Our Every Breath

Have you ever flipped through the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament, and see the word LORD capitalized and italicized?

This is because this is actually a filler word. The translators were simply replacing the tetragrammaton (a fancy word that simply means four letters) of the four Hebrew consonants YHWH—which we have come to pronounce as Yahweh—with a phraseology a bit more palatable to our Christian vantage points.

When you see LORD, it’s where YHWH used to be.

And nothing wrong with that. But I believe we’re missing something when we simply pass over it and keep reading.

YHWH—a simple set of letters, which, at their root simply mean:

“To be…”

“To cause to exist…”

Or,

“To become…”

This means the earliest writers of Scripture, when it came time to make a feeble attempt to ascribe a name to the Creator of the Cosmos, could do no better than simply describing God as to be… to cause to exist… to become.

Another definition of God then, if I could make a small contribution, could be:

Existence Itself.

You don’t have to agree with me.

I’m sure we’d still get along just fine.

But I find that beautiful.

And I’m convinced that everywhere we find a bit of beauty, we find a bit of God.

There perhaps isn’t a more powerful verse in all of Scripture than found in Exodus 3:4 when Moses asks for the name of God, and God simply responds with “I Am Who I Am.”

The Great I Am.

The Great Existence.

The Great Becoming.

I Am Existence Itself.

Those four consonants, YHWH, are what linguists call aspirates—soft sounds, shaped more by air than by tongue or lips. Because the original Hebrew language did not know the concept of vowels (a truth I wrestled with through six painful semesters of Ancient Hebrew), we were left to insert our own vowels to interpret the sound as Yahweh.

But let’s not move past those soft consonants.

Let’s not move past the aspirates.

Let’s not move past the idea that instead of being formed with hard movements of the mouth and tongue, they are formed more by the movement of air coming from our lungs, especially the H (Heh), which is a breathy sort of sound, made possibly only by exhalation, which, once more from my sliver of a vantage point and small understanding of the cosmos, means the name of God is easier to breathe than to pronounce.

I like that.

In fact, many scholars and mystics have pointed out that the very word Yahweh was the writers attempting to capture the sound of our breath.

Yah—We breathe in. We receive.

Weh—We breathe out. We let go.

The rhythms of life.

Our very existence.

What’s taking place at our core every second of every day—when we rise and when we sleep—is the very name of God.

Not to mention that in most languages, the word for spirit and breath are the same word.

But how often do we think about our breathing?

Not often I suppose.

Though we’re never left without it.

Not until the abstract becomes our reality, that is.

Not until a small child wakes up in the morning for school, only to realize he has no breath in his lungs.

His single mother flings open the door only to find her youngest convulsing on the floor, struggling for whatever molecule of oxygen which might keep him alive until the next one is needed.

She tosses him into the car, rolls the windows down, and speeds like an ambulance down the freeway to the nearest emergency room, all the time rubbing the back of her baby who was born without breath in the first place, commanding him softly to “Breathe, baby… Breathe,” as he held his head out the window, desperately longing to obey her soft commands.

There were no cell phones back then.

She just didn’t go to work that morning.

She would deal with that later.

That was my momma.

And I love her dearly.

During times like that, we do pay attention to the breath in our lungs, or the lack thereof.

Other than that, it’s simply our everyday rhythms.

Breathing in and breathing out.

Our every breath proclaiming the name of the one who crafted us out of Love and Stardust.

The Great I Am.

Yahweh…

Yahweh…

Our every breath.

This is beautiful because it means we’ve never really been alone, no matter how distant we might feel.

God has been as near to us as our every breath.

And loneliness just might be the boldest lie the universe has ever told.

Those who experience loneliness, as we all have, are not lonely… they’re simply holding their breath.

Richard Rohr points it out much more beautifully than I ever could, in my favorite of all his works entitled, The Naked Now:

I remind people that there is no Islamic, Christian, or Jewish way of breathing. There is no American, African, or Asian way of breathing. There is no rich or poor, gay or straight way of breathing. The playing field is utterly leveled. It is all one and the same air, and this divine wind ‘blows where it will’ (John 3:8). No one can control this Spirit… This makes the name of God our first and last word as we enter and leave the world.

I find this beautiful.

But I also find this practical.

I have many friends in prison these days, and I like to remind them that as long as they have access to breath, they have access to God.

One can be on the front row of the church every Sunday for the last sixty years, and their every breath is proclaiming the name of their Creator, who crafted them through and for Love.

Or one can spend years in a segregated housing unit, their only encounter with the outside world being when the slot on their door opens up and a cold meal is passed through, and yet their every breath is proclaiming the name of their Creator who, yes, crafted them through and for Love… even in their isolation.

As long as we have breath, we have God, and loneliness just might be the greatest lie the universe has ever told.