Tag: God

Down by the River

Photo by Ruedi Haberli on Unsplash

“But to come to some understanding of God, we must let the story question us . . . When we write, we should become a question to ourselves.”1

Part way through the thirtieth semester he rebelled. Quietly. He wondered who he thought he was and why he was advising students how to live their lives. He wondered if they believed him. When they bent over their notes or looked at him quizzically were they listening or were they merely hearing the noises he made with his mouth?

He’d lost any clear picture of his own life, obscured as it was by the constant intrusion of doubts and sleight of hand. What gave him the right — or duty — to tell other people what they should do?

He didn’t lie to others; that just wasn’t right. But he’d convinced himself he was invisible to most people and that when he left the room people forgot about him. Occasionally he doubted he could be found. And there was the stuttering moment when all his choices held an acorn of truth, every one a potential oak and no foretelling which of them would flourish.

Teaching was the vocation: to free the truth was its compelling subversion. At first it was simply teaching as he had been taught. Later, with more experience, there was something else — call it true north — needle quivering on the compass, pointing to Truth and Beauty. The goal, he thought, was to reach that which must be believed to be seen. “Faith seeking understanding,” said old Saint Anselm. But should we trust ourselves in the seeking?

There was the pebble he’d touched in his pocket all those years when the ethical and theological theories he presented became lighter than air. The pebble carried weight, had balance and smoothness, a reality that could not be kicked away. It represented the solid earthiness of humanity. It asked, “What are you going to do?”

He’d become a teacher because there was nothing he’d rather do than learn and to share what he’d learned and to bring others to the door of their own learning. All those years later he smiled, remembering that young man entering the classroom for the first time. He had seen himself part of a great stream of educators, the people who ‘lead others out’ into new places and new ideas.

He’d discovered along the way that people wouldn’t travel to places they didn’t think existed. Or turn aside for a burning bush. Yet there were days when curiosity and imagination flared up in the classroom and the breath of the Spirit could be felt. When the light flicked up in a student’s eyes, he felt he was on holy ground.

Every day he carried the tools into the classroom where the students and he were building their boat of common learning. Everything they brought to the classroom went into building the boat: the scrap bits left over from previous boats, the new pieces cut and shaped for this one, parts they discovered that no one had known were there.

What they learned together would create the boat and the boat would carry them across the river at the end of the semester, and what they had learned about themselves in the building of it would help them find their paths on the other side.

There was always a river to cross in life. This would not be their last. Crossing rivers was sometimes an escape, sometimes a transition to a new life, sometimes just what had to be done at the time. What happened at the riverbank was always about making a decision.

The story of Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord at the River Jabbok had always transfixed him. He’d been wrestling with God for years. ‘Where are you?’ he’d ask at four a.m. “I’m at the end of my world.”

Then he’d put a brave face on it, stride into class, and mask his fear with a discussion of God-among-us — Jesus. The same Jesus who, struggling to know himself, asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”

And then, “Who do you say that I am?”

He knew this was the most important question in his life, but at four a.m. he had no clear answers. He thought he knew who he was — “I am a teacher” — but that was collapsing like a riverbank undercut by the torrent. Eventually, everything he said in the classroom sounded to him like clanging cymbals. He wondered if the corrosion within showed on his face. If doubt and hope had finally fought each other to a standstill.

Some thought Jacob’s angel was really God. That God had come to strip Jacob down to his true self and whatever transpired on the riverbank that night could only be done by God himself, face to face with Jacob.

In the darkness a figure touched him on the shoulder. He spun around, almost screamed. He was outmatched, overwhelmed. Desperation gave him tenacity. As he fought, his determination surged as his strength diminished. He’d lost himself back there, but he was ready to find himself again, even if it cost him his life.

  1. Cording, Robert. Finding the World’s Fullness: On Poetry, Metaphor, and Mystery. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2019, p. 66. ↩

Carry That Weight

Photo by Davidson Luna on Unsplash

“Religious insights have to be carried over a long distance to reach expression, and they may easily shrivel or even perish on the way from the heart to the lips.”1

I wish I could remember a moment, some white-hot flash, when I first realized the sacred in the flood of the senses. I’d like to think my search for God began early in life, but that would be claiming too much. What I do remember is saying goodbye to a friend when I was five.

My grandparents and I were moving from Canada to California and I was leaving behind my first-grade friends, the hill behind our house where I sledded, and the stand of junipers in our back yard that grew so thick I could crawl beneath them to watch the world and dream.

I knew we were moving away because my grandfather had explained it to me. My impression was we would first be here and then we would be there. The logistics of it didn’t occur to me. There were no pictures in my head of us climbing into our Studebaker and driving from Ontario to California. Neither did I understand how long it would take nor what California was. There was a gap of experience that simply did not rise to imagination. So, I cheerfully went about my young life, immersed in the pursuit of bugs, building roads and tunnels in my backyard sandbox, and peering out through the branches of my juniper fortress.

Bustle and commotion, the moving van pulling up and the contents of our house boxed up and carried down stairs and up ramps into an enormous box on wheels. It wasn’t until we were finally in the car — me in the back seat with my books and the box lunch my grandmother had made for us — and my grandfather was praying for traveling mercies, his head bowed over the steering wheel and his murmured words gathering into me, that the truth hit my gut.

“I have to do something!” I yelled, and I wrenched open my door before my grandparents could stop me and dashed around the house to the sandbox in the back yard. Squatting down, I clawed a hole in the sand and sat back on my heels. And I saw not wet sand and twigs, but a green, lush, and fertile canopy of trees far below and at the lip of the hole, his legs dangling, my merry little elf, my invisible friend.

I told him I would miss him, but we were going away and I was pretty sure they didn’t allow elves in California. He would guard the fortress under the junipers until I should return. This was not goodbye. That was understood. And then he grinned and waved and leaped and I covered the hole. I stood up, brushed my knees, and ran to the car idling in front of our house and we drove away.

We arrived in California in due time. We built a home on the side of a mountain overlooking the Napa Valley, on a site tangled with manzanita bushes and strewn with volcanic rocks that were pitted and bubbled. I immersed myself in that nature, with acres of abandoned vineyards just up the road and streams and lakes to explore. There in Nature was the depth of the mysterious, clothed in the familiar forms of animals, trees, stone, and clouds.

There may not have been a law against elves in California, but I never saw another one nor did I apparently need to. The companionship of an invisible elf gave way to visible friends. It was my first experience with the numinous.

***

Our impressions of the divine coalesce early and later we subject them to reflection. The absence of my father from my life — alive, but far away — shaped how I regarded God for many years. Our separation was the result of fate, forced choices, and the slow accretions that time and habit build up from settled ways and random circumstances.

God-hauntedness has run like a dark thread through my life. Alongside a quietly intense religious upbringing there was the constant presence of the absence of God, an absence with a voice. We have no images of God nor definitions. We have only God’s name, “I Am,” a name that in its utterance brings us to silence and dissolves all time into a present pregnant with the future.

“Something is asked of us. But what?” wrote Abraham Joshua Heschel.2 It is a recurring theme in his books. It is the question, Who — or what — is God? The question is our silent companion, standing off to the side as we move through the world under the sky, give and take with others, and face our eventual death. This is what we can only begin to respond to when we have decided to listen, to feel, to receive, instead of first postulating, arguing, or explaining.

