A conversation about God — the kind that happens in a moving car, with children asking questions the mind doesn’t know how to answer — produced one of the clearest theological statements I have heard.
My son summed it up in three words.
God is nothing.
He was right.
God is NO Thing. Not an idea, a concept, a person, an object, a subject. All of these can point toward God, or describe an experience of God — but none of them can contain or reveal God. The word is not the thing. The map is not the territory.
This is not a statement of atheism. It is a statement about the nature of what God is.
God cannot be known the way we know other things. God can only be experienced. And the experience is never of a thing. It is a meeting, a recognition, a coming home to something that was always already present.
Children, sometimes, see through the noise faster than we do.