Now the eyes of my eyes are open ...

"Stamen Study 5" (© Erik Walker Wikstrom  2010)

Edward Estlin Cummings -- often written as "e. e. cummings," although, he, himself, preferred his name to be appropriately capitalized -- was a poet of the 20th century well known for his rather ... idiosyncratic ... style. 

I read one of his poems in worship the other day, and it's one I think of often.  It feels to me like a beautiful expression of gratitude; it feels to me like a prayer.  The poem begins, "i thank You God for most this amazing day," and ends:

(now the ears of my ears awake andnow the eyes of my eyes are opened)

This reminds me of a phrase that's attributed to Yeshua ben Miriam (who is better known as Jesus).  It appears six times in the Gospels:  "If a man [sic] has ears, let him hear!"

Unlike many passages, looking at different translations doesn't reveal too many variations.  All of them have Jesus saying essentially the same thing.  (The Amplified Bible: classic edition elaborates: "He who has ears to hear, let him be listening and let him consider and perceive and comprehend by hearing."  Eugene Peterson's quite personal translation, The Message, puts it a lot more simply:  "Are you listening to me?  Really listening?")

I know that all too often I fail to hear the "still small voice" (or, "the voice of quiet stillness," as one translation puts it) that is whispering to me of Life's love.  My ears are too stuffed with the noise of the news, and the voices calling me to do something for them, or telling me how to do the things I'm doing.  I know that all too often I pass beauty by, unseen, because I'm too focused on the comings and goings of my days to attend to the deep truths of my life-- of Life.  I know that all too often my ears are not open, and that all too often my eyes are not open, and that all too often I simply can't "consider, perceive, or comprehend."

How about you?

How open are your ears?  Not in general.  Right now.  Do you have ears that are able to hear?  Are you listening to the song of life?  Really listening?  Not always, but now.  If not, take a moment.  Close your eyes.  Allow all the noise to quiet down, and notice what you hear.  This takes practice, and none of us will ever be able to listen to Life like this all the time, but it's so important that we do.

The same with your eyes ... what are you able to see, right now?  Are you seeing surface things, the illusions of importance cast by so many things in this world?  Or are you able to see through the distractions and delusions that veil deeper truths?  Again, not always.  Right now.  If not, take a moment.  Move your gaze from thing to thing in front of you and really see it, then really look at the next thing.  See that stapler, or that sock, or that squirrel in front of you.  This, too, takes practice.

The spiritual life takes practice, because it is so much about developing the ability to really attend to life -- our lives, the lives of the those around us, Life itself.

Cummings' poem begins with a joyous, delightfully and delightedly exuberant prayer of thanksgiving to, "this amazing day."  It ends by declaring that now those inner ears, and those inner eyes, the eyes and ears that can truly hear and truly see, are open.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Try God

This is an adapted version of something I originally wrote on my other blog, A Minister's Musings, back in May of 2014.

On my office wall I have a framed image that I took from the inside cover of the magazine Venture Inward (the journal of the Association of Research and Enlightenment).  In front of a beautiful painting of mountains there is a saying taken from one of the "life readings" of  Edgar Cayce.  The subject of the reading is identified as #1472, and this is an excerpt from their 12th reading.  It says:

"Then, in this era, this age of changes ... it behooves the entity (as everyone), in its relationships in any manner, to impress up others in every walk of life -- not impelling by force, but by love -- to try God; to listen to the voice within ..."

I've had this piece on the wall of whatever office I've inhabited for many years now, because I feel that it describes my calling -- to encourage people to "try God."  I will admit that I haven't always said that out loud to folks -- or, at least, not too loudly nor to too many, nor in those exact word -- but when I have those moments when I forget what it is that got me into this business in the first place, I find myself looking at that page.

One of the things I learned to say in divinity school was, " let me unpack that."  Think of a shoe box that someone has kept under their bed, filled with all sorts of memories and souvenirs of their life.  (Like in the beautiful Billy Joel song, Souvenir.)  "Unpacking" something -- like, for instance, a passage of scripture -- is like opening one of those boxes and taking out each thing, really looking at it, appreciating it, and then, maybe, seeing how they all fit together ... listening to the story they tell. 

