(Originally posted on Facebook on 17 November 2016)
(Just in case anyone is actually trying to follow this, this is the 6th class session because the 4th and 5th happened on Saturday). The theme of tonight’s class was “crumbling images of God.” There was a painful passage in the class material about a child’s death during the holocaust and we started class by reading an excerpt from Camus’s “The Plague” that describes a child dying slowly and painfully. Even just reading these I had that visceral feeling of revulsion accompanied by the feeling of, please, God, let this not be true. Or if this is truth, let me off the hook of faith...
I had a moment of clarity once. It was at another time in my life when I was thinking about religion a lot. I was at St. Edward Park in Kenmore, which contains big abandoned building that used to be a seminary and the grassy grounds around it, and several acres of wooded space, with paths going down to Lake Washington. It has a definite vibe to it – to me it feels sacred, though I say that with some trepidation because emotional and sexual abuse are real and NOT SACRED things that happened in Catholic seminaries in general, and at St. Edward in particular. But anyway, I was there. I had walked down the bluff and I was sitting on a tree branch that grew out over the lake, in a shady spot on a sunny day, looking down through a few inches of clear water to the pebbles below. And suddenly I could see how God, the prime Lover, had created us in his image, as lovers. That love is not love if it is not given freely, so not-loving has to be a real choice. The light and the dark both have to exist. Life and death and good and evil and joy and suffering have to exist, or else we aren’t freely choosing love. And that isn’t to say that suffering exists just because we sometimes choose poorly, it is to say that suffering is a prerequisite for us even having a choice. God doesn’t meddle with creation, he doesn’t sit up in the sky and move us around like pawns, he doesn’t judge us – he IS creation. He is within us. We have the power to choose love, even in the midst of suffering. And God is that love.
That moment passed, that window closed, words don’t do it justice and they are nothing in the face of a dead child. But for better or worse I do believe. And mainly I believe two things. One is that God is incomprehensible. God is bigger than our brains – definitely my brain – can conceive, and though that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try, it does mean that any insight I have will be at best a part of the whole, a distorted reflection. Through a glass darkly. It means that no person or religion or philosophy or art or science has a corner on Truth and any claims to that effect are false. But the other thing I believe is that God is personal. We are children of God. God is in me and in every other human being and in all of creation. God is the life force. God is Love. This God who cannot be conceived in our minds lives in each of our hearts.
The path from this core to Jesus and Christianity and the Catholic church sometimes seems impossibly long. We got a handout about shifts in the image of God as depicted by the Catholic church "in the last few decades.” Of which the headings were: from pictures of God [as bearded white dude] to God as mystery; from punishing God to merciful God; from loving God to incomprehensible God; from male God to [both male and] female God; from neutral God to partial God [fighting on the side of the poor and marginalized]; from taught God to experienced God; from otherworldly God to God in each of us. And while I’m down with all this in principle, and I understand that these changes aren’t really new developments so much as rediscoveries of old wisdom (as my instructor put it in a gem of German, “man hat sich wieder zurückerinnert daran,” something like we re-remembered it again), it also serves to drive home the real whiplash experienced by at least one generation of churchgoers who grew up with one thing and then felt the rug pulled out from under them, faith-wise. The resulting emptying of the pews, the conservative counter-movement. A reflection, again, of society as a whole: if the things we used to understand as unassailable aren’t true, then what can we fall back on?
If change is the only constant and we fear change, then fear is constant. Love isn’t the opposite of pain, it isn’t the opposite of suffering. Love is the opposite of fear.
I’ve had a certain Leonard Cohen song in my head all week (thanks, SNL) but I'm replacing it with this one for now.
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
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