How Do We Know What We Know About God?

Almost every day, I exchange emails about God with a longtime friend of mine. Over the years, he has become reformed in his theology and literal in his reading of scripture. I am neither, and that makes for some spirited emails.

His last email reaffirmed his belief in sola scriptura (“scripture alone”) as the first and best source of knowledge about God. That led me to start wondering just what I believe. I see the Bible as too full of contradictions, counterpoints, and cross-currents for all of it to be entirely, literally from the finger of God. And yet I do think it contains enough sacred wisdom to be taken seriously and thoughtfully.

Then it hit me: maybe the best way to know about God is to know God.

Isn’t this true of our human relationships? We can hear about someone from her friends and professional colleagues. We can Google her to learn about her background. We can read what others have written about her. But there is no better way to know the person than to build a relationship with her.

That explains why prayer, especially silent or contemplative prayer, is so valuable to the life of faith: it puts us in touch with the Source of all things. We open ourselves to God. God opens himself to us. When we enter that space of prayer deeply, day by day, year by year, we become intimately acquainted with the God of all things.

It is a relationship.

And out of that relationship, we can begin to approach faith’s other “ways of knowing”: scriptures, the writing of sages and theologians, the wisdom inherent in tradition, and our own experience. We see everything through the lens of our deep connection with God.

Here’s an example. The book of Exodus tells a story (4:24-26) in which God meets Moses and tries to kill him. My literalist friend, taking this story as a historical account, seeks to figure out why God would, with no apparent motive, kill the servant he sent to liberate Israel the chapter before. Because the story mentions circumcision as the palliative that averts God’s anger, my friend ties it into the Jewish law requiring circumcision for the men of Israel.

Meanwhile, I read this story and see nothing that resembles the God I’ve come to know. I turn the story every which way, seeking some metaphor or symbolic meaning that I can draw from the text. I get nothing, so I assume the story was either an erroneous insertion or perhaps a fragment of a larger story whose context might make sense of it.

Notice something here. Both of us wrestled with the text. Both of us tried to find meaning in the story. I do think it’s important to take these stories seriously, because otherwise we might miss the great wisdom they hold. In addition, our reading of scripture, in its turn, can shape the understanding of God that comes from our personal connection—just as our friends’ insights into someone can help us see something in her that we might not have seen otherwise.

But by starting with the relationship and incorporating the rest, we give ourselves a more flexible way to understand our faith tradition and apply it creatively to a time and a culture that are so very different from the land of Canaan millennia ago. This “relationship epistemology” may, in the long run, make our faith more relevant to confront the world’s most pressing problems and more accessible to the seekers of our own age.

P.S. One other little twist about the developing a deep connection with God: it can turn your life upside down. We’ll dig into that in another post.

Those Annoying Limitations That Never Go Away

In a few weeks, I’ll be heading down to Holy Cross Monastery for a mini-retreat. I’ll meet with my spiritual director, write, read a good book, and soak in the silence. It occurred to me, however, that before the retreat I should visit my therapist, or get my meds adjusted, or somehow screw my head on straight before I go be all spiritual.

Why?

I always do this sort of thing. I have to be in the “right” frame of mind before I say Morning Prayer. I cannot pray immediately after eating too much, or watching NASCAR, because I’m not spiritual enough. Goodness knows, I can’t visit a bunch of monks without being spiritual enough.

As I ruminated on this, it suddenly hit me: after three decades on this journey, I still can’t accept the love of God as unconditional. So to earn the Divine acceptance, I continually strive to present God with my “best-dressed self.”

What nonsense.

And yet it’s my nonsense. I am always astounded when, just as I think I’ve resolved some of my personal issues and can “progress” to something else, up they pop again. They might take a different form, or appear at a deeper level, but there they are.

My therapist describes this graphically, by drawing a spiral with an upward trajectory. Sure, we make progress of a sort—we get a little better at dealing with issue X, or just living with issue Y—but in that progress we keep returning to the same old trash.

I wonder if it’s an exercise in humility—which I define as an awareness and acceptance of one’s place in the universe. I have been created as one person. I have been given exactly one set of strengths and weaknesses. So every time the same old issue keeps cropping up, it reminds me of my one-personness, and humility grows.

On a related front, we have no idea whether our limitations might actually help us help one another. How many times have you shared a personal weakness with a friend, and it meant so much to her because she struggles with the same thing? Or she’s made a bit more progress on that front and can offer you a new perspective? Or, by admitting your weaknesses, you allowed her to exercise her empathy and compassion?

And just like that, you’ve glimpsed another lesson of humility: that we need one another to become fully ourselves. That lesson can inspire us to strengthen the bonds that connect us—and to work together on the problems that confront our world.

Blog Silence: Good or Bad?

A few days ago, a reader harangued me for not posting since August. Her comments have merit—you can only read Job’s exquisite rant so many times—but they got me thinking about the whys of not blogging.