Faith, said Heschel, begins in wonder and awe. That doesn’t preclude rational thinking about God at all, but as one of my professors was fond of saying, “No one was converted by the ontological argument.”

We cannot live on mystery alone; desire to know gives rise to language and language both orders and liberates. We wield the structures of language in shaping the welter of sense impressions flooding in on us from the world. Though we are limited creatures, there is almost no limit to how we may express that ordering through imagination. In our creativity is the strongest evidence of our family resemblance to the Father of us all.

“Religious insights have to be carried over a long distance to reach expression,” said Heschel, “and they may easily shrivel or even perish on the way from the heart to the lips.”3

I have thought about this vivid experience now and then in the intervening sixty-four years. Even now, if I shut my eyes, I can see the backyard, the sandbox, the febrile green of the forest canopy (only visible if seen directly from above), and the wizened, mischievous face of my elf. At the time, I easily made a distinction between what I saw and what was “real.” Yet, I felt compelled to do it and there was a sense of completion in having done it. It wasn’t something I discussed with my grandparents at the time nor with anyone since. Writing about it now breaks up the ice on a long-frozen river.

Any moment in our history can be a window to our interior life. When I gaze through this one, I see a child putting away childish things — without which he could not have imagined later the unseen presence of the Son of Man.

  1. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Man is Not Alone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1952, p. 98. ↩
  2. Heschel, p. 98. ↩
  3. Heschel, p. 98. ↩

Love’s Body, Love’s Spirit

Photo by Roland Hechanova on Unsplash

“Among men, who knows what a man is but the man’s own spirit within him? In the same way, only the Spirit of God knows what God is.” — 1 Cor 2:11 NEB

For several weeks in the long, dark, waiting room of this election year, I immersed myself in the British television drama, “Call the Midwife.” Obsessed as I was with the campaign season, impatient to reach the due date of November 4, apprehensive of the rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem, I found some solace in the wonder and awe of childbirth as practiced in the East End of London in the 1950s.

The sisters and the nurses of Nonnatus House carry out their mission with good humor and courage. Always on call, they swoop down the narrow streets on their bicycles at all hours, clutching their birthing kits to them and dashing up narrow stairs to bedrooms reeking of sweat and pain.

The fathers pace outside. If they are young and it’s their first child, they run their hands through their hair and chain-smoke. If they already have five or six, they leave it to the midwives and await the news down at the pub.

Every episode ushers several babies into the world. The mothers are vulnerable and young, brimming with hope and terrified. The older women, the ones who have been through this too many times, bear down grimly. For them, the awe and mystery are long gone. They’re pacing themselves to go through the wall ahead while they’ve still got breath to scream. But all of them, mothers and midwives, rejoice when the babies are born, bloody, squalling, and beautiful.

It’s entirely natural to gape in astonishment at these creatures. When my son was born, he emerged gray and slick; in that moment I knew he was dead. But then in seconds—hours, it seemed—his robust cry transfixed me. He blossomed pink, then red. Then Love crashed in, a tsunami of feeling that narrowed my vision to a single point. Reason, control, diffidence — all was dwarfed by this mighty rock of love, solid and sudden, in my soul’s desert.

I had not known what to feel or how. Through circumstances and geography I had been raised as an only child by my grandparents. While I certainly did not want for love and all my needs were cared for, the absence of my father left me with an inner coldness that I feared. I had marked this day with dread and hope. Dread, because I did not feel capable of loving a child in the way he or she deserved. And hope, foolish or not, that I might somehow be saved through this experience.

It wasn’t that I was socially withdrawn or reclusive. I had friends, good friends, the kind that were as close as brothers or sisters, but without the competition for affection or the resentment that sometimes results from one’s birth order. It was rather that I had a stillness within, an impassivity as of a house intact but abandoned. It felt as if I had walled something up inside myself, as much to protect something within as to keep some unnamed terror without.

Years later, through a counselor, I was given a clue to a possible cause. He recommended John Bowlby’s book, Separation, which reported the effects on children who were sent to homes in the countryside from London and other cities to escape the nightly bombings during the Second World War. When finally, they were returned to their mothers after a long absence, they often refused any contact and turned away, silent and despairing. Bowlby believed that problems in the adulthood of these children could be traced back to this early separation.

My mother left when I was nine months old. My father, now alone, desperately needed to give me a stable home, so a succession of friends cared for me until his parents took me in when I was three. I don’t know if this explains my reticence entirely. We are woven of many strands, not all of them identifiable and no one of them strong enough to account for who we are. We make it up as we go and later, if we’re fortunate, we may see there was a pattern to our steps.

I grew up, blessed in ways I only later acknowledged. It was always the case that I would go to college; that was never in doubt. It was expected that I would work for the church in some capacity, either as a pastor, a writer, or as a teacher. It was assumed I would have a personal relationship with Christ, the inevitable outcome of the sermons I’d heard, the Bible classes I’d attended, the religious instruction I’d received for baptism.

It was taken for granted that I would fall in love. Which I did, several times, hardly knowing more than how desperately I wanted to give love, yet feeling how little I had to offer.

***

In the Advent season we live in expectation of change. We live in hope. We are pregnant with it. However else we may imagine God throughout the year, this is the time we think of God as an infant. God, born “on a Christmas morning.” God, whose coming as a baby transforms the world, one possibility at a time.

We call it the Incarnation, when Spirit becomes flesh, and we build a creche to house the Baby Jesus. We spot the birth of the Lord in a stable out behind an inn, nestled among the patient donkey, the lowing cattle, a rooster or two and a dog.

As an historical event, we know very little about his birth really. It was probably in 4 C.E., most likely at Nazareth, a backwater town in a province of the Empire notable mostly for its volatile populace and its strange apocalyptic urges. His birth was foretold, as later writers believed. It was somehow written in the stars, as some Persian astrologers divined. It was a threat to the local ruler’s corrupt regime, and it was the trigger to the massacre of male babies under the age of two within a precinct.

The birth itself was unremarkable, similar to the millions before it and the billions that would follow. There was pain and blood and relief and joy. But what makes God so perfectly real, so thoroughly human, so ultimately thisworldly, such that we are drawn near year after year, is that in some mysterious way this infant is the embodiment of the Divine.

In the epigram, Paul says we know ourselves as God is self-known. If that seems a stretch, the possibility of Christmas is that the Incarnation brings us in love to the Christ-child, mirrored now in every vulnerable birth of every baby born, and in so doing, as Paul says, we come to “possess the mind of Christ” and thus to know ourselves as we are known by God (1 Cor 2: 16 NEB).

Looking for a Better God

Photo: Liam Richards on Unsplash

Tell me, in the name of your mercies, you, Master, who are my God, what you are to me. Say to my soul, ‘I myself am your rescue.’ Say it in such a way that I hear it.” 1

Consider the God you have been brought up to believe. If you are honest with yourself, isn’t this God a larger version of yourself or of someone else you admire or a vague cloud of attributes and virtues that seem godlike? The education we undergo as children about God is sometimes hit-or-miss, sometimes rigorous, but never inconsequential.

We are taught about God through many devices. We learn stories from the Bible, we listen to sermons and devotional talks. We encounter God in our worship services through the readings and the liturgy. The sacraments are designed to “show us the Father” through our experience of Jesus. Our teachers lead us through classes that sometimes encourage our thinking, but quite often require nothing but our passive acceptance. And we learn a great deal about an American God from religious leaders and politicians.

