FROM THE BOUNDARY

We were reflecting on disenchantment – with religion, with faith, with ‘Church’ – where mere doubt has morphed into open rebellion. We’re slicing through the conditioning of many years exposing the innocence which was once ours by right, by birth. Yes – a “terrible beauty is born” and, like all rebellions, like the Easter Rising of which Yeats wrote, we’re uncertain where it will lead. One thing we’re sure of, that “all’s changed, changed utterly”. There’s no going back despite all the fears, the uncertainty, the pain of this childbirth. God forbid its final agony – the still birth of indifference.

 

Last week I mentioned the Tsunami in 2004. Why wouldn’t we question the goodness of God, indeed his very existence, after that? It was no answer to say ‘Oh but this was just nature being itself’ for sure it was. Yet how can you leave God out of it? Where was the “smiling face” behind that “frowning providence” which the priests insist is there? It simply wasn’t there. All we saw was the frailty of human life and our common humanity, the flame of the human spirit which ultimately can never be extinguished. But God, God himself, was silent.

 

St. Paul in Philippians (2:12) tells us that each of us must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. It’s down to us. We don’t have to do anything. Waiting in silence is more than enough. Whatever faith we have now, in rebellion, has been informed by experience, the experience of just very ordinary people trying to make our way with all our hopes and fears, our pain, our love, our tears. There are bound to be times in the deep night when we cry out ‘God where are you?’ but no answer comes.

 

 When he speaks, if he speaks, it will be in different ways to each of us. It might be as Jesus, the son of a supernatural being beyond the clouds. If that works for you, so be it. We touch him each in our own way. For the wise he enters as wisdom. For the simple hearted he comes in all the gentle majesty of a baby in a cradle. It’s why we can say with the Psalmist (Psalm 63), and with Thomas, “You are my God”. Is God dead for you, do you think? Why did he die? Was he someone else’s God, not yours? Maybe it’s this dead God who has led you to where you are now. Or was it a question of size?

 

Have you ever looked at the stars through a telescope? If you have, you’ll have gasped in wonder at their brilliant blues of aquamarine and sapphire, and their halos of crimson flicking ruby fingers of flame into the darkness millions of miles away, their light the light of thousands of years. Yet on this very tiny planet of ours we make ourselves so important, don’t we, the centre of everything? And we make God as small as ourselves, despite the vast and wonderful firmament which is his. Then, to confine him in our small space, we give him human qualities. We project on him the noblest consumption goods of language – love and goodness, compassion and forgiveness – and insist he’s always on call. Even the ancients saw through that one. Look at Hosea – “I am God and not man” (11:9) – the Psalmist (50:21) and Isaiah (55:9). Then we confine him to a book and we say you can’t transgress what’s written there. But God can’t be written. You find him only in the unwritten, in the infinity of the blank page. It’s why questions like ‘How could he have let the tsunami happen?’ have no answer. They’re meaningless. Yes, for to ask about God is like a blind man asking about light. The question is going nowhere.

 

Yet we go on reciting ‘God said’ and ‘the word of the Lord’ and parrot creeds and set prayers and allow a very fallible human being tell us it’s really all right if only we’ll grovel, and all as if the cosmic game can be reduced to snakes and ladders. At least that’s how it may seem to you. Meanwhile, we prescribe rules for ‘authentic’ religion and include rules for joining and exclusion. Gays are permanently blackballed. Those who don’t believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true are blackballed. Those who don’t accept the truth of every other dot and comma of Biblical texts are blackballed – well, unless the text is inconvenient, like the command that gays should be put to death. ‘Ah’, they say, ‘you can’t pick and choose’ – and then they pick and choose. We say ‘magic’ is pagan heresy and burn witches, but allow priests to work magic at the altar to turn bread into flesh and wine into blood. We turn against those who are different and deny them as dangerous – and all because they’ve made us feel mediocre and ugly. Is it really any wonder you’re disenchanted?

 

I suppose the disciples were a bit like you. Think how they responded to Jesus in the context of all the traditional Jewish categories of understanding – this Jesus who gave them a mighty act here, a nod and a wink there, and a whole series of stories about this and that. What on earth was he, this Jesus? An imposter? A false prophet? A cynic? A social commentator? A holy man and teacher of wisdom? And, unlike you, they were there. Yes, “My Lord and my God” – but what kind of Lord, what kind of God? They all had that problem – from John Baptist to Judas – and, for a time, were left only with a corpse. Besides, maybe nothing good ever really did come out of Nazareth.

 

All I can say to all of this is that whether we will or no we live our lives in relationship with the eternal, with existence, with that totality, that Is-ness, which embraces all things, in which all things rest. And if you’re disenchanted, ask why. Please know that not all Christians are as narrow as those you’re used to. Not everyone’s obsessed with dress codes. Remember also that you can’t manufacture faith. It can only come through life’s experiences and when you least expect it. You don’t have to thrash about for it. Remember too the Biblical warning. You can’t pin God down with the “precepts of men” (Is. 29:13; Mark 7:7) and no one can truly say they know “the mind of the Lord” (Is. 40:13-14; Rom. 11.34). The fact of disenchantment with what you have distances you only from that, not from everything that’s good and true and beautiful in you. Maybe, just maybe, in the ‘gloom’ of it all, you’ll find comfort and courage in the yonder shining light, if only you can see it, which burns in the darkness. It’s a light which ever blesses and caresses you – and tells you that all is well.

Go safely then, until the next time.

 

Cluedo from the boundary: ‘My face is radiant with joy but inside everything is dark and empty. Who am I?’