There are, in fact, several reasons why I went dark in September. Some of them are the usual suspects: illness, overwork, full weekends, overwork, a focus on my book manuscript, overwork, etc. On another level, however, I just didn’t have anything to say. There were a few ideas floating in my head, but none really blossomed into a full post.

Which leads me to today’s question: What’s wrong with that?

Blog advisers insist on the necessity of posting something every day, or you’ll lose your readers. And maybe that’s true. But it also speaks of a much deeper dynamic at work. The emphasis is on quantity rather than quality, on talking rather than listening. Reflection—letting an idea come to bloom by itself, midwived by time and silence—is grossly undervalued.

This dynamic, of course, isn’t limited to the blogosphere. The business world routinely sacrifices depth of thought in its obsession with speed (the only way to keep up is to skim the surface). As a media-influenced society, we seem to lurch from one all-consuming issue to the next: from moose hunting to lipstick on a pig to God knows what next.

But here’s the problem: by communicating without reflection, by moving at warp speed through ideas and issues, we lose the ability to think through things with any depth. That makes it far more difficult for us to focus on substantive issues and sort them out.

This gets really important in public life, where staggeringly complex issues are too often reduced to sound bites. As a habit of mind and spirit, reflection gives us the space to take a moment, ponder any given “truth claim”—and, as often as not, see through it. Reflection helps us peer into issues, see their complexity for ourselves, and start pulling at the various strands within them to make some coherent sense. From reflection and silence emerge the questions that will probe behind the conventional wisdom to the substantive issues beneath.

Once that starts happening, we might have a shot at addressing the reality of issues. By appreciating their complexity, we’re more inclined to approach them (and the players on various sides) with humility, realizing that no one person can possibly come up with an answer to something so large.

Does all that explain my silence for the past six weeks? Goodness, no; it happened as much by accident as anything else. But maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Maybe contributing to the silence is as important as contributing to the conversation.

Job's Exquisite Rant

Today’s Old Testament reading took my breath away, and I simply had to share a few lines from it. They speak volumes about God’s willingness to be present to every part of us, even our deepest rage, and care for us all the same. In Job, meanwhile, we get a role model for relationship and the hard work therein: a faithful soul who rants at God but will not walk away from him. May we drink deeply of such a relationship with the Divine—where we feel secure enough to be fully ourselves.

“I loathe my life; I would not live forever.
Let me alone, for my days are a breath.
What are human beings, that you make so much of them,
that you set your mind on them,
visit them every morning,
test them every moment?
Will you not look away from me for a while,
let me alone until I swallow my spittle?
If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity?
Why have you made me your target?
Why have I become a burden to you?
Why do you not pardon my transgression
and take away my iniquity?
For now I shall lie in the earth;
You will seek me, but I shall not be.”

(Job 7:16-21)

Samson and the Odder Side of God

(Samson) told his father and mother, “I saw a Philistine woman at Timnah; now get her for me as my wife.” But his father and mother said to him, “Is there not a woman among your kin, or among all our people, that you must go to take a wife from the Philistines?” But…his father and mother did not know that this was from the Lord; for he was seeking a pretext to act against the Philistines. At that time the Philistines had dominion over Israel. Then Samson went down with his father and mother to Timnah. (Judges 14:1-5)

You’ve got to feel for Samson’s parents. They did not see this coming.

Earlier in the story, God told them that their son would liberate Israel from the Philistines. He was to be raised as a nazirite, one specially consecrated to God. So they raise him this way. And what happens? Samson grows up and decides to take a wife from the oppressor. Even worse, God had warned the people of Israel not to intermarry with the Philistines and other Canaanite peoples.

Here’s where it gets interesting. In the next two verses, we get two pieces of information that may (or, in the second case, may not) hold profound relevance for us today:

• “This was from the Lord.” In their complaint to Samson (“Can’t you marry one of your own?”), the parents were coaxing him to obey God. How could they possibly know that God had made other plans? Even when God speaks directly, it’s hard to let go of the former commandment and trust that voice: just look, for instance, at Peter’s resistance to God’s new work among the Gentiles (Acts 10:9ff).
  

It’s hard for us too. In matters of God, we often refer to scripture or tradition, and this is good. But God’s zigzag in this story reminds us to hold tradition lightly—because we have no idea when God will do a new thing.

• Samson’s parents went along with it. They think he’s disobeying the Law by marrying this woman—and yet they go down to Timnah and help arrange it anyway. What gives?
  

This reminds me of Dan Quayle, the former vice president and ardent anti-abortionist. He once said that, if his grown daughter ever chose to have an abortion, he would support her “on whatever decision she made.”

There’s something going on here, and I’m not sure what it is. I’m not saying we should toss away what we know of God on a whim. Abraham nearly sacrificed his son to God; Jesus said people who loved family more than him were not worthy of him.