So ... let me "unpack" that quote that hangs on my wall:

First, "... this age of changes."  Born in 1877, Edgar Cayce, the so-called "Sleeping Prophet," was at his peak in the early to mid-1900s.  In his lifetime he’d seen the advent of the telephone, electric lights, refrigerators and washing machines.  During his childhood the first real “skyscrapers” were built, and Wilber and Orville Wright had shown that humans could go even higher than that.  He lived through World War I, and died just months before the end of World War II.  An "age of change" indeed.  And like many spiritual teachers before and since, Cayce believed that a new "era" of spiritual awareness was on its way.  In so many ways, seemingly on every front, today would certainly qualify as an "age of changes," too. 

At the same time, I think that whether Cayce intended this meaning or not, we often go through our own "age of changes."  It might be a job lost, or a new job discovered (or new responsibilities in the job we've had).  Someone you know and love may have gotten seriously ill, or died.  You may have gotten a frightening diagnosis, or be facing your own mortality.  Perhaps you've just welcomed a baby into your home, or sent one off to college.  Maybe you're leaving college and wondering just what "life on the outside" is going to be like.  I could go on. The number and variety of life-changing experiences we face as humans are almost limitless.

So Cayce is speaking to the individual known in the records as #1472 and saying that this message is in the context of the "this era, this age of changes" (whether they be external or internal).  In other words, he could easily be talking to us.  When I first came across this passage I had the distinct feeling that it was talking to me.

What about the, "impress upon others… to try God" part?  I think it's important to note that the reading is quite clear that one should not use "force."  I understand that to mean not just physical force or coercion, but also any attempt to convert someone, to get someone to change their minds to ones own point of view. In other words, Cayce is being clear that the worst forms of "evangelism" and "proselytizing" are not what he's talking about.  Instead of this, he says, one should invite others to "try God" through love.  I would add, by example.

And that brings us back to the "try God" part of this whole thing. I am convinced, absolutely and utterly convinced, that there is a Sacred Something.  There is something "larger" than us -- call it an energy, call it a spirit, call it what you will. And this thing, whatever we call it, whatever it is, is what I believe people have always been pointing to when they talk about "God."

As previous posts have said, so many people today have been so utterly turned off by the way "God" has been depicted, that they have turned aside from considering any idea of God at all.  Yet, as I hope I've already said, you don't have to believe in "that God" -- whatever "that God" is for you -- for the concept of "God" to make sense.    Brian McLaren, a leader in what some have called "Emerging Church Movement," helpfully suggests that we think of  "God" has been portrayed in the Bible, for instance, as a character named "God," or, actually, a variety of characters with that name.  And given the reputation "God" has developed over time by the way he/she/it has been portrayed, many have closed their eyes and turned their backs on what I think of as the ultimate reality. And that, it seems to me, is a shame. It's like a tree refusing to nourish itself by the nearby stream because it had heard that streams were no good. It's like a flower blocking itself from the sun because it knew a plant that had once shriveled in the summer heat.

I have written elsewhere that I believe "spirituality" has to do with living life "that is life."  Thoreau makes the statement in Walden that he wants to live in such a way that, when the time comes for him to die, he doesn't look back at his life and realized that he'd never really lived.  Spirituality, I think, when divested of all the various theological/religious clothing it has been covered in, is simply about living life that is alive.  So, while I do believe it is my calling to encourage people to "try God," this could also mean, "try touching life at its depth," "try living the fullness of life," "try connecting to something greater than yourself," "try touching a deep and profound wonder."  Although the founders of what has become the Twelve Step movement were thinking about God, they were intentional about using words like "a power greater than oneself," or, "higher power."  Ultimately, the name doesn't matter.  It is the experience the name is pointing toward that is important.

