Many Masks: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About God

Questioning our theological narratives is not the same as questioning the divine.

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I saw a post on X that got me thinking.

Many of my more religious followers will likely find it odd, but I am marking it down here as a curiosity point worthy of some exploratory thinking; make of it what you will. It comes from a guy named Jason Wilde:

I’ve been sitting with this for a long time. The more I read, the more I travel through the old texts, the more I listen to what people say they’ve seen in prayer, meditation, or crisis, the more obvious it becomes. I think we’re looking at the same story wearing different masks. The names change, the language shifts, the art styles morph, but behind all of it is the same presence, the same pattern...contact.

Think about what Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita that “Behold, Arjuna, thousands upon thousands of my divine forms… but with these eyes you cannot see Me.” And then, when Krishna grants him the “divine sight,” Arjuna freaks out. “O Lord,” he says, “I see You everywhere, of infinite form… I can’t bear this.” This is a record of a human being given a glimpse of something so weird he begged for it to stop. The same thing happens to Moses “no one may see my face and live”, and to Ezekiel, who ends up babbling about wheels within wheels covered in eyes. Different continents, same story. The answer is always the same... “You couldn’t handle the real me.”

Vishnu descending again and again when dharma declines. Christ promising to return. The Hopi waiting for the Blue Star Kachina. Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, teaching and departing with a promise to come back. Avalokiteśvara in the Lotus Sutra saying, “I take whatever form beings need.” Did you just read what I said? They’re updates from the same Source for different cultures. If these were just inventions, why do they line up like a single melody played on different instruments?

We still listen to priests, prophets, channelers. We still build wars, governments, and entire value systems around the words of people who say they’ve spoken with something beyond themselves. Even people who swear they’re atheists live inside legal and moral systems built on ancient revelations. It’s like an operating system running under the surface of humanity... same code, different interfaces. Pretending it’s not there doesn’t make it disappear.

To me the evidence points to one Source, fractaling through time, speaking through masks we can handle. Sometimes luminous, sometimes terrifying, but always shaping the next step of our story. Krishna wasn’t kidding when he told Arjuna he wouldn’t like the “real” him. We’ve been shown only what we can handle; and that, I think, is what all the masks are for.

Jason included the following image with his post:

Again, I find this line of thinking very intriguing. I’m not saying it’s conclusive, or can’t be argued with, but I think its basic line of inquiry is pointed in a worthwhile direction.

In the years since leaving my very dogmatic, epistemologically-closed religion, I’ve thought a lot about WHY most people are and have always been religious while simultaneously unable to prove which, if any, religion is “the most true.”

Somewhere along the way, Catholicism (the only thing I ever was, until I wasn’t) started talking about how other religions have “part of the truth,” and pains have been taken to try to assert that all monotheists “worship the same God” — even when their beliefs about that God are clearly too different to be representative of the same deity.

I think about certain preternatural/supernatural experiences I’ve seen others go through, which make it impossible for me to be a materialist even in my doubt, but which also make me wonder whether these things are as described by any given theology, or are a different phenomenon that various religions have tried to come up with proprietary explanations for.

David Bentley Hart has a great insight in his book, That All Shall Be Saved, that I’ve come back to a lot in my mind:

If, however, we are...presented with a comprehensive story that purports to be nothing less than the total narrative and total rationale of all God’s actions in creation, then we may indeed pass judgment on that story’s plausibility.

In fact, it is morally required of us to do so; not to judge is a dereliction of our rational vocation to know and affirm the Good. And here, recall again, we are not assessing God’s acts against some higher standard of ethical action; we are merely measuring the stories we tell about him against his own supposed revealed nature as the transcendent Good. It is our story that is being judged for its internal coherence, in keeping with our rational grasp of justice and benevolence, not God who is being judged according to some external scale of ethical values.

I’m not saying that Hart would agree with the way I’m using this idea here; he might very well reject it. But if we can question, as he does in that book, the idea that eternal conscious torment could ever be a just punishment for any crime committed by finite beings with limited (and even corrupted) knowledge, intellect, and will, then I think we can extrapolate it further to a question about what God is really like and what he really wants and whether there is, as it were, one religion to rule them all and one religion to bind them.

Even as a theistically-inclined agnostic, I find myself defending certain points of Catholic doctrine in discussions with people who seem to take the idea of being Catholic as something more permissive than the Church thinks it is. People who identify as practicing, generally orthodox Catholics who nevertheless will look at certain aspects of non-negotiable (from a magisterial standpoint) belief and say, “Eh, I’m sorry, I just can’t make myself believe that.”

I get it. There are a bunch of things about Catholicism I can’t make myself believe, and I’ve thought at times that if I weren’t so compelled by its authority structure to offer religious obsequience to these things I might still be able to be Catholic. It remains my fundamental frame for understanding the world, because it was built into me starting at such a young age and I spent so much time immersed in it. It feels more “natural” to me (though it may in fact be just nurture) to believe and practice religion in a Catholic way, if I were to once again practice instead of merely offer dubious prayers to a God I’m not sure is even there, than it would to just up and change professions to something like, say, Eastern Orthodoxy. The latter has things about it that are more appealing to me, and things that are less. But to “switch teams” as it were would feel very jarring and incongruous indeed.