And yet compassion for one’s children, even when they do bad things, runs so very deep within our species—within most species. Maybe the lesson here is compassion above all else. Maybe it’s a simple respect for our genetic code and the God who made it. Maybe there’s no lesson at all.

What do you think?

In the World, Of the World

Back in my college days, our campus Christian fellowship talked a lot about being “in the world, but not of the world.” Being young and confused about prepositions in the spiritual life, I never understood what that meant.

Thirty years later, I think I’m starting to get it.

I have always been in love with my career (specifically, writing ad and marketing copy). It has been a larger part of my identity than I ever cared to admit. I adored playing with words and being in demand for doing it well. Running my own business served as a vehicle for healing some of the major issues in my early life.

As I began to respond to a different call, though—the call that brought this blog into being—my zealous attachment to career suddenly faded. I began to see everything that appalled me about the advertising industry: the bending of truth, the overwhelming clutter of public life, the quest for awards. Perhaps because I wanted to leave advertising behind, the call to spiritual writing began to feel like a call to a career of spiritual writing.

I might be called to that career someday, but it’s not the case for now. Instead, as far as I can tell, my calling right now is precisely to what I’m doing right now: spiritual writing as part of my workday, copywriting as most of my workday.

As I’ve settled into that, something amazing has happened. I’ve learned not to love my career in advertising, but to like it. Somehow the prayer and the spiritual writing that frame my day keep my job in perspective—so I’m free to pursue it joyfully without finding my identity in it.

Is this what it means to be in the world, but not of the world?

I suspect it might be. Jesus wasn’t the only one to allude to this idea. Buddhism (as far as I understand it) emphasizes detachment from temporal things and compassion for all beings; the bodhisattvas—who are completely free to enter nirvana, but “stay behind” to guide others to enlightenment—are the role model for this. They are, in short, in the world but not of it.

It is a liberating, exhilarating place to be. The need for control falls away. We can live into our calling without concern for results. We can orient ourselves toward the eternal without denying the dignity of the everyday. We can take each day as it comes, for the blessing it is. No wonder the spiritual masters invite us there.

Touchstones

Maybe it’s because I’m so weary of the conflicting voices that lay claim to absolute truth. Perhaps it has to do with just how elusive that truth really is. Whatever the reason, I find myself, as part of my spiritual path, constantly returning to certain touchstones: shards of truth that anchor my soul. I wouldn’t want to claim drop-dead certainty for these touchstones—as Brother Billy says, “Ultimately, it’s all unexplainable”—but to me they consistently ring true as other notions ebb and flow. Here are three:

1. God is. On one level, the evidence appears to defeat this entirely. Evolutionary theory includes autonomous mechanisms, like natural selection, to get us from amoeba to Homo sapiens. Researchers are beginning to explore the neurology behind faith, and they’ll undoubtedly find something. The impossibility of explaining the Holocaust in the context of an omnipotent, loving God leaves the alternative models—like Buddhism—far more satisfactory.
   

And yet…what started evolution, and why? Why are we (at least most of us) hard-wired to believe—rather than, say, to find other adaptive mechanisms for survival? Even more basic, how could a world of such staggering beauty and complexity come to be through impersonal processes? How could entropy be thwarted so many billions of times to create a cosmos? Why does life find a way?

I don’t think we require the traditional images of God to explain these things, but they all speak to some kind of God. A God who creates something from nothing, rather than lets nothing be. And that leads right into the next touchstone…

2. God is love. Given the aforementioned Holocaust, this is a big stretch. And yet I don’t think we have a choice. If God is, how do we even begin to live in a cosmos where God is hostile, or uncaring, or inattentive? In some ways, that is even more terrifying than belief in no God at all: at least with atheism, you can grieve at horrific world events while accepting them as random occurrences.
   

3. By their fruit you shall know them. How on earth are we supposed to evaluate rival truth claims? Many of them live in their own closed loop, impervious to refutation. We end up with little citadels of belief, each snug inside its own theological walls and occasionally catapulting rocks over the walls of its rivals.
   

Which is why this saying of Jesus carries so much import. If God is love, if God cares deeply about beauty and justice, wouldn’t those who follow God generate more love and beauty and justice as well? Therefore, could we use these “fruits” as a filter to explore the faith of those who practice them?

I’m not talking about people who profess a faith but don’t live it. Otherwise, we would have to evaluate Christianity by the Inquisitors, or Islam by al-Qaeda. My thought, rather, is to note people whose lives bear abundant fruit, and to explore the insights that produce fruit in them. In the process, we may just run up against other shards of truth.

So those are three of my touchstones. What are yours? And how do they give you hope?

Where Is God in This Picture?

Tell me where you see God in the following story.

Often I try to pray when I run in the morning. Often it doesn’t work: my mind wanders off to (if it’s a good day) hobbies and books and things I love or (if it isn’t) anxiety about the day ahead or the week ahead or this difficult meeting or that difficult phone call.

