What We Hear When We Say God
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A Vatican document from 2003 has come back to mind lately. Twenty-three years have passed since the Pontifical Councils for Culture and Interreligious Dialogue published Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life, a Christian reflection on New Age spirituality. It set out to explain where those teachings differ from Christianity. But the part I keep thinking about was addressed as much to the Church as to anyone outside it.
The authors suggested that some people were drawn to these spiritual approaches because their own Christian communities had neglected dimensions of faith they were hungry to experience. They were searching for meaning, a sense of connection with creation, and the possibility of spiritual transformation. Christianity had a rich tradition to offer them. But were we speaking about it in a way they could actually hear?
That question feels fresh to me now. I have been drawn to the writings of Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, Louise Hay, and Gregg Braden. They draw on different traditions, and I do not agree with all their conclusions. Yet I love the way they invite people to think about the sacred. Dyer speaks of the Source and intention. Tolle brings us back to the present moment. Hay asks us to notice the words we speak to ourselves. Braden searches for meaning in the patterns of creation.
Across their work, words such as presence, connection, harmony, and possibility make spiritual questions feel close to everyday life. The language carries hope and curiosity. Reading it has made me wonder whether we sometimes become so accustomed to the language of our own faith that we stop hearing how astonishing it is.
A person can grow up hearing the word God alongside rules, disappointment, or fear. Even when those lessons were offered with good intentions, the word may carry the weight of the way it was taught. Someone else hears the same word and remembers affection, safety, or a prayer spoken at the bedside. Words collect our experiences. By the time we use them, they have already been living in us for years.
Then along comes a phrase like the Source of all life. It may describe something quite different from the Christian understanding of God, but it can also reach a part of a person that familiar religious words no longer reach. Be present may sound more welcoming than another reminder to pray. Let go may open a door that the word surrender has left closed. We should take that seriously before assuming that the person using new language has simply rejected what is old.
There is a line attributed to Barry Taylor, a theologian and former AC/DC roadie, that comedian Pete Holmes has repeated. It resonates with me and illustrates the point.
“God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.”
(Side note: Taylor remembers using “the invisible” rather than “mystery.”)
I would not take that as a complete account of God. Christian faith does not hold that God is simply a name we have invented for what we cannot explain. But I love the image because it reminds me how much we ask of our words. We want to make the mystery approachable. We give it a name, an image, a story, something we can speak about together. The danger comes when we mistake the covering for the whole of what it covers.
The Church knows this problem well. Our knowledge of God is limited and our language must continually be purified of its limitations. Even when our words tell the truth, they cannot contain God. This is not a concession to some newer spirituality. It belongs to the heart of the Christian tradition.
Consider how often we speak of God as a higher power. It can be a helpful expression, especially for someone trying to find words for faith. But it can also leave us picturing a very powerful being somewhere above us, another thing in the universe, only bigger. Saint Thomas Aquinas gives us a different way of thinking.
For Saint Thomas, God is ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself. God does not simply possess existence the way you and I do. God is the uncreated source from whom everything else receives its existence. A tree grows, a person speaks, light falls across the room. Each thing has its own nature and follows its own processes, but none of it is self-sustaining in the deepest sense. God did not merely bring creation into being long ago. Everything that exists is being held in existence even now.
Saint Thomas also speaks of God as summum bonum, the highest good. Not simply the best item on a list of good things, but the source of every goodness we recognize. Love, beauty, truth, and kindness are not alternatives to the divine. The goodness we encounter in the world reflects, however imperfectly, the goodness from which it comes.
This does not mean that everything is God, or that God is an impersonal current running through creation. A tree remains a tree and a person remains a person. The Creator is not the creation. Yet nothing is so far from God that it can exist apart from him. The familiar image of a power somewhere above us gives way to a presence more intimate than distance can describe.
I wonder how often we allow that mystery to remain alive in the way we speak.
We can say that God is present and still rush through the people and responsibilities in front of us. We can say that all life is a gift and spend much of the day feeling that nothing is enough. We can say that grace transforms us while treating the life of faith as a long list of obligations. The words are familiar. What they mean can begin to feel distant.
This is where the spiritual language I have been reading sends me back to my own faith rather than away from it.
Saint Benedict opens his Rule by asking us to listen with the ear of the heart. Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother, wrote about attending to God's presence while doing ordinary work. Grace is not merely an act of divine assistance from a distance, but participation in the very life of God. These are not small ideas. They speak of a life in which the sacred is not confined to particular places or moments, and in which the ordinary day can become a place of encounter.
And the imagery becomes richer the more I return to it. Our Scriptures speak of living water and of light that shines into darkness. Saint Augustine called God more inward than his own innermost self. Saint Athanasius, a fourth-century bishop, described the purpose of the Incarnation in language so bold it can still surprise us.
“The Son of God became man so that we might become God.”
That is an ancient Christian expression of what it means to share in divine life. It does not mean becoming God by nature or losing ourselves in some universal consciousness. It means being invited, by grace, into a communion deeper than we could create for ourselves. Think how different that can sound from a faith described only in terms of requirements and rules. These words belong to the Catholic tradition, yet I suspect they would sound almost new to many who hear the word God every week.
What draws me to the language of Source, presence, and connection is not absent from my own tradition. I am rediscovering how to hear it.
