On the Limits of Christianity and Prayer

I had lunch this week with a friend from seminary during which we commiserated over the usual suspects that trouble our personal theologies. I left our meeting that day feeling re-invigorated enough to struggle with them some more. Here are some of the results, although they are incomplete in that I feel I will need to return to them again and again.

1 Corinthians 15:12-14; 19

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from
the dead, how can some of you say there is no
resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain…If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

I have been thinking about this verse lately, precisely because I find myself doubting the “resurrection of the dead,” whatever that may ultimately mean. Those last words symbolize my disposition. And that is the last thread I hang onto…the uncertainty of what resurrection of the dead may ultimately mean. But how does one base a faith upon pure uncertainty? Oh, how so many of my past tenets of faith have become vestigial organs now. And I don’t mean it to sound as if I am glorying in that, either. I mourn for them…I am to some extent lost without them.

I am struck by the centrality, the necessity of St. Paul’s words. If we do not have this belief, then everything is in vain, of no purpose, pointless. If there is no resurrection, then we are all just wasting our time. Was it easier for St. Paul to believe in miracles than it is for us today? Was there less cynicism? Was there still room enough in the minds of people for the miraculous to occur?

I cannot change that today there appears to be no room for miracles. I take it for certain that the violation of the laws of nature by any deity is impossible. Instead, these days I find my miracles in things visible. And this, I think, is neither good nor bad. It is simply where we are. Some Christians find themselves still waging war against this loss of the supernatural God. I wish them luck, and I pity them for theirs is a faith that is under assault on all sides. As for me, I am tired of trying to rescue this God. I am tired of performing mental acrobatics to try and find some escape clause, some loophole, and some syllogism to keep this God on continued life support. I have decided to pull the plug.

Is there a resurrection of the dead? I have no idea.

Does this mean there is no afterlife? I have no idea.

Perhaps there is hope, and I will allow for that. I will allow that God, the great whatever in the sky, the mysterious force driving the universe, has thus far provided enough evidence of the miraculous in and through the cosmos and nature to provide room for hope. And, yes, it is a scary place to find oneself. And yes, sometimes, I can find comfort in plain old hope…sometimes.

Yet I am still at odds with St. Paul’s declaration. I have heard the explanations of the historical context surrounding the passage. Still, I can’t help feel that what St. Paul is writing is not simply a response to a problem in Corinth. I have to permit that this is precisely what the saint says it is…a central tenet of the faith, without which there is no faith. And that is something that no historical critique of the passage can erase.

Luke 11:1-2a

(Jesus) was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John (the Baptist) taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say…”

What follows from verse 2b to verse 4 is St. Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. Another version is given to us by St. Matthew in chapter 6:9b-13 in his community’s gospel. There is no version given by St. John’s gospel and some scholars offer that a proto version of the prayer can be found in the gospel of St. Mark, 11:24-25. I will not attempt to expound at all on the differences between the versions as other persons with far greater academic pedigrees have done so on many other occasions and with better insight than I can offer. Instead, what I am proposing here is something completely different, going back to the question given in St. Luke’s account – “teach us to pray.” I hope to speak as honestly as I can in this little exercise.

Prayer is something that I struggle with, mainly because I find myself not knowing how to pray. While God is still a mystery to me (and always will be), at this point in my life I find myself trying to think of God in non-personal, non-agential, and non-theistic ways. Thus prayer, at least the concepts and traditions of prayer that I have grown up with, has been blasted to pieces and rendered utterly useless in this new spiritual country in which I roam.

Before I go any further, let me offer a little bit of a negative credo concerning God.

- I do not believe God is a separate being who exists somewhere “out there” beyond time and space.


- I do not believe that God hears our prayers of supplication and requests and then grants or denies them, depending on God’s will.


- I do not believe we can persuade God to do certain things through prayer.


- I do not believe that God can or does intervene in our affairs. God is not a cosmic superman, stepping in to deliver us from harm or evil.