So why use the "G-word"? After all, for so many people the word itself is a stumbling block, and if I'm not encouraging people to "try that old God we no longer believe it," then why use the old word? For me, the answer is simple:  there is so much literature, art, and music which uses this word. Some of it, of course, is too deeply steeped in "that God we don't believe it," making it essentially unusable. But much of it, I would daresay most of it, becomes not only more accessible but more profoundly meaningful when seen with new, more open, eyes.  The works of people like McLaren, Marcus Borg, Bishop John Spong, John Dominic Crossan, and so many others are specifically focused on helping people to learn to see the old texts in new ways.  And in and through these new understandings of these old teachings to, essentially, "try God."

This is the work I feel called to do.  So I would invite you -- not impelling by force, but by love -- to "try God" for yourself.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived

I’ve been writing lately about images of God that don’t work for a lot of people, ways of understanding this thing some call “God” which turn people off, send them away, lead them to say, “I don’t believe in God.”  As I said at the beginning of this series, the woman who trained me as a chaplain all those years ago taught me a great response:  “Tell me about this God you don’t believe in.  I probably don’t believe in that God either.”

When I was studying philosophy I learned a definition of God that I’ve always liked:   “that than which no greater can be conceived.”  This goes back to Anselm of Canbterbury in the 1700s, and is an example of an ontological way of thinking about God.  In his book Discourse on the Existence of God he argued that God exists as an idea in people’s minds.  Yet one aspect of this ‘God’ is that God is Supreme, the Greatest, the Ultimate.  Anselm put it like this:  “God is that than which no greater can exist.”

So, we start by acknowleding that there is an idea of God, yet a “God” that actually exists would be greater than one which only exists in the mind.  This means, according to this argument, that God must exist, because, by definition, there can be nothing greater than God, and a God that exists is greater than a God that is only imagined.

Whether this line of thinking proves to you that “God exists,” I want to use it to try to show those who say they don’t believe in God that if God exists, the God they don’t believe probably isn’t God anyway.

Let’s say that you think God is the God of only a certain people or a certain place.  Well, a God who is God to all people and in all places would be greater, so this more expansive vision has to be true because “God is that than which no greater can be conceived.”  Right?  How about if you think that God is focused exclusively on our faults and failures, and has plans for our eternal punishment?  I’d say that a God who loves us for our strengths and our weaknesses both, and who takes pleasure in our successes more than our failures is a greater God.  Anselm’s ontological argument would say that my God — the loving God — must be the real God because it is greater than your angry and punishing one.

This works even in a counter-intuitive way about the issue of omnipotence.  You might think that the expansive, God-can-do-anything, understanding of omnipotence would be greater than my philosophy professor’s seemingly more limited one, God-can-do-anything-that-can-be-done. You’d be wrong.  Because the omni-omnipotent God, if you will, is capable of ending suffering, yet doesn’t.  And even if you say that God permits — or even causes! — suffering so as to teach us and help us to grow, that’s a pretty mean God who created things in such a way that that’s the only means of teaching us.  The more limited God, then, who can only grieve at the deaths of the innocent, comfort the survivors, and try to inspire people to help turns out to actually be greater than the God who could have prevented the disaster in the first place but for some inscrutable reason did not.

Do you see how this works?

You can try it!  If you’ve turned your back on the very idea of “God,” I’d encourage you to do this little exercise.  Write down the description of this God you don’t believe in.  Then try to imagine a God that is better than that — more loving, more inspiring, more inclusive, more healing, more inviting, more ...  Many people who’ve done this have told me that they couldn’t get past the conviction that “the God they don’t believe” in is what people mean when they talk about God.  What good is it, then, to imagine something that isn’t real?

This could bring us back to Anselm’s original argument, couldn’t it?  If you can imagine a God that is truly greater, is “more” than the God you were taught about and which you’ve now rejected, if you can get an idea of such a God in your mind, then such a God actually existing would be even greater still.  So if God is “that than which no greater can be conceived,” then your idea come to life, as it were, must be God.  Simply, that God you’ve imagined must be.

In a spirit of curiosity and exploration ... give it a try. Next week I’ll try to explain why I’ve been spending so much time writing about God in the first place.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Buff Santa in a Toga

A section of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" in the Sistine Chapel 

I was leading a discussion with a group of senior high youth, exploring the various ways they thought about God.  Or, rather, most of our time was spent looking at the ways they thought other people thought they should think about God.  In other words, we were having a conversation about the kinds of ideas they'd heard other people use to describe "God," and, as you might imagine, much of it revolved around "God's" they didn't believe in.

