I was running late for a meeting and didn’t have the address, I turned on my car’s Bluetooth to call someone who could give it to me. But when I pressed the phone button on my dashboard, I got a message that my phone wasn’t connected. I had just called someone a few minutes before so I knew it was connected, but now it wasn’t? I was feeling so frustrated at that moment and thought, ‘There! That’s proof that these things don’t work when you need them most!’ Then after a pause, I laughed as I realized: ‘Aha ha! I get it now! That’s how some people feel about God! Just when they need God more than ever before, He/She/It is not there for them. Once again God has failed them.’ However, I also know that my dislike of technology is because I don’t understand it, and I don’t put in the time or energy to learn more about it. Yet when it fails me, I blame it for being unreliable and therefore useless. This is very similar to how some people view God.”

My essay continued on how I wanted to help people better understand God. But more than that, my desire was and still is to help people deepen their relationship with God so that they learn to trust God as Always Absolutely Good – no matter what. Apple computer stores have counters you go up to where you can consult an “Apple Genius” who fixes your Apple problems, usually someone under the age of 20. I consider myself as kind of a “God Genius,” who is as conversant with God as Apple Geniuses are with technology.

One of the first understandings about God that I like to offer is that because God is all that there is, there are just as many synonyms for this word “God.” When one can see that as the children say, “there is no spot where God is not,” then one can being to recognize that God is what is behind all earthly appearances. Our teaching puts it like this: God is the First Cause of all that is. With this recognition of God in and as all, then one can also recognize that the word “God” cannot fully contain or describe It. So, if the word “God” doesn’t work for you, then you have an infinite plethora of words to choose from to use instead.

With this beginning of seeing God in all that there is, then we can begin to understand that although God Itself cannot actually be distilled into one image or picture, we can all the same see glimmers of God. Such as when we witness a tender exchange of love, or we’re immersed in nature and overtaken with awe. This is similar to technology in that we don’t see the waves of satellite energy that power our devices, yet we can see our devices at work. And when they don’t do what we want them to do, we can find a tech genius to help us fix the problem. Just like when we believe that God isn’t working for us, we can find a Practitioner to help us understand why and help us learn how we can change this so that we know that God is always here with us, for us. And in my experience, much more reliable than technology.