- I am not certain that God can act as an agent in any way, moving or leading the universe towards any certain goal. It may be that God can do this, but I am unwilling to place any bets upon it, at least if in doing so one is required to allow that God has a prior vision of what the universe will or should look like and then, as an agent, works towards the fulfillment of this prior aim. The crux here is prior aim or goal. If I allow this, then I fear that I slip too easily back into the rut of viewing God as a person, going about, working toward a vision, just as you or I would go about working toward a goal or plan. When I consider the world and the cosmos, I am amazed at the struggle towards life, and towards complexity. At the same time, however, I wish to preserve the freedom of the cosmos and all its inhabitants and matter in its quest towards this complexity.

Is this complexification, expressed freely within and by the cosmos, precisely the cosmos’ response to a God that lures it towards something unexpected? Perhaps, but again, I am afraid of even granting this much to God as it again points toward a greater goal or aim of God. Gordon Kaufman has suggested that it is only the creative serendipitous movement of the universe that can be termed rightly as “God.” While I agree with Kaufman on this, still I am driven further from any traditional understanding by the work of persons such as Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute who suggest that this ability to move towards complexity and life is an essential feature of the universe, existent from the moment of creation.

If this is so, then where does one draw a line of distinction between God and the world? Thus I find myself becoming more and more a pantheist rather than a panentheist, unless I remain firm in the idea that no one individual can claim to be the ultimate expression of God. God, rather, can only be glimpsed (and I would like to stress that this is a peripheral glimpse, remaining always out of focus) in the entirety of the creative serendipitous movement of the cosmos. Is this enough to base a God/world distinction upon? Perhaps it is.

But let me get back to the original question: How are we to pray? Here is my offering. Several years ago, I ran across a Buddhist blessing to be used before meals. I and others have since adopted it, feeling that if prayer is to be an intentional, conscious act of opening oneself up to understanding and living within the world in a spiritual manner, then any prayer must become an expression of this orientation. Likewise, for me a prayer must avoid becoming a laundry list of requests, pleading for God to do what God is incapable of doing. Prayer is to be in part a remembrance, calling to mind to needs of others in such a way that those needs become our needs. In our prayer we must become the other so that we share in their pain, suffering, joy, and pleasure. So, after all these caveats, here is the prayer that I try to use, adjusting it when necessary (as I mentioned, it is a blessing for use before meals) to reflect the situation at hand. When you pray, say:

“This food is the gift of the whole universe,
the earth, the sky, and much hard work.
May I live in a way that makes me worthy to receive it.
Many beings will struggle for food today.
May they all have enough to eat.”

What I appreciate about this simple blessing is that it avoids pleading with a God that I believe cannot hear. Rather, it serves to focus one's attention on the present moment, realizing both that nothing should be taken for granted, and that one should, as much as possible, become completely empathetic toward the complex web of actions, misfortunes, struggles, and successes that comprise the universe.

Excerpts

Nothing much here...just some excerpts from Sophie's World by Jostein Gaardner that I turn to now and then for reassurance. Enjoy!

"A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when amagician suddenly pulls a rabbit out of a hat which has just been shown to them empty.In the case of the rabbit, we know the magician has tricked us. What we would like to know is just how he did it. But when it comes to the world it's somewhat different. We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because here we are in it, we are part of it. Actually, we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference between us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick. Unlike us. We feel we are partof something mysterious and we would like to know how it all works...As far as the white rabbit is concerned, it might be better to compare it with the whole universe. We who live here are microscopic insects existing deep down in the rabbit's fur. But philosophers are always trying to climb up the fine hairs of the fur in order to stare right into the magician's eyes.

"The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder...The world itself becomes a habit in no time at all. It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world. And in doing so, we lose something central...for somewhere inside ourselves, something tells us that life is a huge mystery. This is something we once experienced, long before we learned to think the thought...For various reasons most people get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background. All mortals are born at the very tip of the rabbit's fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick. But as they grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the fur. And there they stay. They become so comfortable they never risk crawling back up the fragile hairs again. Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness..."