Last Wednesday was not a good day. The week was tricky to begin with, and the trickiness was to reach its climax in the day to come. I have been working on mindfulness lately—paying complete attention to the here and now—but on this day my mind ran away from me. Toward the end of the run, I tried to get back to what was happening around me.

Which is when I saw the pileated woodpecker.

Birds enthrall me, and I’ve only seen a pileated once before in my life. They appear rarely, almost never, in our neighborhood. So all my attention was suddenly riveted on the woodpecker. In short, a single bird brought me back to the mindfulness to which, I believe, God is calling me.

So where was God in all this?

Was God somehow in my return to mindfulness—inspiring it, as it were—so that I could see and enjoy the woodpecker? Certainly possible. Did God call that bird to that tree for that particular purpose? A yes answer, of course, raises the oft-asked question of the whereabouts of God on 9/11, or during the Holocaust, or in the life of the child who dies suddenly. But ascribing this event to mere coincidence doesn’t work for me; the presence of the Divine in that moment was almost palpable.

I wrestle with questions like this all the time, and wrestling with God is good. Sometimes, though, I run up against the impenetrable, or at least the too-difficult-for-me. In cases like that, I’m beginning to believe, it’s time to stop thinking and simply breathe in the experience—specifically, the Divine within the experience.

There’s solid precedent for this approach. According to the sage Ben Sira, “Neither seek what is too difficult for you, nor investigate what is beyond your power” (Sirach 3:21). The psalmist speaks in a similar vein: “I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me” (Psalm 131:1). Thomas Merton, the Franciscan monk and thinker, writes approvingly of Zen’s emphasis, not on explaining, but on paying attention.

Maybe, when we follow both wisdoms—the call to wrestle with God and the call to stop wrestling—we approach God with more of ourselves: our minds, certainly, but also our deepest selves. This, according to Jesus, is precisely what the Father so ardently desires: those who “worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23).

A Reading from the Book of Lyndsey

Be careful what you write. You just might get it.

Three weeks ago, in the last blog entry, I wrote about our uncertain cosmos and living in the here and now as a response. Two weeks later, we lost a dear friend very suddenly, at the ripe old age of 16.

An illness in infancy left Lyndsey with developmental disabilities. Something else, God knows what, left her with personality to burn. I would see her on weekends when her mother, who raises and shows animals as I do, would bring her to the shows. While Lyndsey didn’t take part directly, she was never far from the show table, and her exuberance at being with friends was palpable.

Our first meeting at every show followed something of a script. Lyndsey would lead with one of her giant, freely given hugs, then tell me excitedly who from her family was there. “Mom’s here, and guess what? Ty’s here too! And Stephan! He came too!” As though they never came to shows, and their coming was a great big deal.

Now, with Lyndsey’s passing, I realize she was right all along. It is a great big deal.

Here we are back at uncertainty. Every time we meet, we give the gift of our presence to others, and they to us. We have no idea whether it will be the last time we see each other. All we have is now, and the joy that this meeting, this presence, now brings us. All we can do is to be here now, fully attentive to the moment at hand, and relish the joy.

That is a very, very big deal indeed.

The Joy of Not Knowing

Then I saw all the work of God, that no one can find out what is happening under the sun. However much they may toil in seeking, they will not find it out; even though those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it out. (Ecclesiastes 8:17)

How, then, do we live with this mystery?

Surely we know ways not to do it. Over the millennia, the human race has had glimpses into the Divine and gradually shaped them into doctrine—which, in turn, ossifies into certainty. In times of catastrophe, many ask “why,” get angry when they hear no answers, and abandon God entirely.

Curiously, neither of these impulses is bad in itself. Well-considered doctrine can open even deeper insights into the truth behind the universe. Consider, for instance, the notion of the Trinity and what that says about the supreme importance of relationship among creatures.

Neither is it bad to rail at God. The Bible is packed with characters who do just that—as they hold an unflagging passion for the Divine. Even “abandoning God” might be a positive step for a time, especially if it means abandoning one’s preconceived notions about God.

It’s the insistence on fixed answers that runs us afoul of reality. We want certainty; we get God. That has some profound implications. With our understanding of God ever changing, we might someday have to give up our most cherished notions of truth. We might even live our whole lives by principles that turn out to be misguided.

So how do we live? Well, I don’t know for certain (of course). But here are two clues that might help us move forward.

The first comes from another passage in Ecclesiastes: “I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil” (Ecclesiastes 3:12-13). I see this as an invitation not to hedonism, but to mindfulness—focusing on the Divine in the here and now. From what I understand, Buddhism provides extraordinary insight into this: because we can never know whether God exists (the idea goes), we must concern ourselves with what we can achieve, like mindfulness and enlightenment.

The other clue comes from St. Paul. After his rousing discourse about continually pressing on to the prize of knowing Christ, he admonishes his readers with “Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you. Only let us hold fast to what we have attained” (Philippians 3:15-16).

