One of the things that stopped making sense to me sometime during seminary was the idea that humans are born innately bad and deserve eternal punishment for this (a foundational concept taught in many Christian circles).  Why would we deserve punishment for something over which we have no control? I came to ask.  Felt like torturing people forever for eye color or hair texture or the shape of our little toes.  These, too, are innate from birth.

But the more I live and think and read and get to know people, the more the first part of that equation doesn’t work for me either.  Even the most hideous human acts seem rooted not in innate badness, but a complex web of factors, including, yes, our genetic make-ups, but going far beyond that to damaging life experiences and powers beyond any individual, like those of families, neighborhoods, cities, and political and religious environments.  Heck, I’ve even been learning about lead poisoning recently, and all the havoc it unknowingly plays in lives across our country, concentrated (where else?) in slum dwellings where occupants have little choice about whether their walls get repainted or pipes get replaced.

I’m coming to wonder whether, when it all shakes down, we have any choice at all.  You heard me rightly:  any choice at all.  I live daily like I do have choice, and it feels quite often like I do.  But when I think longer about any single choice that I make, the choice can’t be extracted from that huge web I just talked about – any hundreds or millions of things that all moved in and around and through me to bring me to today, to this choice, to this ultimate decision about, oh, what cereal to buy at the grocery store.  Or whether to forgive the mean telemarketer lady on the phone.

The more I get to know the back-story to any person’s life, the less able I feel to place blame on any shoulders for the bad things people do.  On the contrary, my compassion for wrong-doers grows, and, in many cases, I grieve for all the things they endured to bring them to whatever badness they’re presently about.  Part of my own healing in recent years, for that matter, has involved unlearning to feel personally at fault, and therefore guilty, for responding to certain kinds of people with fear or judgment or hostility, for not being able to follow through on certain things I know would be good for me…for being far from perfect.  Most of these very things are defense mechanisms that my dear little psyche dreamed up long ago to try to protect me.  They are not evidence of badness at all – not rebellion against Good and True and Right.  Salvation I’ve needed, yes, but not from innate badness.

And this gets to the heart of what I’ve really wanted to talk about today:  God.  I want to ponder God, and whether or not the divine has a rough side.

A friend responded recently to the story I posted last month with a version of this question:  Isn’t it possible that the judgment and wrath of the preacher in this story (Harris) and the love and compassion of the blind woman (Mama) are both faces of God?  Are you wishing for and imagining and dreaming only of a lop-sided God – a God that lacks the wholeness that is softness and spikes, darkness and light, judgment and mercy…Harris and Mama?

Maybe I am.  I’m uncomfortable with a God that looks too human, too full of all the limitations that come along with human territory.  I’m suspicious that such a God isn’t God at all, but a projection of our own selves, made far bigger and more powerful, but nevertheless imbued with our own consciousness and emotions and responses to the things we don’t like.  Anne Lamott wrote once, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”  And I think she’s got it right.  A God that’s going to zap all my oppressors seems appealing, in one sense, but also one who isn’t taking into consideration, in the zapping, all the things that make oppressors what they are…that make me who I am.  Again, that web I talked about earlier.

I’ve been reading Carl Jung’s autobiography this month, and he reflects a lot on God.  He’s convinced that just as there is darkness and light in all of us, there is darkness and light in God.  And I’m drawn to this wholeness – drawn in a way that makes me think twice and thrice and more about my friend’s recent question.  If all of life is a mixture of yin and yang, is never only one thing or the other completely, why would God be an exception?  Why would God be only love, only light, only softness and compassion?  Is God so “other” from us, as many religious groups and writings claim (despite the fact that the God imagined by many of them doesn’t seem so other to me)?

My dabbling in quantum physics and a handful of clairvoyant experiences make the world and everything in it seem deeply interconnected, interwoven.  “One,” if such a word can communicate.  The breathtaking magic and mystery of it all makes God seem…I don’t know…equated, somehow, with all of it.  All of it together.  All of the oneness and conscious/unconsciousness that is everything.  In moments where I’m in touch with this perspective, it seems silly to think of God as outside of it all, watching on, acting and reacting to a separate universe of his or her creation.  If anything, God and the physical universe feel indistinguishable, and “physical” an arbitrary designation to assign to anything.

