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January 20 - February 3, 2018
If Struensee returned to Denmark today, he’d find a society practicing the reforms he fought for. Yet American evangelicals would deem most of the compassionate citizens of Denmark—who are living according to Jesus’ teaching about how to treat people—as “godless” and try to send American missionaries.
Who then are Jesus’ followers: the secular, godless Danes caring for the poor or the don’t-tread-on-me Ayn Rand-inspired libertarians and their church-going enablers?
We have Jesus and his Enlightenment prophets to thank for the humanistic ideas on which America was founded.
As Francis scrawled in the margin of this book’s manuscript, “Educated contemporaries of Newton wondered how there could be two ‘downs’ or centers of attraction. Did sin or gravity ‘hold’ everything together? The mind boggles!”
To the secular doctrine of human insignificance has been added a secular version of Original Sin. Humankind’s sins against Earth’s ecological well-being nicely mirror the earlier theology of our fall and our banishment from the mythical Eden. We may have left religion behind, but once again, we’re being taught that we’re guilty simply for being born. John Calvin would be delighted.
My question isn’t, “Did I create God who creates me?” but, “Do I need God, however he, she or it came to be?” My question isn’t “Can I find a church, mosque, synagogue, a gathering of atheists or some other temple that’s perfect to stroke me?” but “Where can I find spiritual beauty that feeds my soul?”
I go to church as my means of trying to encounter God, not as a way to look for perfection on earth.
The Orthodox view of salvation is that it’s not a series of magical steps, akin to the one-time born-again experience, but a journey. According to the Orthodox tradition, a person never becomes saved, because we are always becoming.
Where we go to church, or whether we go, isn’t the point. The point is who are we becoming? Does church help you to become the sort of person you’d pick to be stuck on a desert island with? Good! Go! Does it hurt your chances of becoming that person? Run!
There is only one defense against the rising, worldwide, fear-filled fundamentalist tide engulfing all religions (including the intolerant religion of the New Atheists) which once engulfed me: the embrace of paradox and uncertainty as the virtuoso expression of love.
Ritualized scapegoating became the foundation of religion. Girard argues that our mythologies describe what’s always happening, not what happened once upon a time. So the Bible brought a transition from the scapegoat norm to something better.
The idea of atonement—Jesus “dying for our sins” as if to satisfy God—is the opposite of evolutionary truth. Evolution doesn’t demand justice; it demands life. In evolution the result of suffering, killing, extinctions, death and chaos is the learning curve undertaken by genes that pass on knowledge in an effort to survive. No one from the first primitive microorganism to Jesus has died to “satisfy” an angry God.
Girard argues that while the gospel is God’s revelation, we understand its meaning only gradually.
In the West, he notes, the move away from scapegoating is not the product of the Enlightenment but rather the result of the enlightened teaching of Jesus, (affirming my view that the Enlightenment was a Christian heresy).
Those of us raised in the Christian tradition need to choose to either see God in Jesus or to continue to let the Bible define God.
How do we define goodness and who can set us an example of what goodness looks like in action?
I say the Nicene Creed. I say the words “I believe” this and that. I say these words in good conscience, because saying I believe in God is not the same as saying I know what those words mean.
The words of the Creed and my words of love are metaphors for something that is ultimately indescribable but ever present and never perfect. What I know is that whatever the Creed means, I have been overwhelmed by love. I have seen “Light of Light” in action, felt its power while not understanding from whence the light pours into me.
Lucy inclined her head and kissed me. This thought crashed into my brain: I am being seen as I’d like to be perceived, not as I see myself. I have seen the face of God.
I do not always believe let alone know if God exists. I do not always know he, she or it does not exist either, though there are long patches in my life when it seems God never did exist. What I know is that I see the Creator in Jesus or nowhere. What I know is that I see Jesus in my children and grandchildren’s love. What I know is that I rediscover hope again and again through Genie’s love. What I know is that Mother Maria loved unto death. What I know is that sometimes something too good to be true, is true.
Our fear of meaninglessness comes from allowing ourselves to be forced to make a choice, as it were, between the science of what Genie looks like and the truth of how she looks to her lover.
Christ’s love unto death and resurrection—however we interpret those words—is a means of freeing us from the anguish of mortality.
Our best hope is not found in correct theology, the Bible or any other book, but in the love we express through action rather than words. Our best hope is that love predates creation and thus that the Creator sees us as ever young. Our hope is that when we look at God through the eyes of the loving Christ we will see who God really is. Our ultimate hope is that God will be looking back at us as we’d like to be seen.