As children we are taught to think of God as “our Father who art in heaven,” an image that may or may not be comforting for children. For some, it might simply remind them of their absent fathers and the pain of that absence. For others, it might bring an image of a grandfather, kindly, old, and far away. And to some it might suggest a powerful, yet loving, being who watches over this world and our lives with infinite care.

If we stay within a religious community into adulthood our ideas of God might change. I qualify this because I suspect that for many people the God of their childhood does quite well for them as adults. And why not? We’ve been told that God doesn’t change. God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. If there is any surety in life as a Christian, they claim, it’s that God is immutable. He doesn’t change because He doesn’t need to. If God is perfection, defined as all the omnis—all-knowing, all-powerful, present everywhere, all-loving—any change could only be toward imperfection. And who needs an imperfect God?

But many of us go through tremendous changes between childhood and adulthood. Most of these are not cataclysmic but cumulative. One day, in the midst of paying bills, adjusting to family life, raising children, and repeating our breakfast mantra—“I am a professional”—we just might have an overheating of our spiritual engine. “Our Father” suddenly seems long ago and far away. He can neither be summoned by prayer nor conjured through an artificial religious experience. He is not at our disposal.

Moses certainly knew this first-hand. Barbara Brown Taylor describes it vividly:

“Moses knew God as well as anyone ever had, yet God did not tone anything down for him. The mountain shook like it was about to blow apart. The cloud at the top of the mountain was so thick that even Moses could not see inside it. Anyone else who even tried would die, God said—and Moses went anyway. He took the full dose of divine darkness and lived to tell about it, though God would remain a tremendous mystery to him for the rest of his life.”2

This is not a God for children. This is not a God for most adults. This is a God whose very presence threatens human life, as it pours into all available spaces and consumes the oxygen. Moses lived to tell the tale, as did Abraham and Elijah and Isaiah—but not because they were superheroes. They lived because there is more to this fearsome God than fear. Here is the invisible God who is known through the visible—through humanity—and most fully through the humanity of Jesus.

We are living paradoxes: we expect our God to be infinitely more than we can imagine, yet we know that every one of our metaphors for God is severely limited by our imagination. We can bend and stretch our God-models to their limits, but we first must have models to bend. If we can’t find a metaphor for God that enlivens us are we spiritually dead?

“If so,” said Anglican priest Harry Williams, “you must spend your time here looking for a better God — you can look for a better God by reading, by thinking, by discussion, by the experience of common worship and private prayer, by living, knocking about and being knocked about.”3

It’s the ‘knocking about and being knocked about’ part that I find illuminating. It suggests that all our life experiences, not just the ones we label ‘religious’ or even ‘spiritual’, matter a great deal in how we look for God—and the kind of God we find.

Our ‘knocking about’ stretches over our whole lifespan. If, at any point, someone asks me to describe my understanding of God, they shouldn’t be surprised if they come back in a year or so and I have a different story. There will likely be a thread of consistency running from one end to the other of my years, but the details, the priorities, the images and metaphors I find in my search for God will vary considerably as I move through different experiences in life.

When I was a teenager, and even well into my twenties, I confess I thought of God mostly as an agent who was there for my benefit. Help me to pass this exam, get me into this grad school, help me to find this job.

These were important things to me, but the demands left little room for God’s character to be revealed. As a result, I trapped myself into prayer as a contract between two parties—a sure way to kill it off. And it was killed. For years I could hardly bring myself to pray. I couldn’t figure out how it worked for one thing, and for another, I had a picture of myself panhandling before God. According to my framing of God, I obviously didn’t have enough faith, or I’d gotten the formula wrong or—worse thought—God didn’t stop at that corner anymore.

But there was another problem, the problem of evil, that had everything to do with the standard-issue view of God as responsible for everything that happens on earth. I’d long ago ejected from my arsenal of ready-made answers the notion that God actively brings evil on us as a test of our loyalty. With a god like that, who needs the Devil?

I was gradually coming round to the idea that God’s grand experiment with humans was a learning experience for God too. Giving freedom to creatures like us—real freedom to choose—means signing up for the long haul, learning patience, and never giving up on us.

As far as I was concerned, Job won his case against God and God quietly conceded on the merits. But then God opened up a relation with Job that was deeper and wider than anything Job had experienced before. It transcended arguments and codes of conduct. It could not be contained in words.

Job got it. “I had heard of you,” he said, “but now my eye sees you.”4 Job had argued on the basis of a theoretical and legal relation to God, only to be thrust into a close encounter with God that left him speechless, humbled, and strangely satisfied.

Then there was silence: we do not hear from God again in Scripture until the Gospels.

The narrative of God in the Old Testament is of a character who is anything but immutable. He rages, he weeps, he loves, he suffers, he dazzles, terrifies, woos, and comforts. He moves and adapts to our changing circumstances. He meets us where we are. As Charles Taylor says in A Secular Age, “God’s Providence is his ability to respond to whatever the universe and human agency throw up. God is like a skilled tennis player, who can always return the serve.”5

What kind of a God do we need today, right now, in the midst of this national agony?

The Gospels give us Jesus, God-in-Christ—for me an extraordinary, mysterious, profound person, who literally loved us unto death, and lives now as God-in-us through the Spirit. There is nothing we go through that God-in-Christ has not experienced or suffered. There is nothing, as Paul says, that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. A love that can bring justice to the silenced and turn the hearts of the silencers inside out.

None of this can be proven in clinical tests. But when we look for a better god than the one who cannot be moved by our suffering, we stumble into a great disclosure: “there is at the heart of life a Heart.”6 If we cannot let go of our guard rails, God-in-Christ has time and patience.

This is where faith becomes the path. “How am I to get it? Only in the ancient school of experience, by trial and error, by pain and joy, and, most of all, by faith, a confidence that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, life is on my side and not against me. This is the confidence that Jesus brought . . .”7

It’s then I realize, however fleetingly, that stepping on the path is itself the finding of a better God.

  1. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Sarah Ruden. New York: Modern Library, 2017, p. 7. ↩
  2. Taylor, Barbara Brown. Learning to Walk in the Dark. New York: HarperCollins, 2014, p. 57. ↩
  3. Williams, H. A. The True Wilderness. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965, p. 51. ↩
  4. Job 42:5, NRSV. ↩
  5. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2007, p. 277. ↩
  6. Thurman, Howard. Howard Thurman: Essential Writings. Selected with an Introduction by Luther E. Smith, Jr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, p. 41. ↩
  7. Williams, H. A. The True Wilderness. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965, p. 67. ↩

In This Moment

Photo: Jonathan Farber on Unsplash

“I know this happiness is provisional: . . . but ineluctable this shimmering / of wind in the blue leaves.”1 — Denise Levertov

“Jesus wept.”

The shortest verse in the Bible and the favorite of middle-school children who are required to memorize a Bible verse. Why he wept can easily be conjectured: his friend Lazarus had died. An urgent summons had come, but Jesus dawdled, deliberately, it seems. He and the disciples were across the Jordan River, not far from where John had baptized Jesus. It was a prudent move: he had barely escaped a stoning outside the Temple for blasphemy. The crowds found him, hailed him as being everything John had said he was and more. “Many came to believe in him there.”2

When the messenger arrives, Jesus assures the disciples that “this sickness will not end in death; it has come for the glory of God.”3 So, although he loves Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, he holds on, he stays in place for two days. This is either a consummate folly or a breathtaking high-wire act of faith.