That does not make all these accounts the same, and the differences deserve respect too. One difference matters especially. Some New Thought teachings suggest that our intentions and thoughts can determine what happens to us. Set the right intention, hold the right thoughts, and the outcome follows. Christian faith begins somewhere else. Grace is something we receive, not something we steer. Prayer, spoken or silent, is a relationship with Someone who loves us, not a method for producing the outcome we want. And when suffering comes, it is not a verdict on what we were thinking. Some appealing ideas carry claims we should question rather than repeat.
I do not need to agree with every explanation to recognize the longing beneath it. I can appreciate what another writer helps me notice without pretending that our beliefs are the same.
Saint Paul offered an example of that kind of attention when he spoke in Athens. He noticed an altar dedicated to an unknown god and began with the religious searching already present among his listeners. He spoke of the God who gives everyone life and breath, who is not far from any of us. Then, echoing their own poets, he said something that could sit at the heart of this entire reflection.
“In him we live and move and have our being.”
Those words are from Acts 17. In him. Saint Paul was not describing a distant power occasionally stepping into our lives. He was speaking of the one in whom those lives were already held. And rather than insisting that his audience first learn a new religious vocabulary, he began with words they could recognize. He did not leave his convictions behind. He found a way to let people hear them.
Perhaps that is what I most appreciate about these writers. Someone who has struggled to pray can still speak about gratitude. Someone uneasy with religious institutions can still be moved by beauty, mercy, or silence. A person who cannot bring themselves to say God may still be reaching for the mystery that word has tried to name for generations. We lose something when we answer the vocabulary before we have heard the person.
And we lose something within our own traditions when the vocabulary becomes so settled that it no longer awakens us.
Saint Paul writes elsewhere that all things are from God, through God, and for God. The Letter to the Colossians speaks of Christ as the one in whom all things hold together. Read that slowly and it hardly sounds like a distant supervisor looking down on the world. It sounds like existence itself being continually received as a gift. Such language can strike us as startlingly modern, although it has been part of Christian faith since its beginning.
Christianity makes a particular claim about the mystery. In the Gospel of John, the Word through whom all things came to be takes flesh and dwells among us. The mystery is not reduced to an idea we can arrange to suit ourselves. It meets us in a human life, in friendship and grief, at meals and among people who need to be loved. That is why, for me, the language of presence finally has to become something more than a feeling.
The test arrives in an ordinary conversation. Someone is speaking and I am already preparing my reply. I can remind myself to be present, or I can simply stop rehearsing and listen. I can speak beautifully about our connection to one another, or I can give the person in front of me the time and attention they need. No special vocabulary makes that choice for me.
Maybe this is what those unfamiliar words have given me. They have not replaced the language of faith. They have interrupted my habit of hearing it without listening. They have reminded me that God, grace, presence, and communion are not terms to finish defining so that we can put them away. They invite a life we are still learning to enter.
The 2003 Vatican document asked Christians to take the hunger behind new spiritual movements seriously. I think that invitation is still worth hearing, particularly when the language is unfamiliar or the conclusions are ones we cannot share. Before we begin correcting the words, we might discover something by listening to what the person hopes they mean.
What words bring you closest to God?
Sources and notes
- Pontifical Councils for Culture and Interreligious Dialogue, Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life (2003), especially the Foreword and section 1.5. A provisional pastoral reflection that recognizes spiritual hunger while identifying genuine theological differences.
- Dawn Hutchinson, “New Thought,” Harvard Divinity School's Center for the Study of World Religions (2026). New Thought is an older and historically distinguishable movement, although it overlaps with strands of contemporary popular spirituality.
- Wayne W. Dyer, The Power of Intention; Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now; Louise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life; Gregg Braden, The God Code. The essay draws on broad themes and makes no claim that these writers teach the same philosophy.
- Barry Taylor quotation as attributed and repeated by Pete Holmes in interviews, including The Ed Mylett Show conversation with Holmes. Attribution is indirect, rather than a verified original publication by Taylor. The aside follows the captions of Taylor’s later interview, at 19:20–19:28, where he recalls using “the invisible” rather than “mystery.”
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§39–43, on the limits and value of language about God, and §§1996–2002, on grace as participation in divine life.
- Rule of Saint Benedict, Prologue, on listening with the ear of the heart; Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, on attention to God in ordinary work.
- Acts 17:22–28, Saint Paul's address in Athens, including the words he quotes from Greek poets, and John 1:1–14, on the Word made flesh. Biblical wording quoted here follows the NABRE.
- Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 3, a. 4, on God as his own existence, I, q. 6, a. 2, on God as the supreme good, I, q. 8, a. 1, on God's intimate presence to everything that exists, and I, q. 104, a. 1, on the continual conservation of creatures in being. Ipsum esse subsistens is the traditional expression for God's subsistent act of being, distinct from summum bonum, the highest good.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§300–301, on God's transcendence, nearness, and sustaining action, and §460, citing Saint Athanasius on participation in divine life. See also Saint Augustine, Confessions III.6.11, for the description of God's inward nearness.
- John 4, on living water, and John 1, on light. See Romans 11:36 and Colossians 1:15–17, on all things existing through God and holding together in Christ.