So we focus on here and now, live out our lives according to what wisdom we’ve gained, and embrace the Divine mystery for what it is. It sounds like a life of faithfulness. And when we go off base, we can trust that, at the right time, the Divine will guide us back. Can we ask for a richer or more reassuring adventure?

The Power of God in Our Hands

“Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”(John 20:17)

… Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” (John 20:21-23).

Just how completely do we share the life of God?

In this passage, Jesus makes several earth-shaking claims about our relationship with the Divine. He calls his disciples by a new name: not servants, not even friends, but brothers. The God he has always called “my Father” is now “my Father and your Father.” He gives us power to forgive sins—a privilege traditionally reserved for God alone.

These aren’t the only sacred texts that present this kind of view. The psalmist says of human beings, “You have made them a little lower than God….You have given them dominion over the works of your hands” (Psalm 8:5). St. Paul says in his simile for the church, “For just as the body is one and has many members…so it is with Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12)—when you’d expect him to say so it is with the church.*

Does this make anyone else a tad nervous?

Through millennia of training, many people of faith have adopted a much lower view of humanity. We think of God as Sovereign, as Judge. We adopt a “humility” that is more like self-deprecation. We emphasize scriptural passages that tell us (rightly, as it turns out) that without God, we can do nothing.

So what if God has shared with us, not just boundless love, grace, and guidance, but also power? What if we’re called to, in the words of my old therapist Harold Bussell, “trust God’s decision to trust us”?

Here’s what scares me: As humans, we don’t do power well. Either we forget the Source of that power and grow dangerously arrogant—five minutes with the nightly news provides all the evidence you need—or we shrink from it and become ineffective. Shrinking from power, ironically, creates a vacuum for the arrogant to step right in.

Maybe the key is in the relationship. If God is now our God too, if we have received a closer-than-breath connection with the Holy Spirit—and we live in that connection—the Presence stands as a bulwark against the fearsome pitfalls that power brings. It enables us to hold power lightly, remain constantly mindful of its Source, and wield it for good.

And wield it we must. The world desperately needs someone to effect change: to heal the starving, bind up the brokenhearted, toil for justice. In a word, God invites us to join him in co-creating a better world, bringing it closer to the vision of God’s reign.

As we do, let us look at this “power sharing” and see in it the utter extravagance of the Divine love. God has shared with us his work and his power to do it. Only deities that truly love can trust their creatures so completely.

*Thanks to Hal Miller, theologian extraordinaire, for this eye-opening insight into 1 Corinthians.

"Woman, Here Is Your Son"

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her [at the cross], he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. (John 19:26-27)

As the notes in my HarperCollins Study Bible tell me, “Many suggestions have been made for a symbolic meaning for this incident.” Catholic theologians, for instance, have said that Jesus is designating Mary as the mother of us all. That’s a comforting thought: everyone needs a mother now and then.

Today, however, I’m seeing the story differently. Appropriately for a tale about Jesus, it describes something both profoundly human and profoundly divine.

Focusing just on the details, we see a person on his proverbial deathbed, setting his affairs in order. He worries about who will care for his widowed mother—no small matter in a patriarchal society—so he entrusts her to a friend whom he loves. The friend accepts the charge and adopts her into his family. It is a touching display of attention to small but important details that gets played out at deathbeds everywhere.

And because Jesus is doing it, we see how completely he entered into, and embraced, the human experience.

What makes this act divine is the context. Jesus does all this in a state of unimaginable pain. He has been mercilessly beaten. He has faced angry crowds screaming for his death. He has carried a heavy crossbar through the streets of Jerusalem. He has been nailed to a wooden cross and is slowly suffocating.

And he still can look beyond himself to take care of those he loves.

If God is love, there is no more poignant example of the God-nature than a son tending to his mother with his last few breaths.

Through our connection with the Holy Spirit, we can do the same: enter deeply into the human experience and care for others with the ineffable divine love. It is hard to imagine a higher calling.

Things to Learn While You’re Sick

For the last week, a severe head cold/chest cold/whatever has taken over my body and commanded attention. Symptoms include a profound loss of energy and, even worse, sinus pressure that has dropped my IQ by 50 points.

This sort of thing always upends my life, especially the part you might call “spiritual.” Saying Morning Prayer is more rote than substance. Silent prayer is impossible. I couldn’t give a rip about serving other people. You get the idea.

From this and previous illnesses, I’m learning at least two things about life in God. Both may seem obvious, but maybe they’ll give you hope when you get this bug.

1. I used to become terribly anxious about losing my grip on my “spiritual life” when sick. I’d try reeeallly hard to focus, castigate myself for letting my mind wander, etc. The lesson, it seemed, was always to let go and meet God “just as I am”—even if “just as I am” meant with no discernible thought of God at all.

This time around, miracle of miracles, I seem to be getting it. If I say Morning Prayer, or wait till Noonday Prayer, or just skip it and mumble something short at bedtime…if I skip the scriptures to read Dick Francis because that’s all my mind can take…it’s all good. And I know it.