When the devil took Jesus, famished and weakened, to the pinnacle of the Temple, and invited him to fling himself out over the city because the angels would bear him to earth as lightly as a feather, Jesus retorted that God is not to be tested. This life is not a circus act. But now, knowing that Lazarus will surely die, Jesus waits. His time is coming. If he would not tempt Death for himself, he is willing to defy it for a friend. After two days, Jesus says to the disciples, Let’s go. Time to waken Lazarus from sleep. Ah, they say, he’ll be alright then. No, says Jesus, he’s dead. This will be good for your faith. Let’s go.

But the disciples remember how close death came to Jesus the last time he provoked the powers that be. If he goes back this soon, those who want him dead will definitely finish the job. “Are you going there again?” they ask incredulously. Anyone can walk in the daylight, argues Jesus. The real test is whether you can walk in the dark without stumbling.

There was darkness ahead, without question. And Thomas, patron saint of doubters everywhere, breaks the open-mouthed silence. “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

Bethany is two miles from Jerusalem. They are there in less than an hour. “If you had been here,” says Martha sorrowfully, “my brother would not have died.”4 And some standing nearby wondered aloud why he could open the eyes of the blind but had done nothing to keep Lazarus from dying.

***

It is after Easter, but I am thinking about death. Not so much death as dying, the myriad of individual droplets of experience we call “life” spinning down into the whirlpool we call death. I am thinking of the violent, hallucinogenic dreams survivors of the coronavirus have endured. They were swept out in that riptide, far from shore; somehow, they find themselves once again emerging from the surf. I am wondering how they re-enter the life that has stuttered along in their absence. On their return from that hellish dreamscape, what will be most precious to them? How will they live with the gaps and absences in their timelines? These dislocations will change them—our friends, our neighbors, our families.

I stand pensively in the April afternoon sun, trying to memorize the tint around the back petals of the tulips in Brookside Gardens. I want to recall this moment years from now, when a scent or a certain cast of light brings it back. I want there to be a moment to bring back.

How strange it is to walk within a glorious spring day in Maryland, soft with yellow light and bright with flowers, while thousands of people fight for their lives—and thousands more risk their own lives for them. We have not seen such an indiscriminate killer in this country for years. It is “As if a man should flee from the face of a lion, and a bear should meet him: or enter into the house, and lean with his hand upon the wall, and a serpent should bite him.”5

We are in one of those social earthquakes that lay bare our fault lines, when the tectonic plates shift under our feet and upthrust the strata of neglect and callousness that future societies will judge us by. But we see, in addition to the sturdy bravery of our best—the nurses, respiratory therapists, doctors, and scientists—the quiet endurance of the grocery clerks and delivery people, postal and sanitation workers. The social divides and the rampant inequities are exposed; we see with new appreciation the people whose daily efforts define the normal we belatedly cherish.

Later, at home, I pick up a memoir by Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow’s Story.6 I am wary, for she writes prodigiously—not just in the number of her books, but through the style and mood and the enveloping weight of her words. Her eye omits nothing, even as she writes of her confusion in grief.

She writes of how her husband died in hospital a week after being admitted with pneumonia. He seemed to improve, so she left his bedside to catch a couple of hours of restless sleep at home. They called from the hospital deep in the night; they were urgent but cryptic.

She races to his room. A doctor tells her there was nothing they could do. She is in freefall. She is in a parallel universe. She sees herself across the room, a sobbing figure, crooked with grief. Who is this person? When she crosses the threshold of his room, she crosses an equator to a hemisphere she will never leave.

I wanted to experience through her how she brought these two halves of her life, marriage and widowhood, together. How did she see them; first with one eye closed and then with the other? Like every person suffering the death of a loved one, she learns while grieving.

It seems to me that Jesus learns this too, that his confidence on Wednesday ebbs into grief on Sunday. No matter how we prepare, the death of one we love is a gut-punch.

Jesus stands before the tomb and weeps for his friend, already four days dead. He weeps for all humans who die and are dying. And he weeps for himself, for his own dying, which he knows is up ahead. He has meditated on his coming death since Lucifer promised him he wouldn’t die. He knows it will be public, violent, and humiliating. Raising Lazarus will be the last straw. The machinery to kill Jesus will whir into action.

***

If Jesus raised Lazarus, why can’t he prevent the COVID-19 victims from dying? Wrong question.

Raising Lazarus is a sign of wonders to come. Jesus does it as a warning and a blessing. In John’s Gospel, Jesus heals, forgives sins, feeds thousands—all signs that we might believe that God sent him. The raising of Lazarus is a sign too, a sign that death will one day be vanquished. It is a test case, a finger pointing to the moon, a “first-fruits” as the Bible says.

Do you wonder what Lazarus was thinking when consciousness returned? As a dream fragments on waking, slipping through our fingers as light and sound envelop us, so he must have struggled at first in panic when he found himself bound in a winding-sheet. Then he is surrounded by faces—his sisters, Jesus, his neighbors and friends. He is confused, somewhat embarrassed, but he cannot prevent the upsurge of surprise and relief and then joy unabated. When our loved ones die, when we are dying, Lazarus is a living pledge of wonders still to come.

“This is the heart of this story: the essence of all things became part of existence—subject to change, decay, and death, just like us.”7 As much as the die is cast and his fate is sealed, Jesus sees beyond his own death. He bows his head and weeps again for relief, gratitude, love abounding.

“Here we discover the answer to perhaps the biggest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? The answer is, because essence—or God, as we usually say—always intended to be our companion, to be with us . . . Jesus is the whole meaning and purpose for existence in the first place. Jesus is the reason we exist.”8

Agnostic as to the how, of the resurrection, I am all in for the why: it is God’s way of making sure we’ll be with him forever. And although my imagination bleeds out when I think about the afterlife, I’m going on record to say it will be a feast for the senses and a jolt to the mind. To say nothing of love and friendship. And when dying inevitably comes between us and this Narnia, God will see us through it with equanimity.

  1. Levertov, Denise. “Of Being,” in The Stream and the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes, New York: New Directions, 1997, p. 5. ↩
  2. Jn. 10:42, NEB. ↩
  3. Jn. 11:4, NEB. ↩
  4. Jn. 11:21, NEB. ↩
  5. Amos 5:19, Douay-Rheims Bible. ↩
  6. Oates, Joyce Carol. A Widow’s Story: A Memoir. New York: The Ontario Review, 2011. ↩
  7. Wells, Samuel. Walk Humbly: Encouragements for Living, Working, and Being. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmanns Publishing, 2019, p. 49. ↩
  8. Wells, p. 49. ↩

A Labor of the Instant

Photo by the author

“Religious writing, poetry that is authentic religious writing, writing that is religious work, is very precisely an attempt to be where the action is, God’s action, where this reality, me, my words, my perception, meet what is fundamental, God. . .”1

What do we say when we talk and write about God? It’s a question that goes deeper and deeper, like those little Russian dolls, one inside the other, until you lift out the last one, the one so small it cannot be opened but only may be held. Much of what we talk about when we talk about God is precisely that—talk about our talking of God, metatalk,talk that sets us at several removes from God and turns God into an object to be scrutinized alongside other objects in the world. Such talk clarifies the boundaries of definitions and aligns the methods of discourse, but it does not translate well out of the seminar and the conference setting.

