Monthly Archives: March 2007

In several conversations this week, I called God terrifying. The overwhelming response of people encountering the Shekina Glory of God in both the Old and New Testaments was one of sheer terror. We forget that God is not human. The coming of the Christ brought Him near and gave us His image in flesh, but God the Father remains Spirit, and utterly beyond. Even His nearness, close as our breath, is beyond us in its very intimacy. We have no truck with God’s terror these days. We’ve decided no God of Love would be terrible in that love or glory. This is hard to grasp. The ocean when it rises up terrifies us. The tornadoes that dipped from turbulent skies this week terrified the people in their paths. We are frightened of a million things, and yet a God whose power holds the potential to destroy all that is is disqualified from Godhood unless He be benign and nothing but soft comfort and healing.

Let’s say the Bible isn’t true. Let’s say scripture is made up stuff, like anything else written by humans. Let’s say God has said nothing of Himself to humanity. Of course, we could even say, there’s no God to speak to us, because there’s no God there.

Now, in the Godless world, what are we faced with? We are faced with reality, with what’s here. We are still faced with the days, the oceans, the winds, and the deaths that haunt us. We still hunger for origin and destiny, now little more than jokes, born now from nothing and headed toward oblivion. Love is a trick of biology, yet we feel anguish and delight, both states of being spun from illogical whims of millions of years. We fight over morality in every society of the world, the winners writing laws that perhaps serve the populace, perhaps serve the despot. Depends on where the power lies, because there is no metanarrative of humanity, except for the nothing nothing that led to chemical something that led to an experienced 2007, space travel, and the height of musical complexity.

Without God, we still want to know our world and ourselves, so we ask a near-infinite number of questions.  We get science, sure, but when it comes to meaning, when it comes to why, we are stuck with games for answers, endless twistings of thought to kill each other over, accusations of madness flying back and forth between individuals and cultures. If we can believe history, we humans fed each other to animals for sport two thousand years ago. We stretched each other on racks 500 years ago. We lynched folks a hundred years ago, and these days its bombs and beheadings and common murders of various kinds. What will it be a hundred years out, or a thousand, or the millions between now and when the sun burns up?

Nothing changes.  The body may evolve, but the human heart is stuck with a chase for the “good” life in which conditions don’t really change. How strange to appear on a planet with no cause and no destiny but now.  So we make it up, and call it life.

Is this overly bleak? The simple raving of a man who woke up on the wrong side of the bed? Atheists don’t mind this scenario, I suppose, because they hold high hopes that humans can rise above the madness and become…what? Gods? In the end, in this kind of world, all the gods die, and again, in the end, what do we gain for all our labor and suffering and dreaming under the sun?  History has yet to give us evidence that we are evolving higher states of compassion and love.  Killing seems not to have slowed.  Oh, but I forget: religion is the problem, they say.  If we got rid of God, we could evolve to the higher states of consciousness, freed from our superstition?

Of course, without God, who can say which consciousness is higher? Against what do we judge? How do we know which end is up?

One reason I believe in God is that believing that the scenario of time plus chance plus nothing leads to this world’s being here seems at least as mad as belief that an Intelligent Designer may stand behind it all as first cause.  It fact, it seems crazy to me that this all comes from nothing.  Science can give us hows and whats, but can never give us whys. We can clone, but we cannot make life. We cannot even make emptiness—no-life—for everything in creation is packed with the energies that underpin all matter, all that is.

We say God, and in our more sober moments, we realize we have no idea what we’re saying. We dismiss Him, and have no idea Who or What we’ve dismissed. What I’m arguing for here is a basic humility toward reality, toward our religious ideas, even toward our doubts. We human beings are an arrogant species, children on a playground standing atop a small mound of dirt, and calling ourselves kings, the only gods in town.

C.S. Lewis argued that our very hunger for knowledge of what is good and evil—in fact the very presence of the categories themselves—is evidence for the existence of a Creator with a character giving rise to our own. It begins from a premise that may not be acceptable, but the move from the premise to the implication is not irrational at all.  I will never see that faith in God requires any intellectual suicide.

A man rising from the grave?   Most people don’t believe it.   They don’t believe it because they understand the power implied. They understand that if we were there that long ago morning, sitting inside the grave, and saw the whole thing happening, it would have terrified us. People only come out of graves in horror movies, you know.

So much of our world has written the terrifying God out of their equation.  No mystery, just compassion as we understand it.  Well, as Job found out, if you’re going to write God out of life, you’d better “brace yourself like a man,” because whichever way the truth plays out, a human being ends up with a very large– in fact, it’s colossal–task.  He either sits astride a world for a few years, and his frenzied chase of whatever is all he’s got, or he gets to face what he can’t comprehend, a God who’s been called a liar, a cheat, and a murderer all His life.

In both cases, arrogant humanity is faced down by powers far, far greater than himself.  A Godless world doesn’t care how you go down, it will simply make sure you do.  God, on the other hand, at least cares—in fact, scripture argues that He actually loves us.

