God Is Our Rainbow

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

I can understand why someone would be an atheist.  God is utterly invisible.  If there truly were no God, how would men and women reason to create God?  Well, it seems obvious to atheists that we would reason pretty much the way we have been for centuries.  

God is like the void in the void.  We see all this splendid life around us, all of it working very well on its own, and we would add another functional force upon it: a god, an all emanating, all inhabiting Presence, a personality?  

Many mystics speak of the dark night of the soul.  The absence of God could be keenly felt by them.  William James' still relevant work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, recounts spiritual lives of faith seized by exuberance and by absence.  

There is a dreadful time that all serious mystics for God, all seekers after God, experience the Great Silence and dreadful invisibility of God.  For such who would not live a wasted life that time can be so terrible.  How do you live beyond it without losing faith?  

Even worse, how do you live with the terrible question of what might yet be once you cast your faith aside?   What do you do with those moments when you brush up against death or are surprised by a numinous startling rainbow, and you wonder, "What if?" 

In Mark's gospel, the first gospel written, the one wherein Jesus is not as magical as he is in the other gospels, Jesus cried out on the cross, "My God!  My God!  Why have you forsaken me?"  

If Jesus believed, as some scholars suggest, that his ordeal would have finally called God down to "disingentile" the world, thereby making the world right again with God's people ruling in their right place in God's holy land, then his last words carry great weight. God did not arrive and Jesus may have felt the Deuteronomic curse. 

Even if, as other scholars believe, Jesus had started trouble in the Temple, and was taken to be immediately crucified without any of his followers there to witness it (according to Mark's gospel they fled), then his words are the words of Mark's community.  We infer that they too suffered great persecution, possibly by Jews, most likely by Romans.  If your government is killing you and your friends and loved ones, you might feel forsaken by God. 

Another "if" about Jesus:  if he knew that he could call down angels to save him, then the words in Mark are pointless drama.

However, those words spoken point to the sense of God's utter absence.  In life there are for many people interminable stretches of there never being God.  

Like this morning, as I walked, ensconced in thought about the coming day, the first day of school and all of its certain trials and indignities, I had no sense of God.  I was not even thinking about God.

Suddenly, I saw scurrying in the dark a tiny animal that looked like a worm, it's body rigid and straight, moving rapidly across the street beside my foot.  I detected the movement near the rim of a street's light and used my cell phone to illuminate a closer look.

Was it a centipede?   If it had multiple legs, and it most likely did, they ambled beneath its body.  A centipede does not look tubular like a worm.  

I do not know what kind of critter I was seeing.  I will look it up.  But the affect on me was profound.  It changed the temper of my morning perambulation.

I am always utterly surprised by nature.    

And then, like a rainbow, a magnificent natural, surprising rendering of marvelous colors that still can be and still can seem so miraculous, God broke into my consciousness.  

I began to ponder what I might write this morning as I pray with this keyboard tapping.

Blessings...