The God Our Best Words Can’t Hold

Our best images of God are still only pointers. Hold them lightly —and please, don’t be a dick about them.

Many religious expressions come wrapped in a long, storied lineage: libraries of books, beloved songs, sacred spaces, practices passed down through generations. They were probably good and helpful at one time. Beautiful even. Probably a lot still are.

As good as they may be, in and of themselves, they can only point beyond themselves. Metaphors, similes, tools, stories — different forms of the same gift. All are containers meant to help us encounter the God-who-is-Love.

I’m all for these good and life-giving containers.
The trouble begins when we start treating them as the Reality instead of what they truly are: gestures pointing beyond themselves to something unspeakably and inconceivably beautiful.

When speaking of the Divine, Ilia Delio reminds us:
Whenever we speak of God, we speak in metaphors. Not because God is vague, but because God is so vast that our language can only gesture toward the Mystery. (paraphrase)

I feel this in a bittersweet way.
I love words, pictures, songs, stories, prose. Sometimes they ignite me with an ecstatic YES on the inhale, only to fall flat on the exhale. Still, I try again, reaching for even a smidgeon of a glimpse of the More that shimmers beyond my vocabulary.

The Finger and the Moon

There’s an old story I’ve shared before. A person is trying to illustrate the difference between spirituality and religion using the image of a finger pointing to the moon. The gist:

Spirituality attends to what the finger is pointing to.
Religion, at its worst, becomes obsessed with the hand.

How is the hand positioned?
Which finger is being used?
Who is doing the pointing? Male? Female? Ordained?

Religion often becomes more interested in who has power and who is right or wrong. All the while, it misses the point entirely: the moon.

And I’m not immune. I’ve spent plenty of time fretting over the angle of a pinkie finger instead of looking at the wonder it was directing me toward.

Wineskins and Containers That Outlive Their Purpose

This leads me to Jesus’ image of wineskins, a metaphor that is itself a container pointing beyond itself. Wineskins, like religious systems, can become rigid. They often lose their ability to stretch. What once carried the vitality of the Spirit can become brittle and unable to hold anything new.

Whether the container is a metaphor, a liturgy, a creed, a worship style, a theological formula, or a story we’ve inherited, the purpose is always the same: to serve the Life within and beyond it. When the container becomes the focus instead of the content, we fall into what Alfred North Whitehead called misplaced concreteness.

Misplaced concreteness is the mistake of confusing the symbol with what it was meant to symbolize — the temptation to load up symbols with more significance than they can possibly carry. The symbols and stories, as good as they may be, suffer cracks and breaches.

And yet — here is where there is opportunity for hope.

Even in the shadow of edicts from paper kingdoms, those anxious structures desperate to preserve their containers, life finds cracks to slip through. Imagination breaks open the old walls. New (or renewed) stories emerge — more lovely, more liberating, more reflective of Love.

Can We Know Anything About God?

This raises a natural question:
If all our words and stories are partial, can we know anything about God at all?

Yes. I believe we can.
But absolute certainty is a high bar when speaking of the ineffable.

What we can have are degrees of confidence. These come from experience, relationship, and the deep intuitions that surface when we are honest with ourselves. But even these cannot be divinized, and it behooves us to maintain an open posture.

Knowing is layered.
There is the knowing about God.
There is the knowing that comes through lived experience.
And then there is a deeper knowing — a “deep-unto-deep” knowing that arises from the quiet centre of who we are.

There is a long Christian contemplative tradition that speaks of a deeper kind of knowing. Not conceptual. Not emotional. Something quieter and more integrated.

In my own reflective moments, I sometimes feel it as a gentle descent:
through the chatter of the monkey mind,
below bodily awareness,
beneath the emotional currents,
until something opens just beyond the familiar inner landscape.

A spaciousness.
A quiet light.
A peace with no sharp edges.

It is a kind of knowing that isn’t “knowing” in any conventional sense.
And yet, somehow, I know.

Perhaps in our most integrated moments, the boundaries of our usual dualisms begin to soften. Mind, body, and spirit reveal themselves as one marvellous, interconnected whole.

Maybe this is where we truly know, and where we are known:
beneath story, beneath metaphor, beneath the containers we keep trying to build for God.

A place where the Mystery meets us directly, without needing to be held or translated by anything else.

Beyond Wineskins: Toward Living Conduits

Perhaps what we need now isn’t another wineskin.
Even the best wineskins eventually harden and crack.

Because this is part of being human.
We take what once pointed us toward God, and before long, we begin treating it as God. We divinize the symbol, protect the vessel, and forget the living water that always wanted to flow through it.

Structures matter.
They help us hold meaning and walk together.
But they must remain flexible — evolving conduits, not rigid monuments.

Maybe what we need are living conduits — more like aquifers than containers. Channels that shift, deepen, and adapt as they carry fresh, living water forward. Stories, symbols, and practices that evolve rather than fossilize.

The point is never the wineskin, the conduit, or even the aquifer.
The point is the ever-renewing Love that flows through them, inviting us toward more life, compassion, and wonder.

The water is always fresh.
The flow is always new.
And everything we build to carry it is provisional — holy for a season, then ready to give way to wherever Love is flowing next.

Sola Caritas,

𝞃Michael