In other words, I’ve actually learned something and moved forward. We humans can make progress. Who’d a thunk it?

2. The second lesson has to do with the reason our brainlessness doesn’t derail our prayer: we don’t do this alone. That may seem laughably obvious. Of course God’s there, we think. Of course it’s a two-way street. But how often do we give that idea lip service? Somewhere during my life, I picked up the notion that if something had to be done, I had to do it. So if prayer and devotion were to be successful—whatever that means—it was up to me. The thought of letting God shoulder the load is totally alien.
   

And yet…how utterly essential is it to do just that? I suspect Jesus had this in mind when he said, “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). My experience with the contemplative life testifies to that: out of the stillness in my soul, where God dwells, comes a great deal of growth.

Maybe these lessons have a broader application too. It’s not just me making progress; it’s the whole human race. Look at the grand sweep of history: how far, for instance, we’ve come since crucifixion and slavery and the absolute rule of kings. We still have overwhelming problems—and make horrific steps backward (like the Holocaust)—but slowly, haltingly, clumsily, the race seems to move forward.*

And what would happen if more of us could take the Other in this God-relationship seriously? If we could find a way to let go, to “rest in the everlasting arms,” according to the old hymn? How much more good would flow from our lives—and our life together?

*A tip of the hat to my father-in-law for this astute observation.

What Do We Have to Believe? And Why?

Belief (be and lyan, to hold dear). That state of the mind by which it assents to propositions, not by reason of their intrinsic evidence, but because of authority.

Creed (Latin credo, I believe). In general, a form of belief…the entire body of beliefs held by the adherents of a given religion.

—The Catholic Encyclopedia

I’m nearly finished my tour of two gospels—Matthew and John—and their two vastly different approaches to the Christian faith. Matthew is all about inner transformation and the practical living out of God’s kingdom; John focuses on believing in Jesus as Messiah.

What really amazes me, though, is what I haven’t seen: a requirement to “assent to propositions.” So why does the church require it?

Church leaders have spent millennia defining “legitimate” belief and rooting out variations of thought that fell outside its bounds. In many churches, we recite the creeds that sprang from this process. Some Christian traditions require assent not only to those creeds, but to a fairly specific list of propositions. In contrast, one of the towering strengths of the Anglican/Episcopal tradition—a strength that is very much in peril right now—is the latitude it gives to living the questions; we’re asked to believe the creeds, and everything else is open for discussion.

But why have creeds at all?

I suppose there’s a point at which, for purposes of sheer institutional cohesion, we all have to be on the same page. It might be difficult to build a functioning community in which one of us worships Jesus, another Vishnu, still another prays to the bodhisattvas, etc. Moreover, it may be that there’s a certain depth of wisdom in each faith tradition that can only be plumbed by communities of people in that tradition. So, although all faith traditions deserve respect and honor, there’s a place in the universe for communities of like-minded people.

But how like-minded do you really have to be in order to build community?

Perhaps I’ll find some mention of this in St. Paul or another biblical writer. But the thought that God actually cares about “getting the doctrine right” doesn’t square with the God I have come to know: a God whose very essence is love.

Why Wait?

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses…we do not know what has become of him.” (Exodus 32:1)

Imagine this scenario from the people’s perspective.

Moses has led them out of slavery in Egypt. He is their leader, their judge, and the mouthpiece of their God—the embodiment of everything that might keep them moving forward with purpose. After traveling through the desert, they come to this foreboding mountain. Moses scales it to talk with God. Days pass.

Weeks pass.

These folks are in the middle of nowhere, with scarce resources and no one in authority to articulate a vision for them. They are waiting around for a disappeared leader who may never return—and a rather frightening God who may or may not speak to them. Strangest of all, this is exactly what God wants them to do.

Think of how profoundly countercultural this message is for us moderns.

We keep to-do lists and check off the items to celebrate our progress. We love to be busy, to feel productive. So much information and so many goods are now available in seconds.

In themselves, these are good things. But when they control our lives as they do in this century, it’s easy to lose the ability to wait and wander.

Now imagine what happens if we do wait and wander.

Suddenly we have time to ask deeper questions, like why am I living this way? The “necessities” of modern life look less necessary. The ideas and desires that shape our lives—excessive work, upward mobility, busyness as a virtue—seem vacuous. We start making less room for the urgent and more room for the important, including God.

Once we make room for God, anything can happen.

That may be the ultimate value of the desert experience. Our usual touchstones fall away, and we are left with the one relationship on which everything depends. As we live in that relationship, God produces an entirely different kind of fruit in us. It not only brings us peace of soul, but confronts the go-go culture around us by its very example.

If we live in the desert, then, God can work with us to change our small corner of the world. Is that too much to say? Or could there be truth in it?

The Vexing Gospel of John

[Jesus said,] “You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:4-6)

Let me share an ongoing struggle with you.