I’ll take my chances with the love.  At the very least, I won’t have to think I’m insane when I feel that love for the world around me.  I’ll know it springs from Love itself, from the One Jesus described as life itself.

“…I never said he was safe.  But he is good…”

Sorry about the constant shifting of Web site designs.  One of the things about WordPress is that they have a nice selection of templates, and I’m still hunting for the one I like best.  This one still seems bright and readable, and the other one (the black background) all dark and brooding.  I’ll keep it here for now, but don’t be surprised if you come back to a different look altogether.

Happy blogging…

I’ve been focused on seeing, carrying my camera around, annoying my friends and family by constantly framing some piece of the visual field, often asking them to be a part of it. I’m finding my default mode is to zero in on something random: a table and three chairs, the surface of the wet street, a shadowed corner of a room, a reflected light in a window, the still life of the book, coffee, and lamp in front of me. As soon as I consider something in the visual field as subject for potential reflection and capture through a camera lens, it changes my perspective, and suddenly, the most ordinary objects take on power. That power is simple: it impacts sensibility, thought, and any movement of mind toward or away from reality, love, and God.

Do I see God in these framed moments? Depending on how generous you’re feeling toward metaphor…absolutely. God reflected, maybe–and perhaps His nearness through glory and the created order is not quite Himself (I’m no pantheist), but still, as the artist lives in the work yet is separate from it, I see these frames of beauty, and if I pay attention, there He is. Accuse me of game-playing, intellectual dishonesty, illusion. Fine, it’s easy to do. But either way, there beauty stands, begging explanation or context, and it seems just as mad to ascribe it to nothing as to a living–however mysterious–God.

I’ve used seeing as a analogue to all sensory experience, and in that spirit, I want to move to listening. Listening to God is a huge issue these days among folks who want to “experience” God. A friend recently wrote to me that his world exploded when he heard this phrase from a respected speaker: “If the Christian does not know when God is speaking, he is in trouble at the heart of his Christian life!” The bold was in the original email.

Experience is certainly noisy. Cluttered. Hums, bangings, roarings, knockings, crunchings, and of course, cryings. (I know “cryings” doesn’t work, but I like the sound of it, speaking of noise.) It’s hard enough to hear the flesh and blood people of our lives, and truckloads of loneliness result from the feeling that no one hears us. We search for our “voice,” take classes in active listening, turn to music to both find and express our inner being, and in it all, we Christian folk hope and pray to “get a word” from God.

It’s odd that so many cry out for a word from God at a time when the Bible is under such seige. The Word of God isn’t considered to be such by many Christian people, at least not in the old inerrant, infallible sense. We hold the Book up to our own sensibilities and find it wanting. We can’t live with the OT genocide, the lack of condemnation of the morally repugnant (slavery, the subjugation of women), and the overall wildness of the tale. We like the salvation stuff, except that salvation necessarily implies we’re in danger of something terrible, needing to be saved from something a loving God would never subject a person to. I’m not sure you can have the one without the other.

I don’t know the answers. Call me a heretic if you want, but the first move I make concerning the Bible is that these men were writers. They were working–struggling, sweating– to put into words their experience of a terrifying and rescuing God. Aided by the Holy Spirit as they struggled (just as He aids us), perhaps the articulation of their experience was full and true, and yet…and yet… We believe Jesus brought the more complete, more perfect “fleshing out” of God’s image, and it is the Christ nature we are looking to as we seek God’s face and His word.

How best to hear? If two people want to have intimate conversation, be they lovers, enemies, or friends, quiet and stillness remain the venue of choice.

The words of God, a corner table in a quiet room, perhaps a coffee, journal, and a deep friend…

A good friend of mine likes to talk about sailing.  In fact, it is his chief metaphor for the spiritual journey.  He sees himself sailing over a wide, wide river, strong currents buffeting the keel, substantial winds demanding respect, and quiet eddys of energy asking to be paid attention.  There is a destination in mind, but it’s not fixed in stone,  sailing not being about going in a straight line.  We talked yesterday of losing sight of the shore, or at least of the part of the shore we’re most interested.   We talked of sailing near-directly into the wind and the slow progress one makes that way.  He argued that tacking more widely may not seem like steady progress toward the goal; in fact, he said, it may often feel as if you’re moving away from it.  But, he went on, there is always something of the destination in the tacking, and you sail faster to boot, which is, of course, more fun.

The metaphor is for life, of course, for the pursuit of anything; a goal, a career, a relationship, or a life with God.  My life is changing in deep seismic shifts, or at least that’s what I keep telling my wife and friends.  And I can’t tell if I’m tacking or just sitting in a calm zone, but my pursuit of whatever it is I’m in pursuit of is no longer headlong.  There is a ton of writing to do, but even as I type, I often wonder just what it is I’m after in all these words.

My friend–his name is Jeffrey (I have several friends who share my name) — suggested I pay attention to the puffs of wind that come.  I know what he means, and so I’m listening, watching the water and the light, trying to guage the wind.

Now if Jesus would just come alongside, walking on the water…