We must ask ourselves, then, especially those of us who call ourselves Christians, why people—or rather, why we—talk and write about God? One reason, surely, is that we hope others will experience something of God, something that will help them dive deeper, become more supple, find more meaning, discover a saving attunement to Spirit. And this motivation arises on the assumption that we have witnessed in our own lives the outlines of what that something is, through tradition and revelation and personal experience. We can only express with credibility that which we ourselves have seen.

So the “why” of this form of talk inevitably leads to the “what,” a movement from motive to content. But that seems backwards, as if our enthusiasm (from en theos, to be in God) suddenly went searching for the message about God that we could give to others.

The way we were taught about witnessing for our faith always began with the content of doctrine, a system of beliefs that logically cohered and was meant to be persuasive. Only then did you overcome your shyness or your instinctual respect for the privacy of others, and launch the frontal assault for their conversion in the paramilitary style of witnessing that some Protestant traditions employ.

We looked to doctrine to guide us into a relationship with Christ. We thought that to begin with beliefs would eventually lead us to love and to a sense that we were accepted by God. Content would trigger inspiration and lead to motivation to talk and write of God with others.

There are many people whose temperament and outlook on life make this the most natural way to God. “Count the cost,” Jesus said, “before you build.” Are you ready for the changes that come with being in Christ? Do you know what you’re getting into? Acolytes in the early centuries of Christianity spent up to a year studying the beliefs, and observing and learning the practices of the communities of Jesus, before they were formally accepted into the body of Christ through baptism. Given that joining such a community was often a prelude to martyrdom, it was essential that they had counted the cost—and that they would not betray their companions.

“Christian doctrine,” says Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, “exists so that certain obstacles may be taken away to our openness to the action of God.”2 There is a subtle nuance here: doctrines are gates that open to let the flow of responsive spirituality through. They should not be dams to stop the flow until it silts up behind the barrier. Religion does not have to be the death of spirituality.

But for other people the best course is to allow God the lead in this dance. If God is the center of our universe, then God’s gravitational field will draw those willing to him, as we were drawn to him.

“Thou hast made us for thyself,” prayed Augustine, “and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” I memorized that when I was trying to understand prayer and was reading a lot of books about prayer. Notably, I was not praying. My prayers, I believed, fell too easily into the category of “vain repetitions.” They embarrassed me and I was sure they embarrassed God.

As much as possible, I wriggled out of praying in public, convinced that I could only offer up the palest petitions and the most tepid thanksgivings. On the few occasions when I could not refuse, I did not prepare. Instead, I offered up a silent, desperate cry before moving to the lectern. “Say what you want through me,” I prayed. “I’ve got nothing.” Those were the prayers which fell upon receptive ears, and some of the owners of those ears remarked that I had seen into their hearts. “Not me,” I said, “I was just the breath and mouth of it.”

I was a restless heart for whom the study of the philosophy of religion was finally not enough. I will not cut off as dead weight the years I spent in preparation and the years I enjoyed opening students to it. It satisfied a part of me that wanted to witness the grand sweep of thought about God. And I taught ethics so my students and I might be awake and contributing for justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. But it was not enough.

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth,” said Jesus, “will draw all people to myself.” And the Gospel of John continues: “He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.”3 That death has drawn the suffering of this broken world into itself. This man, the very image of God, was and is the Word that spoke creation into being. And where the creative impulse flourishes in humans, through art, music, poetry, fiction, essays, there God-in-Christ makes visible his transformation of suffering into beauty.

For many of us, there is a path to God under the open sun, that winds through standing forests, breathes in poetry and song, and blinks in wonder at works of art. We carry a hunger or a sense of lostness or catch a glimpse of beauty or the sharp edge of justice, and then live our way into a structure that builds on that. In a gallery in a city we find a torso draped in cloth—but it is carved of wood—the flowing miracle of solidity. In another gallery we marvel at the dress that’s spun of glass, the rainbow woven of ten thousand anchored threads. The wonder of forms that reveal grace, these are intimations of God in the presence of a distilled silence heard with reverence.

Rowan Williams reminds us that “We need Christian doctrine because we need some notion of what it is we are trying to be attuned to . . . But if doctrine doesn’t make possible poetry and contemplation, then doctrine is a waste of time; it becomes purely and simply old, safe, and useful.”4

The doctrine of Creation, that there is in all of us a creative impulse reflective of the very image of God, bursts forth in wider and wider circles from the still point of the Spirit at the center. I hear it in the poetry of R. S. Thomas, Mary Oliver, and Rilke. It rings through in the secular psalms of U2, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, and Sting. It is there in the delicate balance of forces in the kinetic art of Andy Goldsworthy’s natural sculptures, in the brooding portraits by Georges Rouault, and the sensual delight in Marc Chagall’s angels, cows, and villagers.

“Man is all Imagination,” wrote William Blake, that God-intoxicated poet. “God is Man & exists in us & we in him. The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, that is, God himself . . . It manifests itself in his Works of Art.”5

God is in the world in many forms and voices; grace gives us the lens to see his glory in the world. In those artists whose works take us through the painful descent into the hells of human suffering, we see the steps of the Christ who harrowed those hells and destroyed the power of death.

Williams says, “. . . God is spoken of, and spoken for, or indeed just spoken, precisely in writing that has no explicitly religious content, because of the character of the writing as a labor of the instant.”6

The Spirit moves as does the wind, springing up in an instant and coursing through us. “And we are put on earth a little space,” says Blake, “That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”7 To that, our most eloquent response, our deepest talk of God, may be our grateful silence.

  1. Williams, Rowan. A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2011, p. 47. ↩
  2. Williams, p. 50. ↩
  3. Jn. 12:32,33 NRSV. ↩
  4. Williams, p. 50. ↩
  5. Quoted in Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton University, 1947, p. 30. ↩
  6. Williams, p. 49. ↩
  7. Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. New York: Avon Books, 1971, p. 37. ↩

Regarding the Distance Between Us

”The decisive thought in the message of the prophets is not the presence of God to man but rather the presence of man to God.”1

Photo: Filipe Resmini, Unsplash.com

I had a recurring dream as a child, one that continued well into my adulthood, showing up every few years, as if to say, “I’m still here. I’ll be here as long as you are.”

In my dream I see my father floating in the deepness of space, like an astronaut untethered, helmetless, a fragment of light. He is drifting away from me, his arm outstretched, like God straining to touch Adam’s fingertip. But we will never touch, and I know it and I know he knows it too. In my mind I call out to him, although I know he can’t hear it, because sound does not travel where there is no air. We remain like that, suspended, until he is a point of light among the thousands of diamond-hard points of light out there.

I can recall this image with perfect clarity even now, although it has been years since it came to me unbidden. Its meaning seems quite clear to me. No doubt there are depths still unplumbed, but I don’t need to plumb them. There is wonder enough that such a remarkable image could arise from my unconscious, almost as some kind of mythic totem.

My parents divorced when I was nine months old. Three years later, having lived with friends and family, I was taken in by my father’s parents and given a childhood that was unusual for my time and place, but wonderfully secure and loving. Like any child of divorce, there were moments of bewilderment and uncertainty, and tears were shed. If I were to write a memoir it would not be about a childhood of violence and trauma, like so many have suffered. But it might move in the regions of how our image of God is influenced in our earliest years.

