Theology of Breathing

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"I cannot emphasize enough the momentous importance of the Jewish revelation of the name of God. It puts the entire nature of our spirituality in the correct context and, if it had been followed, could have freed us from much idolatry and arrogance. As we now spell and pronounce it, the word is Yahweh. For those speaking Hebrew, it was the Sacred Tetragrammation YHVH (yod, he, vav, and he). It was considered a literally unspeakable word for Jews, and any attempt to know what we were talking about was “in vain”, as the commandment said (Exodus 20:7). Instead, the used Elohim or Adonai in speaking or writing. From God’s side the divine identity was kept mysterious and unavailable to the mind; when Moses asked for the divinity’s name, he got only the phrase that translates something to this effect: “I AM WHO AM...This is my name forever; this is my title for all generations” (Exodus 3:14-15).

This unspeakability has been long recognized, but we now know it goes even deeper: formally the word was not spoken at all, but breathed! Many are convinced that its correct pronounciation is an attempt to replicate and imitate the very sound of inhalation and exhalation (from Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous). The one thing we do every moment of our lives is therefore to speak the name of God. This makes it our first and our last word as we enter and leave this world.

For some years now, I have taught this to contemplative groups in many countries, and it changes peoples’ faith and prayer lives in substantial ways. 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 way of breathing. The playing field is utterly leveled. The air of the earth is one and the same air, and this divine wind “blows where it will” (John 3:8) - which appears to be everywhere. No one and no religion can control this spirit.

When considered in this way, God is suddenly as available and accessible as the very thing we all do constantly - breathe. Exactly as some teachers of prayer always said, “Stay with the breath, attend to your breath”: the same breath that was breathed into Adam’s nostrils by this Yahweh (Genesis 2:7); the very breath that Jesus handed over with trust on the cross (John 19:30) and then breathed on us as shalom, forgiveness, and the Holy Spirit all at once (John 20:21-23). And isn’t it wonderful that breath, wind, spirit, and air are precisely nothing - and yet everything?

Just keep breathing consciously in this way and you will know that you are connected to humanity from cavemen to cosmonauts, to the entire animal world, and even to trees and the plants. And we are now told that the atoms we breathe are physically the same as stardust from the original Big Bang. Oneness is no longer merely a vague mystical notion, but a scientific fact." - Rohr, "The Naked Now"