One of them cracked us all up -- and stopped the conversation for a while -- by announcing that they'd always believed that people thought of God as "a buff Santa in a toga."  For all it's shock value, I think it's actually a really good depiction of one of the ways lots of people think about "God."

For one thing, the conscious or unconscious image many people have of "God" is that of an old man much as Michelangelo depicted him -- white, somewhat long and wild hair and beard; male; white skinned; strong features; etc.  This image of God has an ancient feel, as a figure for a long time ago, a time long passed.  And while you or I might see the garment he's wearing as a robe, this young person thought of it as a toga.  So there's the "in a toga" part.

The reason she or he (I honestly can't remember which after all these years) described this "God" as "buff" is that he (of course) is generally depicted as muscular, which, of course, is a traditional way of understanding, and personifying, power and might.  This is, after all, "the Almighty."  One of the traditional attributes given to this "God" is omnipotence.  This "God" can do anything; there's nothing that he cannot do.  (Of course, one of the great challenges to this idea is captured in the question, "Can God create a rock so big that he can't lift it?"  One way or another, lovers of this paradox point out, God's power is supposedly proven to be limited.)  To embody this attribute, this person all those years ago memorably described "God" as, "buff."

That brings us to "Santa."  Right off the bat there's the whole white hair and beard thing. Admittedly, Michelangelo's God doesn't look all that much like Edmund Gwenn, (my personal choice for quintessential Santa), but if you were to put a red suit onto him and relax his stern face a little, he'd sure be able to get work in your local mall.

The real reason this person said he'd thought of "God" as "Santa," though, is God's reputation for bestowing gifts.  This might be the inverse of the "God" whole doles out nothing but punishment.  This "God" is the source of All Good Things, and will hear the cries and supplications of the faithful, rewarding them by answering their prayers.  After all, aren't "all things possible with God"?  Doesn't God perform miracles?  Jesus is remembered in the Gospel of Matthew as saying, "Ask and it shall be given."  (Much like, this young person reasoned, like writing a letter to Santa Claus.)

If the Westboro Baptist Church is the epitome of the God-as-Cop metaphor, as I wrote about last week, then something called the "Prosperity Gospel" could be seen as the ultimate expression of this boon-granting "God."  The prosperity gospel teaches that your financial and physical health are an indication of your relationship with God.  If you are faithful, keep a positive attitude, pray rightly, and, last here but not least, donate generously to religious causes, God will bless you with literal, material abundance.  (If you don't, of course, he won't.)  The Wikipedia article on the prosperity gospel puts it like this:  "Prosperity theology views the Bible as a contract between God and humans: if humans have faith in God, he will deliver security and prosperity."

While this may seem a more benevolent depiction of "God" than the one that condemns, it is no less problematic, and has caused as many people to give up on the idea of "God" entirely, because this is not a "God" they can believe in.

In his controversial (and wonderful) book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Episcopal Bishop John Spong explains why he came to reject this notion of God.  His wife had received a cancer diagnosis with a very negative prognosis -- she was not expected to live.  He wrote, 

"Because we were a well-known and publicly identified family in New Jersey, this news became public knowledge almost immediately.  The religious resources of our people and our friends were quickly mobilized.  Prayer groups throughout the diocese and even in ecumenical settings added my wife to their list of special intentions."

Seemingly miraculously, his wife's cancer went into remission, and to the shock and disbelief of her doctors she lived for another six and a half years.  And as the word of her near impossible improvement, he writes, "the people who were most concerned and whose prayers were the most intense began to take credit for her longevity,  'Our prayers are working,' they claimed.'"

You might imagine that someone, especially someone who could unquestionably be called, "religious," especially someone as "religious" as a Bishop in the Episcopal Church would have agreed with this interpretation.  After all, "God" is a "buff Santa in a toga."  All things are possible with "God;" nothing is impossible for the omnipotent and Almighty One.  Yet Bishop Spong didn't react this way.

