Using the word "God"

I’m spelling “God” with a capital “G” here, because I’m talking of “God” when it is used as a name and not as a regular noun. Some, like Jehovah’s witnesses, make it important to use the right name for God as well. And they may have a point. Namely that there, as with many other aspects of reality, may be some correspondence between how the spiritual world and the physical world work here. The correspondence would be that we almost always learn a person’s name before we get to know the person, even though it’s physically possible to get to know a person without knowing his or her name. 

But this is just speculations. And just as I find it problematic to make a clear distinction between the physical and the spiritual, I also find it problematic to draw straight lines between the two areas, where one can be assumed to work just the way the other one does.

What is not so much speculation, is the fact that labels carry certain connotations. For example, if we refer to God as “source”, it might imply more of an impersonal force that everything else flows out from. If God is, as I believe, intimately personal and wants to have a personal relationship with us, this label might lead us in the wrong direction. 

I have also heard the term “the universe” being used in a way that may or may not be interchangeable with “God”. It doesn’t seem to be used in directly the same manner, but still in ways similar, as an entity that is vastly bigger than us, that interacts with us, grants us wishes and teaches us lessons. This, for me, leads to a feeling of replacing God. Of attributing communication and willful actions from God to the universe.

There are of course other examples. But these are the most common that I have found in modern spirituality. And I don’t belong to the crowd of people that aspire to live in Christ, that condemn modern spirituality. I believe that there are valuable lessons in it from many of the thinker belonging to the category. But I think that God needs to be put in the proper place here, which is at the absolute centre. Because as the intimate, personal, and at the same time omni-potent, omni-present, eternal creator of everything, God is the beginning and the end-goal of all spirituality. God has to be.