If God is something like the All (how in the world do I talk about this???  I feel at a loss for language here), then of course God is not all softness and light.  God is thunderstorms and avalanches and raging wildfires.  God is attacking lions and tantruming two-year-olds and oppressive dictators.  And yes, God is peacemakers, too.  And prophets.  And sages.  Community organizers.  Disaster relief agencies.  Babies, suckling at our breasts.

God is Jesus on a cross, living and dying in such a way that our darkness is exposed, our intolerance of those who challenge our systems, our religions, our gods.  God is death and loss and unutterable grief. 

And resurrection, too.  New hope, new life.

A God like this is bigger and more pervasive than any God I’ve ever otherwise dreamed of.  I’m not sure I like it entirely.  But right now, nothing else rings quite as true.

What do you all think?

Whew!  It’s been a full week of moving and then getting sick and being laid out for a couple of days and then trying to bring some sort of aesthetic appeal to this new white-walled place (beyond getting boxes unpacked).  I have a passel of thoughts that will work their way into posts in coming days, but for now just wanted to say hello, and I’m alive, and moving slowly toward a daily rhythm again. 

Blessed Easter, for those celebrating, and a rich Holy Saturday.

My husband and I are moving this week to a slightly bigger apartment (need a little more space for a baby), so I’ll be away from blogging for a few days.  Right now the thought of packing one more box makes me want to go hide under the covers.  But I’m sure that’s nothing a little dinner…and maybe some ice cream…can’t help.

Until soon,
Kristin

Last week’s New Yorker ran a powerful short story called The Gorge, by Umberto Eco, a heavy piece about Italian life during the Second World War.  The two main characters are a young Catholic boy, and an endearing older man named Gragnola – an anarchist, with all sorts of faith and love and valor hid well beneath a crusty, cowardly exterior.  The two are friends. 

One day the old man talks theology with the boy.  While I don’t see everything the same way he does, his words, and the boy’s reflections on them, dig deeply into the realness and messiness of life.  Here’s the end of a conversation about the Ten Commandments.  The old man speaks first:

“And now we come to the last commandment:  ‘Don’t covet other people’s stuff.’  But have you ever asked yourself why this commandment exists, when you’ve already got ‘Don’t steal’?  If you covet a bike like the one your friend has, is that a sin?  No, not if you don’t steal it from him.  Don Cognasso [the local priest] will tell you that this commandment prohibits envy, which is certainly an ugly thing.  But there’s bad envy, which is when your friend has a bicycle and you don’t, and you hope he breaks his neck going down a hill, and there’s good envy, which is when you want a bike like his and work your butt off to be able to buy one, even a used one, and it’s good envy that makes the world go round.  And then there’s another envy, which is justice envy, which is when you can’t see any reason that a few people have everything and others are dying of hunger.  And if you feel this fine sort of envy, which is socialist envy, you get busy trying to make a world in which riches are better distributed.  But that’s exactly what the commandment prohibits you from doing.  The tenth commandment prohibits revolution.  Therefore, my dear boy, don’t kill and don’t steal from poor kids like yourself, but go ahead and covet what other people have taken from you.  That’s the sun of the coming day, and that’s why our comrades are staying up there in the mountains, to get rid of Fat Head [Mussolini], who rose to power funded by agrarian landowners and by Hitler’s toadies, Hitler who wanted to conquer the world so that that guy Kripp who builds Berthas this long could sell more cannons.  But you, how could you ever understand about these things, you who grew up memorizing oaths of obedience to Il Duce’s orders?”

“No, I understand, even if not everything.”

“I sure hope so.”

Justice envy.  What a clever distinction.  And what a beautiful reflection more generally on the complicated nature of envy, and the need to parse the implications of “don’t do it at all.”

Later on the boy notices that Gragnola always wears a long, thin sack hanging from his neck and tucked beneath his shirt.

“What’s that, Gragnola?” he asks.

“A lancet.”

“Were you studying to be a doctor?”