"Despite my gratitude for the embracing love that these people demonstrated, both for me and for my wife, I could not help but be troubled at their explanations.  Suppose, I queried to myself alone, that a sanitation worker in Newark, New Jersey, probably the city with the lowest per capita income in the United States, has a wife who received the same diagnosis.  Because he is a not a high-profile person, well connected to a large network of people, socially prominent, or covered by the press, the sickness of his wife never comes to public attention.  Suppose he is not a religious oriented person and thus prayer groups and individual petitions in hundreds of churches are not offered on his wife's behalf.  Would that affect the course of her sickness?  Would she live less time from diagnosis to death, endure more obvious pain, or face a more difficult dying?  if so, would that not attribute to God not only a capricious nature, but also a value system shaped by human importance and the worldly standards of social elitism?"

Capricious.  That's really the only word to describe this "Buff Santa in a Toga" God.  Well, capricious and cruel.  Because a God who can do anything, who does do anything if one lives a certain kind of live and prayers in a certain kind of way, yet at the same time allows 3.1 million children to die of hunger each year?  It is estimated that roughly 1 person dies from hunger every 10 seconds.  What else can you call a "God" who could do something to prevent that, yet doesn't?  Cruel certainly comes to mind.

And when the cruelty of this understanding of "God" becomes unavoidably clear, people of good conscience can do nothing but reject the "God" being described.  When I was doing my chaplaincy training at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, I engaged with a family whose daughter was dying.  They were angry.  They were furious at God.  Years before this same daughter had been sick with lupus, yet after lots of prayers -- like those for Joan Spong -- their daughter had a full recovery.  The doctors were flabbergasted that there was absolutely no sign that she'd ever been sick.  In gratitude, this family began a radio prayer ministry, and they had many, many stories of people who had experienced miraculous recoveries which they all attributed to the power of prayer.  The put everything they had into this ministry -- all of their resources of time, energy, and money.  Yet here they were, after having done all that, and their daughter was sick again, dying, and this time God seemed to be doing nothing about it.  What kind of God was that?  And in their anger, they turned their backs on the "God" they had so recently revered.

I was lucky enough to study philosophy in college with a man named Richard Creel.  He posited a different way of interpreting the concept of God's "omnipotence."  His thought that, rather than denoting the ability to do anything, the word "omnipotence" really described the ability to "do anything that can be done."  We live in a universe governed by laws (which, some would argue, God himself ordained).  There are some things that simply cannot happen in this universe.  Humans, for instance, simply cannot breathe underwater, or fly through the air, unaided.  Those are things that just can't be done, so our inability to do them doesn't show any lack on our part.  Similarly, Dick argued, God's omnipotence exists within the confines of the laws that guide the universe.

Even if you are someone who believes that God created not only the universe itself but also those laws which govern it and who, then, could certainly bend or break them at will or whim, I would think you'd also think that God had had a reason for establishing those particular rules.  If so, then, why would God create rules that "he" knew he would at some point have to circumvent?

There are those who have answered this critique by saying that God created these Laws, knowing that he was going to circumvent them, in order to provide for us humans the experience of "miracles."  It's also been said that "none can understand the ways of God," which is pretty convenient when a logical inconsistency is uncovered.  The Unitarian side of the Unitarian Universalist tradition used to argue that if God gave us brains he probably intended for us to use them!

So let's return to Prof. Creel's assertion that the best way to interpret "omnipotence" is not "the power to do anything," but, rather, "the power to do anything that can be done."  The Universalist side of UU ancestry often summed up their theology in three words:  "God is love."  Putting these two things together you get the description of God having the power to do what love can do.

This post has already gotten too long.  (Thanks to those who’ve stuck with it!)  I want to leave with this last thing.  At a great many weddings people use the words from the Christian scripture of 1 Corinthians (specifically, chapter 13, verses 4-8) to describe what love is really all about.  If “God is love,” then these words should be equally apropos if you wrote it like this:

God is patient, God is kind. God does not envy, does not boast, and is not proud. God does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, and keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  God always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  

God never fails. 

Pax tecum,

RevWik