“Das Ding an sich” and personal thoughts

No real epiphanies here, just some thoughts to capture before they disappear. A confession if you will…

Often I think that one of my struggles is not to come up with some new amazing never-before-thought-of idea, but rather to see things in a new light. The most insightful moments of learning for me are those in which something, an idea, set of facts, etc, that has been before my eyes and mind for a very long time are suddenly “seen” anew; I become aware of a pattern, having always existed, but now seen clearly and with a precision that was lacking before. Something starts to make sense in a way that it didn’t before, regardless of how often I had scanned over, read, or played around with it in my mind. A pre-existent truth finds its way home with a stickiness that it didn’t have before.

Thus wise, I have been pondering certain dispositions of mine, personal feelings and intuitions. The saying of Kant’s, “Das Ding an sich,” kept returning to me; “The thing in itself,” as it is known only to itself and to no other observer. I wonder how that applies to my personal feelings and sensitivities.

So often, I become convinced of the reality of my perceptions of other things and people. That is, I am convinced that my perception of them is actually how they are in themselves. I am convinced that there is no discrepancy between my thoughts and the reality of the other thing. It occurred to me that so often, this is the breeding ground for the un-pleasantries in life. Hurt, pain, anger, sadness, and all other sorts of ill-feelings that are all based on my believing my understanding to be the reality of the situation. How often does this misconception, this wholesale buying of personal interpretations lead directly to sorrow and personal torment? How often does it shape my subsequent actions for the worse?

There is something else here, something pleading to be dug up, to be examined but I don’t as yet know exactly what it is or how to excavate it. Some way of seeing the same old things with a new vision that has slipped away for the present. Maybe it is simply an inner longing to see the old things in a new way, a request for a new vision? I don’t know. Does anyone really understand that, the internal struggle for dealing with the same old trials in a new way? It is a longing to escape for a moment the inner thoughts and voices that seem to struggle against each other, realizing that I have heard all these same thoughts before, played around with them in the same old ways, and have grown tired of their endless banter, their same tired conclusions producing the same tired actions and results.

God's Evolution - a meditation on Luke 23.42

The other day I was listening to the Taize song "Jesus, Remember Me." The lyrics are simply a repetition of Luke 23.42: Then he said, 'Jesus, remember me when you come in (into) your kingdom.' The "he" is one of the two men being crucified along with Christ. Tradition identifies his name as Dismas and in the Catholic tradition he is revered as a saint. (For those of you not familiar with the story, the two men being crucified next to Christ are both thieves. One of them, Gestas, mocks Christ while they are all three hanging on their crosses. Dismas, on the other hand, chastises Gestas for his harassment of Christ, proclaims that Christ is truly innocent, and then asks Jesus the favor given in Luke 23.42. Christ responds back to Dismas that he will indeed join him in his kingdom.)

It struck me that whenever I hear this passage, my mind usually stays focused on what is happening to Christ, and even the penitent thief's statement usually is a reminder of the faultlessness of Christ. I suppose this is from growing up in churches that emphasized the sinless nature of Christ as necessary for atonement. Anyway, I began to think about Dismas, the penitent thief in a new way. Even though the gospels list the two men crucified with Christ as criminals, we do not know the specific reason they were being executed. In Roman eyes, all three men, including Christ, were criminals. Dismas and Gestas could have been convicted of something very petty or very great. By modern standards, they could have all three been innocent or, at the least, not guilty of anything demanding execution.

I began thinking about the mental state in which the dialogue took place. (A little side note here - I am aware that one cannot take for granted that this exchange between Jesus and the thieves even took place. Certainly the author of Luke intended for his crucifixion narrative to provide a lesson for the early Christians. Recognizing this, I am attempting to put this very old lesson to new use. But back to the reflection.) Dismas is faced with not only the certainty of death, but the nearness of death. He knows that he is in his final hours and face to face with his end. Think about that - knowing that one's death - which remains in peoples lives often at the periphery of their thoughts, so distant that they often are oblivious to its certainty - is immanent.

Dismas is in the immediate presence of his death. He is faced with the inescapability of his death. Prior to this he may or may not of heard of Jesus of Nazareth. If he had, perhaps he had earlier on hoped for a miracle. But now, as he hangs from his own cross, there is no hope for a miracle. Christ cannot save him from this moment any more than Christ can save himself. If it is the case that he had never heard of Jesus, which is just as if even not more likely, he does not even have this hope to hang onto for a while before seeing it slip away.

