Is God a Verb?

I have a friend with whom I meet most Friday afternoons. We're writing his life story together. It's about his journey from sexual abuse to healing and wholeness. Though he is anything but "churchy," and his language about holy things and a higher power are uniquely his, I'm no longer certain who's the learner and who's the teacher. We "do theology" together in a rare manner that stretches our spirituality beyond the confines of conventionality. For my friend the words "God" and "church" have become synonyms that not only bear the vestiges of part of his childhood abuse, but are too constraining. The God of fundamentalism on which he cut his religious teeth holds nothing but emptiness and negativity. For him his "God" is "Papa Being." When I write that they have regular conversations where God initiates many of the words that flow into his journals, I am understating the degree of depth in his relationship with the Divine. Sometimes he is the supplicant who pleads with "Papa Being" for help, but most of the time he is deeply listening to the still, small voice that comes to him in need.

Is this a form of prayer? It certainly sounds that way in the normal sense of what we mean by "prayer." The uniqueness of my friend's prayers, however, is that God begins to talk before he utters a word. To set the record straight, other than his recovery from various forms of sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse he is perfectly "normal," whatever normal is. There are no allusions of grandeur, or leaps into a schizophrenic world of detachment from the real world and others. He is as "normal" and "with it" as the rest of us (present company excluded).

In writing his story I've found a fascinating abbreviated way of his journaling with God. His shorthand is often simply "Papa Be." I asked him recently if he had ever considered that "Papa Be" might be both a request for God's presence, and perhaps a verb. He was puzzled by my question, but truly fascinated that maybe he had come up with a characteristic about "the wholly other" that he had never considered. I've spoken with him about Paul Tillich's phrasing that God is "the ground of our being." He fully understands and hangs onto this wording because of how it roots his relationship with a God of caring. That's what love is for my friend: caring. But ponder for a moment the action of "Papa Be." We tend to speak and write of God as though God were a noun. That's a passive form of describing reality, or attempting to explain the unexplainable. After all, who can fully define, or describe God.

What if God is a verb? That seems to turn our understanding of the "bigger than" on its head. Isn't it the actions of God that bring meaning to our feeble understanding? But what if. . . just what if. . . God is a verb - a verb of actual "being?" The possibilities seem limitless if we look in a direction we have not looked before and began to relate to a God of perpeptual motion. "To be" is action. To quote a bit from Shakespeare: "To be, or not to be. That is the question."

"Papa Be." I like that!