I don’t say that to rule it out. I only say it to observe the tension…the resistance to changing out one all-encompassing model of belief for another that is somewhat similar but also different in many essential aspects.

But isn’t this the human experience across the world? Aren’t we all shaped by where we are born and what culture we are born into and what familial practices have been in place for generations and how our particular race or culture tends to think about certain things (whether naturally or through societal conditioning), etc.?

If you’ve never done real evangelization — the kind where you try to convert some stranger to the supposed truth of your way of thinking — perhaps you’ve not encountered the innate difficulties of trying, through mere words and ideas and explanations of doctrines, to change another person’s entire way of approaching the numinous.

I happen to have done a lot of it, and there’s nothing easy about it.

But even so, the vast majority of us are reaching, in some way, towards the divine. We do not want to live in a nihilistic universe where the only meaning is that which you impart and the then it all goes up in smoke once entropy takes over and biological processes shut down. Perhaps, like me, you find that the answers offered by various religions are insufficient, but you also know that science doesn’t have any better ones.

At some point, whatever you believe (or don’t) takes some measure of faith that it is the most correct path.

You cannot know what you cannot know. You cannot prove what you cannot prove.

But the pursuit of those answers, to the best of your ability, is probably the most important single thread of activity you can do in your life. Question it. All of it. Point out the things that don’t make sense instead of lying and pretending they do. Remind yourself, if you’re a more dogmatic sort, that the things you believe are absolutely and unquestionably true about God didn’t come to you through some form of direct revelation, but through human intermediaries who very well may be misrepresenting their alleged divine inspiration or mediation, in whole or in part.

That doesn’t make whatever it is that lies beneath, the very substrate of reality, less real. It only means that its full contours cannot be known by creatures such as us, with limited reasoning powers and sensory apparatus and so on.

And that’s why, to me at least, the kind of triumphalistic certitude of the zealot has become so unappealing. You can’t learn anything with a full cup. You can’t take for granted what cannot be proven without doing a fundamental injustice to the pursuit of truth.

Epistemological humility — the willingness to admit that we “see through a glass, darkly,” and that our theology and ontology should be reflective of that, leaving openness to certain adjustments and a lot less ironclad surety — appears incredibly necessary for true meaning seekers.

A priori assumptions framed as beliefs are “a jig” as my friend

Kale Zelden

might call them. A jig is a tool; a filter; a limiting frame that allows a certain ease of use in the fabrication of things. But your table saw can do lots of different things, and other jigs or even free-form application are possible. If you forget this, and you start thinking there’s only one jig, one limiting filter, one type of product you can make, you’re missing a world of other possibilities.

In my Catholic days, I used to rant a good bit against religious indifferentism and syncretism, and I might still do that even now. If God is real, there’s a better than average chance that he cares what human beings believe about him. The problem is, there’s no way to check your answers. I don’t like the syncretistic impulse to mash different kinds of beliefs together and present that as something real and coherent, when it’s just a pastiche; a bespoke construct of our own making.

Where I would not so readily object to such things is in the person who uses this kind of cafeteria belief system as a heuristic that is perennially subject to revision when new information is found. The Problem of Divine Hiddenness remains a very real obstacle to faith. So if we are left to our own devices to try to ascertain why we are so inclined to believe in a God or gods despite that hiddenness, there’s going to be a certain amount of trial-and-error in assembling a collection of understandings and beliefs that strike us as the most likely to be true.

We just have to resist becoming stuck there when we have reason to revise.

To return to the central theme, it does not strike me as irrational to approach the idea of a singular phenomenon wearing different masks as worthy of consideration. That doesn’t really preclude the notion that some religions are more true than others, or that one might actually be the most true of all.

Clearly, the Christian notion is one that demands to be reckoned with in a way that others don’t, because it is a story of a God who not only inserts himself into human affairs, but who becomes one of us, to elevate our nature in such a way that we, too, can become more like him.

While I don’t find C.S. Lewis’s trilemma quite as ironclad as others do, I absolutely believe it’s something to be grappled with. It can’t merely be dismissed:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

I can imagine other conclusions than those laid out here, but I haven’t thought them through deeply enough to feel confident in presenting them yet. But there really is a kind of mutual exclusivity between notions of Jesus here, and Lewis is right to point out the superficiality of “the great moral teacher” hypothesis.

All of this is to say: I prefer, for now, not to be locked into the dogmatic presumption of correctness about one particular paradigm, even if I believe those who subscribe to a particular paradigm should probably be logically consistent in accepting its dogmas and not just picking and choosing. But I do understand, if each religion is making its own imperfect attempt at knocking on heaven’s door, so to speak, why some are inclined to say, “Well, I think this is mostly true, but this is where it strikes me as off; perhaps that aspect is just some man-made accretion.”

At the heart of all of this is something I hope we can all agree on: it matters very much to try our best to figure out which things about the supernatural realm are true, as far as can be ascertained, and to hew as closely to those truths as we can.

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