What does he ask of Jesus? Remember me. He does not ask to be saved, only to be remembered. And what if this was a reciprocal request? Remember me, Jesus, as I will remember you, for here we are alone, dying a slow death, mentally grasping for hope and dignity as it all slips so quickly away. All we have in this movement is our sharing of it...our unity is in this destruction. There is no promise of anything after this, but let our final acts be the remembrance of each other as our mental faculties slowly slip away and we die.

This is, as I see it, an act of final desperation. Desperation not for salvation from destruction, but perhaps desperation for hope, even if it is only the hope of remaining human a bit longer, that the last thing should be something of worth. I read into Dismas' last words a persistence in being human, being that which defines our humanity from the rest of creation.

I think about these things primarily because I am convinced more and more that whatever God is, God must be revealed in all, in everything. And this means both destruction as well as creation, in death as well as in life. This is troublesome because it implies a "bi-polar" God of sorts. The God that is serendipitous creative movement is also serendipitous destructive movement. I feel that it is our place, precisely because of our distinctively human capabilities, to grasp onto and attempt to further the creative serendipitous side of God in order to become God's co-workers. God is, in this sense, evolving just as the universe and life is still evolving. We are on the forefront of that creative serendipitous movement. We are the tendrils reaching out, exploring new possibilities. It is in this sense, when I say that God is evolving, that I can better understand that God's kingdom, the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth, is in-breaking and yet still to come. Just as we are still working out our salvation "with fear and trembling" we must also remember that "it is God who is at work" in us (see Philippians 2.12-13). Our evolution is God's evolution. Our salvation is God's salvation.

Stray Dogs and White Privilege

This morning I drove to a gas station nearby to fill up my car. The station is directly across the street from a public golf course with a high chain link fence running along its perimeter. As I exited the station onto the street separating the station from the golf course I was stopped by a red light. And so I sat in my car, watching traffic on the cross street whiz by and falling leaves whirl and tumble in the wind. I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye and looked to see three feral dogs on the opposite side of the golf course fence. The smallest one quickly slipped under the fence to run in front of my car and across the street, probably heading toward the dumpster located behind the gas station. The second dog, a little bigger than the first, followed the lead of the first and scrambled under the fence with a little more difficulty. This left the third dog, the largest of the three being some sort of husky-retriever mix, staring longingly at its first two companions making their way across the street. After a slight pause, it too attempted to scramble under the fence but got stuck halfway under. This got me thinking and this is what resulted.

In a class on systematic theology last spring we were instructed to write a credo, a summation of what we personally believed in our faith. Part of the instructions for the assignment were to make evident what we held as non-negotiables, that is, things/ideas/beliefs which we refused to give up or discard because of their centrality to our faith and, perhaps even more importantly, our person. Since then, as I continue to work on other projects, I keep that lesson in the forefront of my thoughts. What things am I unwilling to surrender? What do I feel deep down in my bones must be held onto with fierce determination? It is not simply that I feel that they must be true, truth being so indeterminate at times, but rather that I must cling to them as if they are true even in face of the possibility that they might not be. What beliefs are so vital to who I am as a person that to let them go would mean a loss of who I am and who I wish myself to be?

One of my non-negotiables is the inherent worth and preciousness of life in all its various forms. Let me explain this a little further. First, by inherent worth I mean this: Life, by the very fact that it is life, has value. Life, struggling, wriggling toward the sun, scraping away at the earth to find sustenance, fighting to continue on despite the constant threat of breaking back down into the chaos from which it came, is precious. It must be cherished. More than any other god or deity, life itself is holy. It seems funny in a way that we all struggle so much to come close to that which we set aside as holy or sacred. We put the holy off into sacred spaces, into niches, into tabernacles, into chapels, into cathedrals, synagogues, and mosques. In doing so we blind ourselves to the immediate presence of what is truly holy. What is most holy is what is nearest to us.

