Vachon Imagined

When people speak about God, they tend to speak in absolutes.

Why?

Because people have an extraordinary desire to turn what is immeasurable into something solid. Something living into something fixed.

Life rarely cooperates.

Walk into churches today and you’ll find an astonishing range of ideas. Some speak of manifestation and stepping boldly into your dreams. Others emphasize emotion, healing, and feeling loved. Others speak almost entirely through fear: Do this… or else.

Each reflects something about the human search.

Each has a place.

But do yourself—and everyone who encounters you—a favor.

Be careful how certain you become.

The moment we declare, This is God, we are usually saying more about our own perception than about God itself.

Language can point.

It cannot contain.

Perhaps this is why conversion is such a common human pattern.

It often begins with beautiful words.

You are loved.

You belong.

You are welcome.

And then, almost without noticing, the pattern changes.

Now change.

Wear this.

Believe this.

Say these words.

Pray this prayer.

Think this way.

Become more like us.

The pattern is remarkably consistent.

We invite people into belonging, and then quietly ask them to surrender themselves in exchange for it.

This isn’t unique to religion.

Families do it.

Politics does it.

Corporations do it.

Self-help does it.

Friendships do it.

And even in sexuality and identity, belonging can sometimes become conditional on becoming something specific in return.

Every identity eventually feels the temptation to preserve itself.

We all participate in the pattern whenever we become more interested in protecting an identity than remaining open to what is true.

The irony is that the more confidently people speak about God, the more likely they are to turn the infinite into another identity—another belief to defend, another boundary to protect.

We watched something like this unfold in the life of the one we now call Jesus Christ.

Whether people saw him as God, a prophet, a blasphemer, a narcissist, a threat, or someone worth following depended almost entirely on the consciousness of the one looking.

The same life.

Many perceptions.

So perhaps the question is not whether someone is God.

Perhaps the deeper question is:

What remains true before perception begins naming it?

There seems to be something that does not move with popularity, religion, buildings, money, culture, or time.

Something that exists before our explanations arrive.

Some traditions call that God.

Others call it awareness.

Others simply remain silent.

And perhaps silence understands something language cannot.

Truth does not become more true by being proclaimed.

It does not boast.

It does not insist, This is who I am.

It does not rush to convert.

It does not need applause, agreement, or followers to justify its existence.

It simply is.

The more deeply a person lives from that place, the less urgency they feel to convince anyone else.

Because what is true does not become larger by being believed, nor smaller by being rejected.

It simply continues being what it has always been—

quietly,

long before we found words for it.