Reading: from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad--
 

A student named Vigadha Sakalya poses the question of manyness to Yajnavalkya, one of the visionary sages:
"How many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?"
"As many as are mentioned in the Hymn of All the Gods, namely 3,306."
"Yes," said he, "but just how many gods are there Yajnavalkya?"
"Thirty-three."
"Yes," said he, "but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?"
"Six."
The dialogue continues. There are three gods, two gods.
"Yes," said he, "but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?"
"One and a half."
"Yes," said he, "but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?"
"One."[1]

Bill Moyers asks Joseph Campbell, "What is the transcendent? What happens to someone in the transcendent?"

Campbell replies, "'Transcendent' is a technical, philosophical term, translated in two different ways. In Christian theology, it refers to God as being beyond or outside the field of nature. That is a materialistic way of talking about the transcendent, because God is thought of as a kind of spiritual fact existing somewhere out there. It was Hegel who spoke of our anthropomorphic god as the gaseous vertebrate... Or [God] is thought of as a bearded old man with a not very pleasant temperament. But 'transcendent' properly means that which is beyond all concepts. Kant tells us that all of our experiences are bounded by time and space. They take place within space, and they take place in the course of time.

"Time and space form the sensibilities that bound our experiences. Our senses are enclosed in the field of time and space, and our minds are enclosed in a frame of the categories of thought. But the ultimate thing (which is no thing) that we are trying to get in touch with is not so enclosed. We enclose it as we try to think of it.

"The transcendent transcends all of these categories of thinking. Being and nonbeing--these are categories. The word 'God' properly refers to what transcends all thinking, but the word 'God' itself is something thought about.

"Now you can personify God in many, many ways. Is there one God? Are there many gods? Those are merely categories of thought. What you are talking and trying to think about transcends all that.[2]

Last month while I was staying in Bozeman, Montana, I spent a day in nearby Yellowstone National Park. My guide that day was Tom, a member of the Unitarian Universalist fellowship in Bozeman. Tom is working on a masters dissertation focusing on the bison's demise during the 1800s. Given his familiarity with the area and the bison, I was very fortunate to have him showing me around.

We concentrated our day in the northern part of the Yellowstone, in and around the LaMar Valley. This area is the range area, home of many of Yellowstone's bison and elk herds, as well as their predators. I think the elevation of the area is 5000 or 6000 feet, with mountains visible in the distance wherever you look. The range land is hilly and mostly open, vegetated by prairie grasses and full of scat from the herds. I quickly realized that I would not be able to avoid stepping in the bison and elk piles. Scattered areas of woods dotted the landscape, although many of them had been considerably thinned out by the great fire several years ago. There was a little bit of snow here and there. The day was gray, temperatures probably in the high 30s.

Tom knew the place to go to see up close the bison and elk herds. In fact, we quickly discovered a herd of about twenty-five bison sitting right in the middle of the hiking trail he had selected for us. Between an eighth and quarter mile from the bison, we headed off the trail to skirt around them. We headed up to a wooded ridge. Just as we got close enough to see into the woods, a herd of fifty or sixty elk passed by. We were close enough to hear them snorting, to hear their hooves hit the ground, and to hear a few of the elk bugle. We stopped, looked and listened. "This is going to be quite a day," I thought.

After the elk herd passed, we walked onto the ridge, then continued off trail up toward higher ridges. At one point we could tell we were coming up to some kind of dip. As we got right next to the dip, we realized it was no little dip: it was the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. We sat down on the edge of the canyon, the canyon opening up panoramically below, the snow-capped peaks beckoning in the distance. Hungry and thirsty from the walk, the food and the water tasted far better than they would have anywhere else. There I was, eating, sharing a deep conversation with a new friend, looking at breathtaking beauty.

After a while we got up, my bottom feeling damp and cold from sitting on the ground. The canyon, the range land stretching on and on, the mountains, a new friend: I felt at the same instant incredibly small and insignificant but also in some mysterious way at one with the whole universe stretching on into infinite time and space beyond those distant mountains. I had come into conscious contact with the transcendent.

Joseph Campbell said in one of his interviews with Bill Moyers:
 

There's a two-page spread in a world atlas which shows our galaxy within many galaxies, and within our galaxy the solar system. And here you get a sense of the magnitude of this space that we're now finding out about. What those pages opened to me was the vision of a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence. Billions upon billions of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other. Each thermonuclear furnace a star, and our sun among them. Many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces, littering the outermost reaches of space with dust and gas out of which new stars with circling planets are being born right now. And then from still more remote distances beyond all these there come murmurs, microwaves that are echoes of the greatest cataclysmic explosion of all, namely the big bang of creation, which, according to some reckonings, may have occurred some eighteen billion years ago.

That's where we are, kiddo, and to realize that, you realize how really important you are, you know--one little microbit in that great magnitude. And then must come the experience that you and that are in some sense one, and you partake of all that.[3]

Many people through the eons of human conscious awareness have labeled the transcendent "God." Whether "God" comes in the guise and name of Siva or Yahweh or Pele or Isis or Krishna or Gaia or Allah or any of the other millions of gods and goddesses human beings worship, "God" is a symbol for the transcendent. God and Goddess--divinity--are symbols of the transcendent. As with all language, these symbols, too, are ultimately incapable of describing the transcendent Paul Tillich writes:
 

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, or what you take seriously without any reservations.[4]

The Lutheran theologian and Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it more simply than Tillich: he defined God as "the 'beyond' in the midst of life."[5]

I imagine that many of you have had experiences maybe at least a little like mine at Yellowstone. Every once in a while we get glimpses of the transcendent. In such moments, we briefly recognize the beyond that has always been and always will be operating in the midst of our everyday lives. For most of us, these glimpses are as rare as a triple play in baseball, or finding a four-leaf clover. Yet they are as close as our next thought. And when we finally do recognize the transcendent in the midst of our life, we see that it has always been and always will be there, right next to us. You see, the great paradox is that the transcendent, though it has nothing to do with time or place because it is beyond all such categories, only occurs in the here and now.

