Turning Things Around

When I began this blog, I promised myself that I would, as much as possible, try to write something every Sunday. It doesn't always look like I've done very well at that, but what you don't see (and I don't want to see when I revisit my blog months down the road!) is all the stuff I write that is clearly not worth posting. Having just finished a letter criticizing my own preacher for saying very little worth listening to, I have to admit that I have less of interest to say than I thought I did when I started the blog. Sometimes I feel really inspired, but inspiration is elusive even when I do apply perspiration to the task!

What survives of my musings from last week is below:

What I "believe," how I think or speak about anything spiritual, changes with every approach I make to the subject. Sometimes I believe it all, sometimes none of it, and most often bits and pieces, but it's all dependent on how I look at things at the moment. Just a slight change in angle or time makes everything look different and elicits a different response. Anyone reading these pages can see that what I say is not "consistent" in any common use of the term, I make no attempt to avoid contradicting myself and claiming essentially opposite things -- I just write as I feel at any particular moment. And yet, it never seems that what I actually feel, behind the attempt to put it in words, changes all that much. How I describe it changes radically depending on the perspective, the viewing angle, but the reality behind all the striving to put it into words is as steady and unchanging as it is elusive and impossible to describe...

In somewhat related thoughts this week, I heard the preacher ask "Is it sufficient just to believe in God, to be a Christian?" but my heart responded with the question, "Is it necessary to believe in God to be a Christian?" Because I often don't "believe" in God -- or at least, what I do believe has very little in common with how many would define God. Nevertheless, being (in some sense, not everyone would agree) a Christian is central to who I am, and I doubt I could walk away from defining myself so even if I wanted to.

Some friends and I are reading Karen Armstrong's Case for God together, and one thing she says early in the book is that atheism requires a doctrine of God to oppose -- that it's not possible to be in opposition to something without some definition or conception of what it is that one's against. She is (and I am also) an atheist to the God of most fundamentalist Christians (as well as other fundamentalists of various religions) and perhaps to the God of many other Christians as well. In fact, I find that many of the Criticisms leveled by the Dawkins, Hitchens, Hawking, etc. crowd of neo-atheists to be extremely on target. Yet, I listen to them with a great deal of frustration because I don't recognize the God that they don't believe in -- at least that God is foreign to me on so many levels, yet they seem to insist that anyone who professes to believe in God must hold at least some of these beliefs that they oppose. (I could, perhaps, argue that I hold none of them and yet STILL profess to be a Christian -- it all depends on what one means when one uses words to describe things essentially not describable with words. There are always different angles and different interpretations.)

I like too what Armstrong says about evaluating religious ideas and practice not in terms of right and wrong, but in terms of skillful and unskillful (or helpful and unhelpful). Does something (a belief, a practice, a text, ...) help me to connect with others, to feel integrated and whole, to find meaning and purpose, or not? And, are other people finding those things that do the same for them?

I'll finish for today with one of those things from the Bible that opens so many questions for me about the nature of God, of faith, of how we look at things and what they might possibly mean: The gospel for today (John 17) says, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." Actually, pretty much along with our neo-atheists, I'm one of those people who has very little of either fear or expectation from death, I think it is just the end, like birth is the beginning, and that the two endpoints in some sense encompass the total of my being. But, there's nothing in the above that contradicts from that at all -- it says "eternal life" is "to know God." If you look at that from some vantage points it blows the traditional idea of "life after death" quite out of the water. Time and space are related and derivative, properties of the physical universe, rather than outside of it. Perhaps to know God is to touch something which transcends time and space? Beyond that, my thoughts grope blindly... but, does anything essential in scripture actually insist on a "life after death" perspective? [That people have, at times, believed in life after death? -- yes. That it is an essential belief for faith in God? -- I haven't found it!]

Last week, Jesus spoke to his disciples of "In my father's house are many mansions," and "I go to prepare a place for you." But, is he necessarily speaking of some kind of life after death? "My father's house" could equally well be something we encounter in this life. Jesus knew he was going -- this life was ending -- but with his life and death he had perhaps shown how, prepared us for, finding a dwelling place in God for our being, not someday, but now. Of course, "a dwelling place in God" could be equally many things, or nothing at all. Isn't that the point; to keep asking these questions and searching for answers, looking from as many angles and vantage points as possible while we still can?