When I read the Psalms, I read the cries of a child to a father, one who is all-powerful, yet who inexplicably does not appear when the flood waters rise, and death is near. The Psalmist rages at his enemies, cursing them and threatening a showdown between his father and theirs. Then there are the many texts in which the writer is comforted, exalted, swept up in love for God. He even rejoices in the Law, as sweet as honey to him, something to be meditated upon day and night. Reading those passages, I marvel at that surety and love. The Psalmist tells his Father—and us—everything, even that which for us might be too much information.

The Psalms are memoirs of corrosive violence, abandonment, family loyalty, and the ache of love. They make my staid and quiet upbringing seem like the placid hours of a cow.

***

In the last decade of my teaching career, I taught ethics and philosophy at Trinity Washington University. Most of my students were young women, many of them Hispanic. In their papers, essays, and presentations they would often mention their families, both here and in other countries. There were strong bonds there, so much so that if any family member was in a situation which put them in the emergency room, my students would leave class immediately, texting me with apologies later. There was simply no question: family came first.

Some of the young women found their fathers to be overbearing at times and felt themselves to be caught between cultures. They wished to honor their parents, but they also wanted to forge their own identities as confident young women. In our discussions in class, particularly those about the nature of God, I could sense that their views of God were colored by their relationships with their fathers and with their priests.

Is it inevitable that we transfer our feelings about our caretakers, particularly our male caretakers, onto our impressions of God? Are we like ducklings, imprinting our familial muscle-memory from whoever cares for us in our earliest years, our perception of who they are and how we are to be with them?

If that is true, then my grandfather was my first God-model. Kindly, patient, reticent in his Englishness, my grandfather held integrity without revealing his feelings. He had emigrated from Yorkshire as a young man, purchasing a ticket in steerage on the Titanic, but then selling it and sailing instead on another ship, one that picked up the survivors. He had landed in Nova Scotia, hitchhiked across Canada and ended up in a mining camp in Alberta, where his honesty and forthrightness meant that he held the men’s wages in trust when they went into town after paydays for drinking and women. Eventually, he found his way to a small Christian junior college on the Alberta prairie, where in time he met my grandmother, a farm girl from Vancouver Island. They became teachers, working for a total of one hundred years in Seventh-day Adventist colleges in Canada and America. My father, their only child, was raised as a campus kid in Alberta at Canadian Union College and left home early, heading out to Toronto and eventually, the US.

I used to play a game as a child in which I imagined having been born to other people, perhaps in another time and place. Would I still be me? These were intriguing questions to ponder—questions of identity, personality, even epistemology. What could we really know about others and about ourselves? What was our lineage? Whom did we “take after?”

I could not see any resemblance between my grandparents and me. The only photograph I had of my mother showed a girl of nineteen, blonde, pretty, a Canadian teenager in the late Forties and early Fifties. I couldn’t see the boy I was in my mother either. Photos of my father holding me in his arms on one of the visits he made to me and my grandparents, showed a tall, lean man with deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and hair combed like Elvis.

We would pick him up from Toronto International Airport, his long coat smelling of travel and cigarettes, and he would scoop me up in his arms, where I could survey my surroundings from a new vantage point. There are photos of my father smiling, looking up at me. I look bewildered. Then he would be gone again and after his departure my grandmother would tell me the story of his quick-wittedness in saving a child whose scarf was caught by an escalator, nearly choking her to death. God-like qualities of heroism to a four-year-old.

***

In time, my father remarried and settled in Chicago. Later, he worked for IBM when it was centered in New York and then took a transfer to San Jose, where he and his wife raised five wonderful children. I was living with my grandparents in Northern California, so he and the family would come up for visits.

I finished graduate school in Southern California and moved east to teach near Washington, DC. It was not his way to write or to call, so years went by with no words between us except for family Christmas cards. One day he left a message on my answering machine. He was consulting for Lockheed and would be in Philadelphia. He wanted to take the train down and spend some time together. I erased the message with a swiftness and coldness that was involuntary, almost instinctual. I was shocked at myself, but nevertheless, I didn’t respond. That’s when I knew there was much more under the surface that I was not facing.

Just before my fortieth birthday my father wrote me a letter, one of two I received from him in my life. He wanted to fly out from San Jose and tell me what had happened all those years ago, why he had made the decisions he did that had resulted in our separation. I picked him up from the airport and we talked until late. The next day he sat in my classes and watched me teach.

And I know a father

Who had a son

He longed to tell him all the reasons

For the things he’d done

He came a long way

Just to explain2

***

I have a memory of my father teaching me how to ride a bike. I am quivering with excitement. His hands are on my shoulders; he leans down next to me. I feel the warmth of his face next to mine. “Are you ready?” he asks. I nod. His hand is on my back then, and I am pedaling, slowly at first as my front tire wobbles. I hear his footsteps behind me as we gain speed. My legs are pumping now and the bike is cruising straight and true. I am exhilarated and I shout over my shoulder, “Okay, Dad, you can let go now!” I don’t hear an answer, so I throw a quick glance backwards and I see him half a block behind me, smiling, his hands on his hips and I am flying.

“My soul thirsts for God,

for the living God.” (Ps 42:2)

Are we to desire God? I’m not sure what that means, to desire God. Would it be God, there behind us, kindly seeing us to the door to the world, “Go on now, you’ll be fine. Trust me.” —and in that moment to know, with a pang, that we have never loved God more?

  1. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955, p. 412. ↩
  2. Paul Simon, from Slip Slidin’ Away, 1975. ↩

Our House

Photo: Pierre le Vaillant, Unsplash

”The kingdom of truth is consequently not the kingdom of some other world. It is the picture of what this world ought to be . . . It is not some realm of eternal perfection which has nothing to do with historical existence. It constantly impinges upon man’s every decision and is involved in every action.”1

For a good stretch of my younger reading life I was immersed in science fiction. It offered worlds that could only be imagined, thankfully, since most of them were ramped-up versions of this one, but several orders of magnitude more hideous. They were warning messages and the message was, if you think this is bad you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

They featured intergalactic battles, plagues scourging entire civilizations, aliens traveling thousands of light years to obliterate our planet out of sheer, arbitrary cussedness (“Of all the planets in all the solar systems in all the universe, TZoth, you had to pick this one”), and the occasional beneficent link between worlds.

The best of the hard science fiction built plausibility on a platform of physics; it was exhilarating to see where science could go when imagination pushed the status quo. For a layperson in science, these revelations came as a surprise and a preview of what might come to fruition.

There was heroism too, when the future of civilization and of the world itself belonged to the one whose grip forced the hand holding the death-ray down, down, and then, snap. Order restored; don’t screw it up again. Please.

I liked the stories best that played with questions about ultimate meaning, like whether humans really had anything to offer the universe or what it was that distinguished us from androids. After all, androids were faster, smarter, more efficient, impervious to physical maladies, and couldn’t lie. Humans, well, we are a mixed bag, to put it generously.

Often, the bright line of value between humans and androids was in the freedom we possessed that allowed us to color outside the lines. From that freedom arises beauty, creativity, and truth. But where there is freedom there is the potential for giddy mischief, sullen imperfection, and tragedy. The alternative, however, a sterile perfection of monochrome conformity, kills everything in its path. The grim truth that almost every utopian community has had to face is that coercion in the name of preserving freedom turns a eutopia (a ‘good place’) into a dystopia (a ‘place too awful to work’).

But what we lose in the process, we gain in the effects. Remember how Data on Star Trek achieved technical perfection on the violin, but lacked the feelings to wash the notes with pathos and hope? He knew what he was missing, but that wasn’t enough to grant him the emotional muscles that would move his fingers to draw out the beauty in a Hayden violin concerto.

