One for All and All for One

A. Powell Davies, pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., once wrote:

"The years of all of us are short, our lives precarious. Our days and nights go hurrying on, and there is scarcely time to do the little we might. Yet we find time for bitterness, for petty treason and evasion. What can we do to stretch our hearts enough to lose their littleness? Here we are – all of us – all upon this planet, bound together in a common destiny, living our lives between the briefness of the daylight and the dark, kindred in this: each lighted by the same precarious, flickering flame of life, how does it happen that we are not kindred in all things else? How strange and foolish are these walls of separation that divide us!"

It's so easy, though, to fall into "us" and "them" thinking -- as a species we seem to be hardwired to distinguish between who's "in" and who's "out."  Resisting that urge, that frequently unconscious habit, can be incredibly difficult.

Successfully enlarging our circle of inclusion is not just something we will do with our minds; it takes an expansion of our hearts as well.   And that's a spiritual undertaking.  "Love one another ... regardless" is a teaching that can be found in virtually every religious tradition (even though most religious traditions don't quite practice what they preach).  Even simply becoming aware of when we're defining someone as "Other," learning to see what we've so often be oblivious to, can be a spiritual practice.

A Spiritual Director can help us navigate the new terrain in which we will inevitably find ourselves.  They can listen to our stories of successes, as well as those of when we've been unable to see that underlying commonalty.  None of us will get this "right."  In fact, that can be said of every single thing the Spirit calls us to.  It is the effort, though, the desire to try, that is the practice part of "spiritual practice."

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

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

The Cosmic Cop

Michelangelo painting "Last Judgement" in the Sistine Chapel 

Without doubt one of the most pervasive images of "God" in the popular imagination is, essentially, a kind of Cosmic Cop.  This depiction has God always on the look-out for some kind of infraction, some breaking of some sacred law.  And like some cynical detective on TV, this Cosmic Cop has seen the worst of humanity so often that he now expects it.  (And these fictional cops -- like this fictional "God" -- is almost universally imagined as a "he.")  You are, in this cop's eyes, guilty until proven innocent (beyond a reasonable doubt).

In fact, while often unsaid, this image of "God" is also sort of like a vigilante.  Vigilantes are those who "take the law into their own hands," and since "God" is often seen as the creator of these laws as well as their defender, this might not seem like a fit.  And yet, the other aspect of the classic character of the vigilante is that they act as, "judge, jury, and executioner," and that is certainly part of this image of "God."  Not only does this characterization of "God" police our every action, but judges -- often harshly -- every violation, and then condemns the accused to, in most cases it seems, eternal punishment.

There is perhaps no more famous example of this way of thinking that the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which was preached by the colonial preacher the Rev. Jonathan Edwards on July 8, 1741.  It contains this rather memorable passage:

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider of some loathsome insect of the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.  His wrath toward you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire.  He is of purer eyes than to bear you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as abominable in his eyes as the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours."

Actually, there is a modern example of such an understanding of "God" taken to an extreme in our own day.  Some will certainly say that it would be to choose just one, but I think that the Westboro Baptist Church, under the leadership of Fred Phelps, is arguably the most hateful.  These are the folks who show up at funerals to "share their message" of "God's"  utter revulsion at, among other things, "LGBT people, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Jews, U.S. soldiers and politicians," to quote from the Wikipedia article about them.  In fact, this "church" believes that "God" hates pretty much everybody.  They wrote and recorded a parody of the rather remarkable so-called "charity song" produced in 1985 by more than 45 of the top musicians in the United States at the time, "We Are the World.".  The Wetboro Baptists Church's version is called, "God Hates The World," and you should only follow that link if you have a strong stomach and want to see how truly pervert a view of "God" some people have.

If this is "the God you don't believe in," then I couldn't agree more.  Yet this is not the only way that "God" has been conceived.  The Universalists, whose tradition forms one half of the lineage of today's Unitarian Universalism (the faith tradition I serve) did not believe in this "God," either.  Their name actually comes from the central teaching in their theology -- that salvation is universal.  Not only doesn't God sit in eternal condemnation of humanity, but God's relationship with creation is like that of a loving parent and their child.  God as "father" (or "mother") is one of the most common ways of talking about God, and if this truly is what God is like, then you have to ask what parent would ever condemn their child to eternal punishment no matter what they did.  All you have to do to convince yourself that we are not born "in sin," predestined to suffer in hell, is to look into the eyes of a baby. 

One might argue that Universalism was branded a heresy, and outside a proper understanding of Christianity.  (I could argue the reverse -- that the kind of "Christianity" we're talking about here is the true heresy, and that Universalist Christianity is the proper understanding, but I digress ...)  Yet even if I were to agree that Universalism is a fringe (which, again, I don't), there are many, many examples of a more Universalist understanding of "God" within mainstream Christian traditions.  In fact, it's been said that one of the reasons the Universalist Church of America  dwindled the way it did was that it essentially won the debate.  Some form of Universalist theology is being preached in a great many mainstream Christian congregations today, so you no longer had to leave your Methodist or Presbyterian church to hear the message of God's love (as opposed to God's wrath).
As an example, look at Matthew Fox.  Fox was a Catholic priest who was silenced by the Vatican and eventually moved to the Episcopal Church, developing what he called "Creation Spirituality."  One of his books is titled, Original Blessing, and contrasts this concept with the idea of the centrality of "original sin" which forms the foundation of the kind of theology we've been talking about here.  "And God saw that it was good," is recorded in the Hebrew Scripture of Genesis as God's first judgement of creation.

In one of his books on contemplative prayer, Fr. Thomas Keating gives what is by far my favorite expression of the antithesis position on God from the idea that God is some kind of Cosmic Cop (and judge, jury, and execution) It is a story that Cardinal Basil Hume, used to tell on himself:

When he was a child, his mother would take his brothers and him into the pantry where there was a cookie jar. She would tell them that God was always watching, and would know if they ever took a cookie out of that jar between meals.  And, so, young Basil grew up thinking of God as some kind of Cosmic Cop, always on the lookout for even the smallest infringement of the rules.  Even so – or, perhaps, because of this – he went on to become a priest.

But he remembers the day when in prayer he received what he considered a tremendous grace.  He suddenly realized that if God had been watching him take one of those cookies, God would have said, “My dear boy. Why don’t you take another?"

"My dear boy, why don't you take another?"  That is a God I can believe in.

Pax tecum,

RevWik