what if god were a verb
The reckoning we are facing here in the heart of the empire with the fact that our lives are built on the incalculable suffering of the people of the Global Majority is extremely heavy and bleak. A lot of the spiritual and alchemical work of revolution involves reckoning with these intolerable facts that make up our existence. This work is as important as it is painful. To attempt to gloss over the untold suffering that is required in order for us to live the lives that we currently do and have historically done is anathema to revolution and to the goals of our spiritual, intellectual, and human development. Simply, there is no eliding this truth if one truly desires what one purports to desire. We are in the trenches and the maws of the trenches are ever-deepening. We are embarking on a liberatory march into the infinitude of the human soul.
This work requires us to accept, at increasingly overwhelming magnitudes, the bitterest heavinesses so that we may unlock the most sublime experiences of our shared humanity as we integrate ourselves more fully into the holistic totality of this world-organism. We must own, transparently, our role in perpetuating needless suffering. To own this role with transparency requires an unwavering commitment to empathy. We must embody, to the fullest extent possible, an imaginative understanding of the "other", the "other" who is, of course, ourselves. We must come to behave consistently as if the horrific crimes and violence perpetrated against the "other" are in fact being perpetrated against our very selves, because this understanding comes much closer to the heart of reality than does an understanding born from the illusion of separation.
When you orphan a child, you become that very orphan. When you torture and execute a surgeon who saved the lives of countless people, you torture and execute your own humanity and flesh. We must fully install and integrate this way of thinking into our minds and hearts and imbue every action with an awareness of this truth.
The agony we feel at our complicity in causing innocent beings to suffer is really the twin, the doppelgänger, of that original act of inflicting suffering. To inflict suffering is to inflict suffering outwardly on the "other" and at the same time inwardly on the "self", because there is no actual separation between "other" and "self"; both are contained within and represent manifestations of, the True Self, or Expansive Self.
In languages other than English, notably in many Native American languages, verbs take on a much stronger prominence than do nouns. Nouns are connected by and in fact become one another through the alchemy of the verb. Many have pointed out the dishonesty of using passive language to skirt around naming an actor. For example, we might see a headline that says "Dozens died in airstrike in Gaza" instead of "Israel killed dozens in Gaza airstrike." By focusing on the verb instead, we can better understand the relationship between the nouns as a process that unfolds and happens with and through the nouns. Nouns, after all, are temporary configurations of matter and energy that are endlessly implicated and bound up in processes of change. As Matthew C. Bronson writes in the article linked above, "What if god were a verb, an unfolding dynamic processing?"
We are tasked with excavating ourselves from the cavernous grave of human history, swallowing mouthfuls of putrid dirt. Armed with spoons, we must dig through the walls of our self-made prisons, prisons of language and soul loss and the pitiable failure to understand the extent of who and what and how we really are.