The humans in some of these tales were clearly louts on the lam, who found their mettle in the midst of battle and survived to rise above their “fleshly nature,” as Paul might have put it. While most of them were wedded to a form of individualism more reflective of Gordon Gekko than Ralph Waldo Emerson, occasionally there would be a spiritual breakthrough, and one of them would admit to feeling in the presence of a vast and lonely Force, while gazing moodily out a porthole en route to another military assignment. Their virtues were often exercised in the face of a tragic decision to die fighting for the lives of the innocent victims of the corrupt corporations that had hired them to preserve their power.

In one of the book series, intrepid human explorers journeyed light years away to an uninhabited world to establish an outpost, a way-station for further exploration. They had hijacked a small fleet of interstellar transport vehicles and had escaped Earth because of mounting anarchy around the globe, climate change run amok, and an America ruled by right-wing authoritarians. The chance to start from scratch, to build a world that had learned from history and would not repeat its mistakes, was the lure that drew this diverse band of artists, engineers, mathematicians, policy wonks, historians, and community organizers.

This was Sim-World on a grand scale, with all the complexity and diversity that one could imagine, now put to good use with attention and intention. This is Creation, Day One, with a chance to reverse-engineer all our present social conundrums back to their original lines of code and rewrite them. It is tempting to think that we could do better this time around because we’re starting out with knowledge of past mistakes and the technology and will to invent the future.

In such a society, historians would be venerated for their interpretive abilities, while scientists would be honored for their adherence to the facts. The poets and artists would portray the acts of the imagination that would cast light on the darkness of unknown futures. Prophets and priests need not apply, since we were intimately acquainted with the neural transmitters that boosted our endorphins or inhibited our guilt.

Yet, one theme that was often present, even at a faint decibel level, was the love for this Earth, this ‘dear, old, warm Earth, as comforting as a grandmother.’ I remember one novel, the title and author of which is lost to me now, that was the story of the literal breakup of the Earth as the result of electro-magnetic forces deep within the core that had gone haywire.

The central figure was a young scientist who had first stumbled upon the clues to this disaster and worked together with an international team to alert the world. The last third of the book follows those who are preparing for the end. Our young man drives from San Francisco to Yosemite and climbs Half Dome to witness the dawn of the last day on Earth. He knows the hour the cataclysm will arrive; he wants to be in a place where he can face the wave that is coming with stoic courage. But as he waits in the semi-darkness, feeling the first tremors around him, he hears the wafting of wings overhead as a flock of birds rushes up from the valley. He takes in the fragrance of the pines, feels the coolness of the stone beneath him, and he begins to weep, not from fear—he’s beyond that—but for the love of the body of the Earth which will be no more.

***

Ask anyone to describe Heaven and they might facetiously give you the clouds, the harps, and the pearly gates. But if they reflect for a moment—and set aside their skepticism—they’ll probably imagine something infinitely better than the most beautiful place they already know. Our heavens are linear extensions of this Earth. Once you trim off the silliness of caricature you realize that there are as many versions of Heaven as there are people to imagine them. And that alone should preclude any obstinate certainty about its dimensions.

We do get a glimpse at the most famous scenario of them all in the Book of Revelation. There John describes a city with streets of gold, gates of pearl, and walls of jasper and other precious stones—a vision, if taken literally, that would nicely fit the garish tastes of a Las Vegas casino magnate. My own desires run to a kind of Hobbiton, each of us with our own cosy burrow built into the side of a hill, overlooking a verdant valley, with a backdrop of mountains from the Canadian Rockies.

No matter. What John gave us was what he saw through the lens of his experience, married to his greatest hopes. For him, it was the most beautiful city he could imagine, clean, sparkling, bathed in light, with no dark, dank corners and no terrors. There would be no night there for God is there and the darkness will never overcome the light that has come into the world.

The story, which we are free to believe, is that God will come to live among the people. However it appears to those whose eyes are opened, what everyone will see is “Immanuel,” God with us. Where Jesus is, there is God, and where God is there is love. And the measure of that love is that God moves into our house with us, this sweet old Earth made new. And how fitting, somehow, that ecology, the study of the relationships between all organisms, is derived from the Greek word oikos, which simply means “house.”

  1. Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, 277. ↩

Forgiveness Perpetual

Photo: Candice Picard, Unsplash

I grew weary of sinning

before God grew weary of forgiving my sin.

He is never weary of giving grace,

nor are his compassions to be exhausted. —Teresa of Avila

I’ve never been fond of the poem “The Hound of Heaven.” Somehow, the image of God on the trail with cold intent to pursue me until I find myself with my back to the wall, nowhere to go, and thus must yield to his designs—that image instills fear rather than love. I don’t deny that some people respond favorably to this and similar images. I’m just saying that in the vast repertoire of metaphors we have for God that one is way down the list for me.

But in a sense, it doesn’t matter all that much what I think about God, whether I think God resembles a hunting dog or a lover or a rock or a fountain of everlasting water. These are educational toys pointing, sometimes distractedly, toward a Being who breaks all categories and metaphors, simply because He/She/They cannot be contained in our refracted lenses.

What really matters is what God thinks of me. For starters, God hates the sins that I manifest so effortlessly. Absolutely, unequivocally, irrevocably, and any other “lys” we’d like to conjure up. This is the case for a couple of reasons.

First, our sin rends the beautiful creation God has provided us. There is a thread running through world faiths that sees a clear causality between human arrogance toward the created world and the fracturing of that world. Back behind the science of climate change are the fables, stories, parables, and straight-out testimony for thousands of years that says we are inextricably intertwined with our world. Because we have command of so many tools our impact on the environment is far out of proportion to our physical size.

We change our world simply by our very presence on this planet; like all other beings we take our place in time and space. But we can minimize our unintended harm and work to eliminate our deliberate havoc. That is sin, and it tears through the perfect circles of interdependence that God set up.

But the second reason God hates sin is what it does to us. How it distorts our perception, calcifies our empathy, teaches us cruelty and contempt, makes us mock the innocent and destroy the beautiful. How it places us beyond contrition and in contention with compassion, stretches our patience to the breaking point and snaps our attention, glorifies violence and belittles peace, derides those who listen and castigates those who are honest. The list goes on, but we get the point. All of this, in God’s way of thinking, is not who we are, and though we find it difficult to separate the gold in others and ourselves from the dross, God sees both and draws the distinction.

Despite our expertise in sinning, our development and refinement of its methods, the thousands of ways we have devised to ruin a beautiful world and to break each other, somehow God is able to see through the sin to the sinner. And the sinner in all of us—incredibly—is what God loves.

We are the pearl of great price that Jesus the Holy Diver plucks from the bottom of the ocean. We are the treasure in the field, buried in a rusty old tin box, that the fellow with the metal detector finds while skimming back and forth across the furrows. We are the lost and forgotten masterpiece picked up at a yard sale and restored to its former beauty, the coin wedged in a grate in the gutter.

But what of those who cower before God, those who keep to the back roads to avoid being seen, the ones who run for their lives if God appears because of the shame and fear of their sinning? Like a dog beaten and abandoned, who limps off when people approach, we see danger in the one who only wants to help.