Secondly, by life in all its various forms I mean this: There can, in the end, be no division or system of classification by which we give more or less value to living things. All living things possess equal inherent value by the fact that they are living. All life, from the microscopic up to human beings, is sacred. I will admit this is troublesome when being applied. Nonetheless, in all our actions, we must, even when it comes time to take another life for the continuation of our selves, recognize the value of the life which we are consuming or destroying. And in doing so, in giving equal weight to all life, we create an ethic which itself is worthy of the tasks in which it is to be employed. If we ignore the importance and weight of the smallest things, how will we be able to understand and appreciate those of greater things? Can there be any wonder that when we overlook, whether out of ignorance or indifference, the worth and the suffering of the least of these, that we find ourselves overlooking the worth and the suffering of our fellow humans. There is a direct connection between the indifference to nature and the indifference to other persons. (As a side note, I find it strange that some of those who are the most outspoken in the pro-life camp on the issue of abortion are the most eager to pull the switch when it comes to the execution of persons guilty of capital offenses.)

As I sat there at the traffic light, still red at this point, I watched the last and largest of the three dogs wriggle and struggle to get under the fence. At that moment the light changed to green and traffic began moving. I paused a moment, trying to decide in that split second whether to begin moving or to wait for this dog to get under the fence and follow its companions. I decided to go ahead and drive on, feeling guilty. As I moved on and made my turn at the intersection I proceeded slowly, looking out the side window and saw with relief that the last dog had finally succeeded in getting under the fence. A car in line behind me had stopped to let the dog run safely across the road to catch up with its companions.

The dogs I encountered this morning are probably of little worth to most people. Most likely they will either be hit by a car sometime or rounded up by animal control where they will be taken to the pound, caged, and in all likelihood euthanized. In that moment though, I saw in them nobility. Abandoned either at birth or born in the open, the three had somehow managed to find each other and form a pack. Their life is not easy, and certainly it is unfair, especially for animals, bred by humans to be pets, pushed to the side, yet still struggling because they are alive. I don’t have the right words to describe it all, that mix of emotion and spirit that occurred for me this morning. Spirit is fitting though, because in all of this, I can say with some certainty that is what I felt afterwards. These days it is very difficult for me to define God. But in ways I can point toward it, and say God is in this or that thing or over in that direction. And I can point to this event, this scrambling of stray dogs (and also in the driver behind me who stopped to let the last one pass safely in front of them) and say God is in that; that the spirit of Life and God was very present this morning on an intersection between a gas station and a golf course.

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In a class I am taking this semester we discussed the issue of white privilege. White privilege is, as defined by Peggy McIntosh, “an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in on each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.” She further describes that “as a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts other at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts met at an advantage.” She goes on to list some examples of white privilege such as:

- “I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see
people of my race widely and positively represented.”
- “I can go into a
supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions,
into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.”
- “ I can
swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters without having
people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy
of my race.
- “I can do well in a challenging situation without being called
a credit to my race.”
- “I am never asked to speak for all the people of my
racial group.”
- “I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books,
greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my
race.”
- “I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have
them more or less match my skin.”
- “I can take a job with an affirmative
action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it
because of race, or keep it because of my race.”
- “I can remain oblivious of
the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority
without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.”

After we had our in-class discussion about white privilege, I will admit I left that evening fuming and feeling upset. I don’t like being called a racist. I didn’t feel that I should be somehow deemed guilty for the actions of bigots and those in the past who enslaved, tortured, or oppressed people of color simply because I was of the same race as them. On the other hand, some of the things in McIntosh’s list rang true. I work part time as a receptionist at a hair cutting salon and have been asked on several occasions by various persons of color or different ethnicities whether someone knows how to cut their hair. And to be honest, whenever buying band-aids, I never worry about the color of the bandage matching the color of my skin. I don’t even question that, I just assume and know that it will. Other times, I will see black or other ethnic children holding a doll that is white.

