In the beginning, God created the sky and the earth. (NCV)
Welcome back. I hope my blog here
today finds you well. When the world makes me feel silly for loving God,
as I have felt from time to time along with self recrimination every time my
reason lays out evidence that God is nothing more than an illusion, a coping
mechanism, and make believe.
Let’s break that down.
If I had to pick among the three, I would first say that faith
in God my very well be all three, although make believe is most preferable.
As an illusion, especially in Freud's, much God is an illusion. Christians,
Jews, and Muslims have another word for that kind of illusion: idolatry.
The average person of faith, especially the one who relies on others to
tell him or her what to believe, must go through life maturing beyond an idol. I
know I did. Pretty soon, I realized the wisdom of the first and second
commandment. The God who is truly God is beyond all gods. No image, graven-mental-imaginary image, can
encompass God.
Moreover, God is a coping mechanism. Well, duh. So
is bicycling, education, chocolate, and watching the Atlanta Falcons, who show
me every year how setbacks can be overcome quite splendidly during the regular
season until they are in the playoffs.
Honestly, what better way to deal with the stormy pulverization
of life than to know that the strength to make it one more time comes from the
God in whom storms come and go.
Make believe is the ticket, as the late
Joseph Campbell suggested. We make believe all the time. We make
believe that our lives are not in peril as we race 80 miles an hour past a not
much slower semi-Leviathan on wheels that is inches away from crushing us.
We make believe that our Western states are not beginning the process of
becoming deserts and our glaciers are not vanishing and our ocean temperatures
are not rising. We make believe that drilling for natural gas is a fair
swap for poisoned water. We make believe we can eat three or four times a
week at The Happy Trough and not affect our health. We make believe that the Falcons will win the
SuperBowl every year (at least I do) and Tennessee will whip Alabama (again, I)
and everybody love us because we are Americans.
We make believe because we cannot do
otherwise. God is beyond our thoughts and our minds, yet faith comes to
us, and it is experienced as a gift. Nobody can force faith. Often faith comes yet we do not feel it so we
discount it. When we give ourselves
permission to make believe, we then use a word like grace to explain the marvelous
sense that love is the underlying power of being in the universe , and that marvelous
sense can be more compelling to us than the former sense that all being and
life is nothing but mere mortal tripe.
Faith in God truly is
a gift. I certainly did not think it up. I never met anyone else
who did. Christians who wrote of faith alone as the sole qualification
for being a God person did not invent that experience. They invented the
language to describe it. That language was make believe at its finest.
Even now, those of us
who have that gift are loathe to give it up. That gift comes to us
from...somewhere. I can make believe it comes from above, but above me is
the sky and beyond the sky is the universe. Beyond the universe is God.
We live and breathe
and have our being in God. The entire universe has being in God.
God is the power of being. Those last statements are God talk
packed with theological meanings. Think
about what that language says. Being could very well be nothing at all,
yet Being is what is. Being-itself abounds
with power, that is, the force that makes Being always be.
Here, I am talking
about a God much vaster and much beyond a sky god that in comparison is a
Tinker Toy.
The problem in the way
we make believe today is how we are squeezing Being-itself into a thimble of ancient
language and categories. God is much
grander and many universes vaster than what heretofore has been imagined to be
God.
I know one way God
speaks. Today, I joined with a sizable group of teenagers and grownups
who signed on to paint an elderly woman's house so it will not be condemned.
We scraped and scraped old white paint off of gray boards. In 1960
that paint was fresh, but now it has hardened into flakes and chips glued onto
loose boards. The color from the tin
roof has faded to white like my brand new Atlanta Braves cap I leave in the back
window of my car. The lady told us her house was 100 years old.
I believe a lot of God
language was spoken as we scraped that house and cleaned that yard. When
the house is repainted, I am confident that the language I spoke today with the
others surely must be saying something that can be translated into a crude
English equivalent that goes something like, "God is love."
Make believe that!
If you are a seeker or a restive finder ,
then I hope that my word today offers some illumination.
Thanks for visiting. Until tomorrow…blessings.
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