I should like to suggest that God can be understood meaningfully not only as ground of being but also as the focus of ultimate concern.

God is the infinite measure against which we can see our own limited lives in proper perspective. Before God it is difficult for us to elevate the trivial to the central in our lives.

Idolatry is the confusion of a limited aspect of things with the ground of the totality. If an awareness of God as the ground of being does nothing more than enable us to refrain from endowing a partial and limited concern with the dignity and status reserved for what is of ultimate concern, it will have served the most important of all tasks.

God as the focus of ultimate concern challenges us to be the only persons we realistically can be, our authentic, finite selves in all of the radical insecurity and potentiality the life of mortal humanity affords.

Our prayers can no longer be attempts at dialogue with a personal God. They become aspirations shared in depth by the religious community. As aspiration there is hardly a prayer in the liturgy of Judaism which has lost its meaning or its power. Worship is the ultimate concern by the community before God, the focus of ultimate concern.

Paradoxically God as ground does everything and nothing. God does nothing in that God is not the motive or active power which brings us to personal self-discovery or to the community of shared experience. Yet God does everything because God shatters and makes transparent the patent unreality of every false and inauthentic standard.