Even still recognizing all of these things, I still felt hurt in a way. And that didn’t change until recently, for the same class, we read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I think that this book helped hammer home the point about the fact of being oblivious to, so to speak, being on top of it all. It is this fact that McIntosh points out: I can “remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.” Even more than that it is the perception of my normalcy, of my being the standard by which all others are judged. In some ways, I guess, this is normal. We judge any difference in relation to ourselves. But again, it is this idea that our way, and let me be blunt, the white way, is some sort of universal norm by which all other ways, cultures, etc. are to be judged. And, I think, this is made more potentially dangerous due to the real power, be it in world finance, military strength, media impact, or others, that we due possess. It is not just that the white way is viewed as the norm, it is that we have the capability of enforcing it as the norm and are unwilling to admit that other ways are as equally valid.
I think this has other ramifications as well besides that of race. It is directly related to our willingness or capability of seeing things differently or even admitting that it is possible to see things from a different perspective. Let me give an example. Perhaps during the summer time you have happened to be near a lake or pond. There are insects called water striders which due to their design are capable of not breaking the surface tension of water. Thus they are able to walk and skitter about on water, never sinking or falling below. In a way, I think this could be a metaphor for how we view our reality. We stride about, riding the surface tension of reality never worrying about being brought under because we don’t even accept it as a possibility. And this is the important point - we must be willing to at least be open to questioning, to engage that possibility, to ponder that things as they are presented to us are not necessarily sacrosanct.

What if God is not personal?

Growing up in a fundamentalist household I was accustomed to the question, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” I would hear it at the end of every church service right before an altar call. All these years later I could still orchestrate one if I needed to. The pastor asks everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes. The pastor then spews out some words, overly generic. “Are you burdened by life?” “Do you feel like there is no way out of where you find yourself?” And my personal favorite, “If you died tonight/today/on the way home from church would you go to heaven or hell?” And then the solution was presented to whatever poor soul either felt down enough about life or was scared shitless by the possibility of burning in hell that they would raise their hand or perhaps make their way to the altar to be assisted by someone waiting on the side or in the front pews to pray with them and, if possible, lead them to Christ. The main selling point, when it wasn’t avoiding eternal damnation, lakes of fire, or any other horror from a Heironymus Bosch painting, was the promise of a personal relationship with God.

I bring up all of this because, whether or not one is a fundamentalist, one of the main tenets of Christianity is that God is in some way personal. But what if this is not the case? The farther along I move on this personal journey towards something (nameless and indescribable as it is), it seems I keep dropping more and more beliefs off to the side like some pioneering wagon leaving a trail of discarded items behind to lighten up its load. For a while now, one of those things that I have tried to leave behind (and still it keeps popping back up) is the dependency on the idea of a personal God, and, even more troublesome lately, an agential God.

There is some place for salvaging some of the idea of a personal encounter with God though, but I think it is through both the presence of the other, and in interaction with the other. First, the presence of the other. I like the idea of panentheism. God, whatever it is, can be understood as being inside/outside all things, yet not identical with all things (pantheism). Thus God still remains an elusive substance, present to us in the other, whether it be bird, ant, tree, or person. Panentheism keeps a limit on how far we go with this though, keeping us modest from proclaiming ourselves to be God.

Secondly, interaction with the other. Gordon Kaufman comments on this in In Face of Mystery much better than I (see page 333). Nonetheless, here is my take on his argument. In 1 John (see chapter 4.7-21) we are reminded “that no one has ever seen God.” I like to think about that…all this searching for something that can never be seen, never touched, so ephemeral, so vaporous, like grasping at smoke. The chapter hints at this, I think, basic truth: Whatever God is, our experience of God will be found in our relationships with the other, whatever the “other” happens to be at any given moment. It is this interaction in which, dare I say, God is in some sense is created. That energetic surge, that give and take, and most importantly, the love given back and forth is what creates the space where God is found. I guess it is appropriate that the author of 1 John bluntly states that “God is love.”

So, in this sense, can God ever be truly personal. I think, in a way, God is personal only if we create the environment within and without in which God can be manifested. God is personal, but in the sense that the possibility for God lies within us and especially within our interactions.

What are the consequences of this, then? Is God constantly being created and destroyed? Becoming incarnate and crucified? Do the possibilities and capabilities of God evolve along with us?

Pondering "Holy" Destruction

First, some passages which are relevant to what I am thinking about these days.