Soren Kierkegaard tells a parable of the king who woos and weds a lovely peasant girl. The king loves her deeply and truly, but anxiety grows within him because she responds to him as the king, not as her companion, husband, and lover. Their difference in status calls up admiration in the girl, but not confidence. To appear in all his majesty before her would overwhelm and further distance her. for she thinks herself not his equal. Despite their love for each other, there is an unbridgeable gap between them. Neither really understands the other.

Kierkegaard suggests this is God’s dilemma. Since we could not be elevated to a level where we could fully understand God, God would take on himself the form of a servant so that God could understand us.

But perfect fear casts out love, and if we have been told that nothing short of perfection in this life will satisfy God, it’s no wonder that so many run in the opposite direction from the one who comes with healing. God’s persistence looks like deadly intention, his moves to reach and bandage us we see as seizing and shackling us. In desperation and in fear we plunge on through our wilderness.

He tracks us by the blood on the trail, the pain our acts cause for others and ourselves. That which separates us from God and condemns us—Sin—becomes the very means through which Christ finds the cancer and excises it. As Dante shows us, Christ follows our sins down to Hell in order to liberate us, not to condemn us. The very presence of our sins leads to confession and repentance, and finally to absolution and reconciliation.

Complications arise. According to our usual reading, God’s forgiveness of us is a contractual arrangement: if we forgive others, then God can forgive us. If we can’t forgive, then God won’t either. The rules are clear, there’s no ambiguity. We go first, then God reacts. We read it this way because we’re used to relationships that involve some type of transaction, that are functional, that include a payoff or a return on investment.

But this is not how God looks at forgiveness. He doesn’t wait for us to reach out, to make the first move. God’s ego is not tender. He is not easily offended.

Those who are forgiven can forgive. Forgiveness received can become forgiveness extended to others, but it does not work in reverse. We cannot forgive if we have not experienced forgiveness as an extension of God’s unfathomable love.

The woman who crashed a private party for Jesus at Simon the Pharisee’s house wept for joy because she had been forgiven. Perhaps she and Jesus had had an encounter before this that convinced her of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness. Perhaps she had grown weary of the trap of her sins. As Luke quotes Jesus, “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little (Luke 7:47).” Perhaps because of this she could even forgive the men who had enjoyed the use of her and then condemned and shamed her for it.

Paul Tillich, in a sermon in The New Being, points out that if we fear God and feel rejected by him, we cannot love him. But if we can see—and feel—that God’s love is without limit, then it truly is a new world. He says, “We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.”

As Jesus says, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do. I didn’t come to call righteous people but sinners to change their hearts and lives (Luke 5:31, CEB).” Whatever hellish darkness we find ourselves in, whatever pain we are carrying, we can be assured of this: Only those with a pre-existing condition will be accepted into this universal health care plan.

Burn for the Infinite

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“But a thinker who has no desire to think cannot think . . . And one who desires but cannot imagine what it is he wants is not getting very far with his desire, which, if it were real, would attempt to achieve an intelligible form.” — Northrop Frye. Fearful Symmetry, 27

How might we know an infinite God . . . as finite as we are? If we shall someday perfectly “know as we are known,” and if perfection is completeness, and if we’ve never experienced perfection, would we know the Infinite if we believed?

Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in Beyond Tragedy, says we have lost the tragic view of life. We think history is the record of “the progressive triumph of good over evil.” We do not recognize the “simple but profound truth that man’s life remains self-contradictory in its sin, no matter how high human culture rises; that the wisest expression of human spirituality, therefore, contains also the subtlest form of human sin.”

Three Conjectures

Our human tragedy is that we burn for the Infinite, yet we lack the imagination to reach for it.

What if we were honest with ourselves and admitted that what we know about the patriarchs and prophets in the Bible isn’t much after all? That in the stories we grew up with we got flashes of insight like lightning in thunderclouds or we heard something faint, like French horns in a fog, that made us curious, longing to climb through the story and drop down to the person beyond? That maybe, with respect, we need to bracket for the time being the things we’ve been indoctrinated with and widen our scope. That most of what we know about God that wasn’t thrust upon us we picked up at a yard sale secondhand, and maybe it’s time we thought for ourselves as we read these stories. Maybe it’s time we see David, Rahab, Jereboam, Isaiah, and Jonah as real people instead of characters in a sermon illustration that inevitably ends up somehow washed of all life’s reversals, misunderstandings, beauty and tragedy, and reflects—however improbably—the necessary successes of a middle-class American life.

We have two sources to think and imagine our way into the lives of these ancients: the tradition of memory and our personal insights. We hear our tradition as we read these stories together; we understand ourselves as we stand within the shadows of these people.

When we read, says Northrop Frye, we feel the centripetal force within the story, drawing us into its time and place; we also feel the centrifugal force spinning us out through memory to the external world and the meanings we associate with the words we read as we align ourselves with our reality.

As Christopher Fry says in his play, The Dark is Light Enough, “in our plain defects we already know the brotherhood of man.” Can we know then, these people whose experiences are so distant from ours in time and yet who are so tangibly, breathtakingly, solidly drawn?

Thought and desire, reason and imagination . . . these are the avenues of the soul Godwards, even as we sit trapped in traffic at the end of the day.

Our human tragedy is that we do not burn for the Infinite, yet we envy those who do.

What is tragic about exceeding our limitations, about “reaching for the stars,” about striving to become more than what we are? Isn’t this the very core of American exceptionalism and individualism, that we are limited only by our ambition and work ethic? That if we work hard enough we can achieve anything we put our minds and our hearts to? That we can fly if only we believe we can?

The poet, Stephen Spender, says in The Public Son of a Public Man,

“How shall we know that we really exist

Unless we hear, over and over,

Our egos through the world insist

With all the guns of the self-lover?”

We desire to be gods in our impatience with the “merely” human. When we substitute the penultimate for the Ultimate, says Paul Tillich, our false gods dry us up at the root.

Our human tragedy is that we burn for the Infinite, yet we cannot fully perceive it.

We cannot tell the whole truth about God because we do not know it and we couldn’t express it fully even if we did. That’s our tragedy, such as it is, when we live and move in the Spirit in this mortal dimension. When we speak or write in the name of Christ, then, we know that we are deceivers, yet true. Going in we know that whatever our metaphors of God in our best moments of self-reflection, our highest reach for truth, they will still result in gaps, miscues, diversions, and muddiness when we express them. To take the pulpit swelled with pride is to guarantee our own deflation. Yet in imagination, through will and hope, in some mysterious way through God’s Spirit, we may be lifted higher.

“Our minds are constantly trying to bring God down to our level,” says Christian Wiman, in his My Bright Abyss, “rather than letting him lift us into levels of which we were not previously capable.”

What we do know is that our best in potentia falls short in actuality. Between imagination and action, between desire and fulfillment, between thought and speech, between the mountain spring and the sea, lie numberless deflections, any one of which can turn the flow in another direction or stop it up completely. But we try. That’s what matters.

Niebuhr says, “Human existence denies its own deepest and most essential nature. That is tragic . . . But out of this despair hope is born. The hope is simply this: that the contradictions of human existence, which man cannot surmount, are swallowed up in the life of God Himself. The God of Christian faith is not only creator but redeemer. He does not allow human existence to end tragically. He snatches victory from defeat (19).”

There is a moment of finite perfection. It lingers before the singer takes a breath or the preacher speaks the first word before her people or the diver on the cliff’s edge flexes up on his toes before flight. In that moment is the potency of imagination, that which none greater can be experienced under our bright star.

Photo: Karen Hammega, Unsplash.com