We create and use religion and science and poetry and art to help us recognize, name and make some sense out of the transcendent that is in the midst of our lives. But all of these ways of seeing and making sense are incomplete. The huge images of gods and goddesses in India seem to express this truth metaphorically. In many Hindu rituals, you only get a glimpse of one small part of one of these massive images--the feet for example. All of the reality of transcendence is there in the feet, yet you know you are only getting a brief and terribly incomplete glimpse of the transcendent as you worship the god's feet.[6]  No individual symbol of the transcendent captures the whole truth of the transcendent--just as no set of words can capture it all. Transcendence is too large, too complex, too paradoxical, too impossible to know completely.

One of the reasons I am so intrigued by the Hindu tradition--indeed, one of the reasons I would label myself polytheistic--is that polytheism beautifully illustrates this truth. No individual symbol--no individual god or goddess, in other words--can completely capture the whole of the transcendent. Diana Eck writes that the Hindu tradition "exaggerates to the point of profundity."[7]  So by some counts there are 330 million gods and goddesses in Hinduism. Or there are 3,306 as the Upanishads reading I shared earlier states initially. Or there are 33. The point of having dozens or thousands or millions of gods and goddesses is that they provide a multiplicity of metaphors. There are baby gods and child gods and Father gods and Mother goddesses and androgynous gods and old gods; there are beautiful goddesses who create the universe, and terrifying goddesses who destroy it; there are gods who are our friends and others who are our lovers and still others who are our enemies; there are goddesses who are serious and others who play and dance. Each individual Hindu worships the deity that best expresses his or her view of transcendence at a particular time, and puts that deity at the center of attention. The multiplicity of gods illustrates the complexity and impossibility of describing the thing (which is no thing) each individual god and goddess refers to: the transcendent. The multiplicity of deities helps the Hindu (and sometimes the student of Hinduism) see the transcendent in new and different and often entirely unexpected ways.

But maybe, as the Upanishads sage said at the end of the reading, there's just one God. Hinduism points to the ultimate complexity and paradox and unknowability of transcendence by saying at the very same time that there are many gods and only one god, known as Brahman. In fact, each individual deity as he or she is worshipped becomes the whole, becomes Brahman. Yet each god is only a partial representation of the whole, of Brahman, of the transcendent. There are 3,306 gods. There is one god. Both statements are true.

A final recognition of the complex and paradoxical nature of transcendence is where Hindus find divinity: not far off in Heaven or in the nether world of theologians and scholars, but embodied and alive in the most everyday of objects: in cows, in trees and bushes, in wise people, in stones lying in the field, in dolls dressed up in temples, in clumps of soil. One meets transcendence, which is beyond time and place, face to face, up close, in the concrete and even mundane. The transcendent alive and visible in a cow, of all creatures? Even in America's Dairy State this is hard to fathom. But what a beautiful metaphor: we can find the eternal transcendent in the midst of our lives, in the here and now, in the most mundane thing we can imagine.

Even though the transcendent is here, right in front of our faces if we only have the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it, no one can possess it. No one can grasp it fully, understand it completely. It's too complex. Even the most enlightened among us only catches glimpses of it. There's a Hindu story about Krishna multiplying himself so he can dance wildly and passionately with each of his beloved milkmaids. The dance goes on and on, but the instant one of the milkmaids thinks Krishna is dancing with her alone, he disappears.[8]  We humans cannot possess or fully understand the transcendent. The instant we think we do, it disappears.

Maybe we don't have to travel to Hinduism to find these truths about the transcendent. The Jesus story contains much of the same wisdom. The Jesus story, for example, contains a multiplicity of images: God incarnated as a baby, as a Teacher, as a Healer, as one who suffers with us, as He who is Risen. All of these images reveal something about the nature of the transcendent. And as an incarnation of God, Jesus, too, is a symbol of the transcendent in our midst. You want to find the transcendent? All you have to do is go to a stable of all places and view this baby born to dirt poor, unmarried parents, lying in a manger located in a tiny village tucked away in an obscure corner of a sprawling empire. How much more down to earth and in our midst can you get? Open your eyes and look! You will see the transcendent--not just at Yellowstone Park but in the homeless shelter where folks stay because there is no room (or they have no money for a room) in the Inn. The transcendent--God if you want to use the Christian symbol for transcendent--is right here with us, right in the middle of our everyday lives, as close as the homeless shelter or the touch of your lover or your hand reaching out to another in help. God is the beyond in our midst. "Emmanuel" means "God with us." Emmanuel came not just once, back during the great taxation of Caesar Augustus. Emmanuel comes all the time, whenever we open our eyes enough to see the transcendent in our midst. In the words of the Advent carol, Emmanuel comes within as Love to dwell, as truth to dwell, as Light to dwell, as Hope to dwell.

Joseph Campbell notes that the Hindus "speak of a state in which the ears have opened to the song of the universe."[9]  Maybe that's what Advent and Christmas are all about: opening our ears so we can hear the song of the universe, opening our eyes so we see the transcendent in our midst, in the baby and in the cow and in the helping hand. Is there any transcendence? Of course there is. Open your eyes. Open your ears and hear the song of the universe.

[1]Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banares (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. 62.
[2]Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988) p. 62.
[3]Ibid., 183.
[4]Eck, p. 55.
[5]Ibid., p. 55.
[6]I am indebted to Eck, pp. 77-79.
[7]Eck, p. 61.
[8]Ibid., 46.
[9]Campbell, p. 25.