“I have no words with which to portray the feelings of the heart when it receives this divine will in the guise of humiliation, poverty, annihilation…By just that which the senses lack is faith heightened, increased, and nourished; the less there is to human eyes, the more there is to the soul…Mary sees the Apostles fly, but she remains constant at the foot of the cross; she recognizes her Son in that face spat upon and bruised.”
- Jean-Pierre de Caussade

“God is not thought of as some being outside the world but rather as a particular form of creativity and ordering going on within the world, namely that serendipitous ordering which has given rise (among other things) to the evolution of life on planet Earth and the emergence of human beings, and which continues to sustain us and to move us toward a more profound humanization…And faith (or belief) in God will be interpreted essentially as commitment, in the face of the ultimate mystery of life, to this reality central to this particular vision of the world (rather than as assent to some quite dubious propositions about some cosmic person, as it so often is).”
- Gordon Kaufman

“Our falls into nothingness can be and must be trusted – we can learn to let ourselves fall, to let ourselves sink. Isn’t this what the seed does as it falls into the ground, eventually to sprout new life?”
- Matthew Fox

I’ve recently been reading Gordon Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery and also, at the suggestion of my spiritual director, Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence. I am finding Caussade to be helpful but at the same time having some difficulty “translating” what he writes to better fit my personal understanding of God. I find myself agreeing with Kaufman’s working definition of “God.”

For a while now, I’ve been at peace with Fox’s elaboration on what he identifies as the via negativa – the path towards the divine through the negative aspects of existence such as pain, suffering, isolation, aloneness, destruction, and, ultimately, death. I have found myself benefiting from being able to view these things anew and, as is Fox’s intention, to be able to trust in these things. So, as I continue to construct my personal theology, Fox’s thoughts have been securely mortared into the hodge-podge structure that it is.

But here is the sticking point and the thing that has become my obsession lately. It is the immense amount of destruction that is integral to the universe. How does this fact correspond to or shape my idea of God? Like Kaufman, I believe that any theology, if it is to be of any use, needs to have as a conversation partner the findings of the empirical sciences. This is not to say that one has to be bound to the determinism or reductionism of the sciences, but that one cannot ignore the information they provide about the workings of the universe and ourselves. So, to restate the problem again, if God is, according to Kaufman, “the serendipitous movement which we discern in the cosmic and historical processes that have created human existence,” then what are we to make of all the destruction that has been part of this creative serendipitous movement? Let me make it clear that I am not concerned about the existence of destruction and death. I accept that they are necessary. But how does that necessity help modify this understanding of God. Specifically, I am concerned about the individual thing experiencing the necessary destruction.

If God is creative serendipitous movement, then does God somehow have to be found in the precise moment of destruction? Kaufman’s view, and he himself admits this, is found via reading back into cosmic and human history this movement. The problem is that this becomes a meta-utilitarian viewpoint in which the destructive presence in the cosmos is seen as beneficial precisely because it is viewed from the present. I suppose I could walk away at this point and say to myself, “O.K., I can trust this destructive presence because based on my looking back into the past and seeing the good that comes from it, I can rest knowing that any future destruction, including my own, will ultimately come to some good.” And that may be fine and workable. Nonetheless, I feel an inner urge to linger on this point and meditate upon it and explore it some more until I am fully satisfied.

What I hope to find is a way in which God is to be found in that precise instant of annihilation – that destructive moment. And I feel that it has to be something more than just a greater good coming from it in an event that occurs after the destruction. Let me give an example. If a hawk swoops down and grabs a sparrow and eats it, then obviously some benefit comes from it. The hawk is sustained to live for a while longer. But any redemptive act has to also be for the agent undergoing the suffering or destruction. There must be redemption for the sparrow. It cannot be only a posthumous benefit for something other than the victim. I am aware that certain process theologians address this issue by pointing to a redemption within God. But that only works if one accepts the process conception of God, which I am not 100% sold on. And this is not just an issue of theodicy. Rather than trying to justify God in the face of destruction, it is a search to see what implications destruction, so vital a presence, has for my always developing concept of God.