What is Sacred Wahoo?

Meister Eckhart, the 14th Century preacher-wild-man-mystic says that all language has taken a vow to be mostly wrong about God. I take that to mean that whenever someone opens their mouth and starts yammering about God—no matter how eloquently they speak, no matter how smart they are, or how certain they are of what they are saying—they will be mostly wrong about God. This does not diminish the human impulse to describe God—it only is a way of acknowledging the vastness of the mystery and the fact that our tongues are just these small, clumsy, mucous-covered flappy things and human language is just a very small tool with to grasp the Ungraspable. 

The Koran speaks of the “99 names of God”—names like The Hidden, The Fashioner of Forms, The Bestower, The Reinstater Who Brings Back All, The Magnificence. The Producer, Originator, and Initiator of all. And 93 others.

In the book of Genesis, the very first name for God, five words in—“When, in the beginning, God created the heaven and earth…” the name for God in Hebrew is Elohim, and it is plural. There’s a lot of theology buried in that plurality.

Modern theologians who are responding to people’s distrust of traditional religion and their desire for scientific sounding definitions say things like the creator is that which “initiates the process and permeates all processes.”[1] The Germans go even farther, as they always do, and have a word: fliessgleichtgewicht (the flux-equilibrium that systems contain within themselves — the ability to allow a flow-through of matter-energy and information, the flow-through that makes for a self-stabilizing system.) [2],[3]

Drummers have the same word--pronounced in a low, gravelly, flirty, sensuous, kinda naughty sounding tone of voice: Grooooove…

In Scots Gaelic, the word for the Creator is Cruithear (pronounced KOO-tee-ahr).[4] It means the Shaper. The Irish name for Creator is Duileamh (DOOL-yev) which translates roughly into “the one who is inside the elements.” That word, Duileamh, also has the root in it of the word for desire and fondness and yearning, or love.[5] 

Taken all together, I like to say that the creator is the one inside everything—the one who shapes everything from the inside, who brings everything together and binds everything together through the power of yearning and love. When I say God, that’s who I am talking about: the one inside the elements who shapes everything from within, through the power of yearning, who is plural, who can dress anyway it wants to dress in order to move us, cajole us, heal us, and love us.

And if we open ourselves to that One, and we listen, not just with our ears but with our skin, and our animal bodies and our humans minds and our spiritual imagination, we can be taken into the Groove, to be changed and made better and maybe even wiser, more loving, taken into what I like to call groovelicious rhythmocity, or the shorthand: The Wahoo. 


Notes:
[1] Sallie McFague, The Body of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1993), 77

[2] Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (New Society Publishers 1998), 40

[3] No wonder theologians have to get tenured at seminaries. They’d never survive outside that little world, talking like that. Imagine a theologian ordering a #2 meal at the McDonald’s drive-up window. Seriously, they’d starve. Okay here’s my try at the joke: “Hmmm, yes. I believe I’d like a post-embodied, non-pneumatic bovine coagulation implanted between dome-shaped yeasted baked goods, with colorful condiments of medium viscosity binding syncretistically the whole into a unity, which bears an unchanging ontology without regard to its physical location in the created universe or self-identity of the preparer. And super-size it.”

[4] Frank MacEowen, The Mist Filled Path (New World Library, California, 2002) 127

[5] Tom Cowan, Yearning for the Wind (New World Library 2003) 32