About a year ago, I decided I needed a fresh look at the gospels. Among the motivators were two beliefs that could be at odds: first, that the Bible deserves to be taken seriously (whatever that means); second, that I cannot imagine God excluding any human soul because it did not subscribe to specific beliefs. That, to me, makes God smaller—and I distrust anything that makes God smaller.

I started with Matthew and loved it. I felt liberated by the overwhelming emphasis on inner transformation and outer practice as part of the reign of God—elements that, I think rightly, Marcus Borg cites as the core of the gospel in The Heart of Christianity. This gospel calls us to embrace the less fortunate, to be generous to all, to heal, to distrust wealth, all from the wellspring of a heart transformed by the Spirit. Wonderful.

Then I came to the gospel of John.

Suddenly it is not so much about the practice of Christianity as the person of Jesus. Belief in Jesus as Messiah is the path to God. In fact, verses like the one above—including “those who do not believe are condemned already” (3:18)—indicate that this belief is the only path to God. If true as written, that would pretty much take down my belief in an all-inclusive God.

So what gives? Is it that simple: we take it literally and assume that the Buddhists are going to hell? On the other extreme, do we simply ignore it because we don’t like it?

Those answers, I believe, are simplistic. Now look at the next (perhaps more thoughtful) level of response: Do we explain this message as a product of the times in which John was written? Or the understanding of that writer in that culture, time, and place? Or the fact that the whole gospel was written more than a half century after Christ, so who knows what he really said?

These seem more reasonable to me, and if I were a Bible scholar, perhaps I could adopt one of them with confidence. But without the scholarship to back them up, even these approaches seem too dismissive, too unwilling to stare into the text and then, like Jacob with the angel, wrestle it until it blesses us.

What’s the answer? I do have a couple of thoughts: it intrigues me, for instance, that Jesus calls himself the way—so the way is a person, not a belief system. But honestly, I don’t know. Maybe wrestling with texts, regardless of one’s academic background, is the only way to give proper respect to all the factors: the text, the context in which it was written, and where we live now. Maybe that’s the best way to get at the truth behind each passage. Maybe.

What do you think?

The Power of the Smallest Acts

And they told [Jacob], “Joseph [your son] is still alive! He is even ruler over all the land of Egypt.” He was stunned; he could not believe them. But when they told him all the words of Joseph…and when he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of their father Jacob revived. Israel said, “Enough! My son Joseph is still alive. I must go and see him before I die.” (Genesis 45:26-28)

Can our actions possibly matter?

Much of the evidence points to a resounding no. Day after grinding day, the media show us the staggering size of our world, the tectonic trends that move nations and regions, the massive suffering on other continents. How can one person possibly make any impact at all? Why not just lapse into despair or, on the other extreme, live for ourselves and our own little corner of the world?

Then you run across stories like this.

Jacob’s sons had sold their brother Joseph into slavery—and told their father that Joseph was dead. Jacob had lived with the grief for years. Then, during a famine, his sons went to Egypt to buy food, only to find that Joseph had become a ruler, second only to Pharaoh. They bring the joyous news back to Jacob.

Then what happens? Jacob decides to follow every father’s most natural impulse: to go and see his beloved son.

And the whole history of Israel changes in an instant.

Maybe, if Jacob does not go, his clan does not settle in Egypt. They do not, over time, become a nation enslaved to the Egyptians. God has no reason to deliver the nation of Israel—and thus provide one of the greatest examples of God’s passion to save us. As a result, maybe we don’t even come to know God in quite the same way.

The very language of this passage foreshadows the impact of this small act. Up till now, the story refers to Jacob mostly by his birth name, Jacob. When he makes the decision to see his son, though, the passage suddenly calls him Israel—the name God gave him, the name that connotes his position as the patriarch of the future nation. In that one subtle name shift are the shades of what is to come.

This is such good news for us. The truth is, we have no way to tell whether even our smallest, most natural acts might have earth-shaking consequences. But clearly, as the story shows us, we do make an impact. It behooves us, then, to live our lives for good and not ill—to “do the things you have given us to do” (in the words of the Anglican prayer).

This good news also takes the pressure off. Jacob underwent no strategic planning process to consider the results of his actions. He did not attempt to “control outcomes.” He simply did what any father would do. When we live our lives in the Presence of the Divine, we can do the same, without obsessing over results—because the results are not up to us.

In short, then, this story liberates us to live with purpose, because we make an impact, without looking for results, because we can’t know the impact. We are free to lay aside our best-laid plans and simply do justice, love extravagantly, and walk humbly with our God.

Out of the Depths I Cry to You

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications! (Psalm 130:1-2)

There is something all too familiar about the images of Silda Wall Spitzer standing by her disgraced husband’s side. I have seen that haggard look elsewhere.

In the mirror.

It is a look that can speak of unexpected upheaval or tired desperation, of sudden shocks or long tortuous battles. It is the look of someone who is losing a child to mental illness, who cannot escape the clutches of depression, who has been ground down by life’s vicissitudes…who, like Silda, has suddenly found a productive life destroyed by a tragedy in the classic sense.

If you’ve lived any length of time, you’ve probably seen that look in the mirror too.

It often comes with a complete loss of perspective. (I would suggest Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking for a vivid depiction of this.) Accomplishing the simplest tasks can be impossible. One moves as through water, or rapidly curing concrete. Suddenly it is easy to understand the emotional wallop in the first two verses of the de profundis (quoted above), which we often pray to commemorate the dead.

What can we say to faces like these? What can we say when the faces are ours?

I don’t know that there’s a clear way forward. The typical platitudes are rarely comforting, whatever seeds of truth they contain. The silent, listening presence of others can bear much fruit; sometimes, however, they might be blessed with just the right thing to say, and silence would be counterproductive. Certainly there is no way around the distress; there is only the way through.

Faith rarely makes the distress go away quickly. But it does have two words to speak. One involves psalms like the de profundis. If we can cry to God so desperately—if we are free to scream at God as the psalmist does—it makes faith a safe space in which to grieve. Before God, we can let everything out and slowly, slowly, work our way through.

The other word will be spoken next week, during the Christian Holy Week, when we commemorate the brutal torture and death that Jesus endured. God may not magically set things right, but in the person of Jesus, God has worn this face.

Sometimes clinging to these words is all we can do when that face confronts us in the mirror.

What’s All This About Sharing the Faith?

Our parish priest has been nudging us to evangelize—to spread the word about Jesus to those we know in the secular world. Many ecclesiastical leaders, especially those with a conservative or literalist bent, push this as a necessary part of one’s faith journey. They cite Jesus’ words in the gospel of Matthew to “go out and make disciples of all nations” (28:19).

At the same time, as I mentioned several posts ago (“Explaining the Unexplainable”), we’re faced with formidable challenges in talking about God at all, among them a secular culture that’s often hostile to discussions of this structure. We get pushed on both sides, so we naturally end up doing nothing—and feeling guilty.

Maybe there’s another way to think about this.

Let’s start by taking the pressure off—by removing the imperative of evangelism. A “just do it” mentality will not help us reach a culture that is highly skeptical, prefers science over faith, and associates discussions of religion with aggressive televangelists.

Then, let’s redefine what we do when we evangelize. The traditional objective is to convert: this automatically puts pressure on both parties—the evangelizer, who feels the need to recruit more church members/save people from hell/whatever, and the evangelizee, who’s being asked to make an earth-shattering life decision that she may not want to consider at all.

I would suggest that we try a different objective: not to convert, but to engage—to share our experience of God in a way that “joins the general conversation.” This fits better with the sensibility of our culture, so it may bear considerably more fruit.

There are two curveballs here. One is the risk involved in joining the general conversation. When the discussion becomes two-way, we might be confronted with the validity of the other person’s ideas. We might have to let them shape our own belief system. I think that’s a good thing in general, but it does eliminate the possibility of staying in one’s comfort zone.

The other curveball involves what we share. For many progressives, there’s no imperative of hell involved, so why even bother talking about faith? As far as I can see, the primary reason is that we can’t help it: the sheer bounty of God’s work in our lives takes our breath away, and we just have to share.

But what if that joy is not part of your faith journey? If that’s the case, I’m thinking, you put the entire evangelism business on hold. There’s something more important for you to do right now: to find that joy.

This is an incredible life we lead. By all means let us share it—respectfully, with humility, when and if we’re ready.

Is Imperfect Better?

As [Jesus] walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” (John 9:1-3)

Can our best selves spring from our most broken parts?

In some ways, my entire adult life has been a quest for the approval of others. It can be a painful and crippling affliction. It has led me, in many instances, to make nice and keep my mouth shut, even when speaking up would have been more appropriate. I have worked for years on the causes of this, and I am making progress in overcoming it.

Along the way, however, my obsession with approval made something else happen. In trying to make nice, I learned to seek common ground. In keeping my mouth shut, I learned to listen. I learned enough to begin writing a book about the essential elements of authentic dialogue—an important topic in a world that is starved for it.

So my own pathology might someday, God and publishers willing, help others heal.

How often is that true? I have read of a man who rarely spoke because he was ashamed to show his bad teeth; as a result, he became an outstanding listener. God tells St. Paul, who is afflicted with an unspecified “thorn in the flesh,” that “my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:8).

This attitude toward brokenness isn’t intuitive. We try to overcome our weaknesses, heal from our infirmities, triumph over our besetting sins. And all these efforts are good and necessary. Who could deny the value of health and spiritual progress?

And yet, in the quest for wellness, it’s easy to miss the fruit that the brokenness bears. If we turn our attention to that brokenness, we might be amazed to see the God hidden within it—and the wondrous works that God is doing there.

Then, perhaps, we can say with St. Paul, “Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).