“I was studying philosophy.  I was given the lancet in Greece by a doctor in my regiment, before he died…And I’ve worn it ever since.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a coward.  With the things I do and the things I know, if the S.S. or the Black Brigades catch me, they’ll torture me.  If they torture me, I’ll talk, because evil scares me.  And I’ll be sending my comrades to their death.  This way, if they catch me, I’ll cut my throat with the lancet.  It doesn’t hurt, only takes a second – sffft.  I’ll be screwing them all:  the Fascists because they won’t learn a thing, the priests because I’ll be a suicide and that’s a sin, and God because I’ll be dying when I choose and not when he chooses.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

(Did I mention the man is crusty?)

The boy reflects on things like this that Gragnola says:

“Gragnola’s speeches left me sad.  Not because I was sure they were evil but because I feared they were good.  He lived in a world made sad by an evil God, and the only times I saw him smile with any tenderness were when he was talking to me about Socrates or Jesus.  Both of whom, I would remind myself, were killed, so I did not see what there was to smile about.

“And yet he was not mean; he loved the people around him.  He had it in only for God, and that must have been a real chore, because it was like throwing rocks at a rhinoceros – the rhinoceros never notices a thing and continues going about its rhino business, and meanwhile you are red with rage and ripe for a heart attack.”

Could this describe the experience of raging at God any more poignantly??  Or the paradox so many God-haters are:  people so compassionate, so in touch with the beauty and pathos and suffering of humanity, that they just can’t stomach the idea of God being the jerk they’ve understood God to be.  They love so deeply they have to hate God.

I respect these kinds of people.  I guess I was one for a good bulk of time.  I still feel rage toward a certain image of God, but am coming to trust more and more deeply that that is not the God we’ve got.  My trust makes me say to “God”-haters whole-heartedly:  “Rage on!” I respect their (our) reasons for doing so.  And I hope and pray that all of us have occasion to experience God as other than jerk.  I pray that if that takes being raging atheists for a while (which probably means not atheists at all), we find the courage to live and be that storm for as long as it takes to find the Calm that comes after.  Or sometimes, if we’re lucky, the Calm that’s right there in the middle.

Lately Christy has been sharing some really beautiful things (read all of her March posts.  Seriously.) that have made me think again about what it means to suffer, what it means to grow when it really hurts to do so, what it means to feel really alone, even when supportive and/or well-intentioned others are around.  And also what it means to want to be gentle with yourself, even when you don’t exactly know how…to wish you could accept others’ love.

The darkest season I’ve experienced so far took place a few years ago.  It was just on its heels, when I was actually beginning to see life at the end of all that death, that I wrote a poem to try to understand what I was experiencing.  My life and faith and identity felt like “death-strewn shores,” and, having experienced a lot of hurt, it had become very, very difficult to trust.  Even those I knew in my gut to be trustworthy had become suspect.  Thankfully (the word feels now like an obscene understatement), a handful of people stuck it out with me, offering, as best they could, what presence and patience and compassion they had to give.

The stranger-friend in the poem is a prototype of this Compassion, this Presence.  Someone like Jesus may have been.  (I wonder what the poem would look like if he were female…)  He embodies the idea that resurrection sometimes cannot happen – in ourselves, or the ones we walk alongside – apart from us acknowledging our own suffering, and standing in solidarity (often wordlessly) with those we care for, not as “outsiders,” but as ones who know from personal experience what it’s like to be there, in the struggle.  Near the end I work with the idea that each of us, in the days and months and seasons of our lives, are at various places on this death/resurrection cycle, and we cannot expect even the most powerful of stranger-friends to escape the death part of it; they, too, (will) need presence and compassion.

Here’s the poem:

(more…)

The last many years of my life can be characterized, on one level, by awakening.  Not the kind that happens with a start, like when something goes whap in the night – the kind where you’re instantly alert, heart pounding, intensely aware of surroundings.  No, this has been a drawn-out process where consciousness comes slowly, layer upon layer, the kind of drip, drip that’s innocuous in a moment, but with time can actually move mountains.  My inner world is getting (re)created.

Part of my awakening has had to do with deep fears and beliefs and prejudices I’ve carried in relation to my identity as a woman – a devaluing of most things feminine, a drive to disassociate myself with stereotypically feminine roles and ways of being in the world, an incessant tug to work hard at earning the respect and admiration of men.  The pinnacle of all of this was probably the years I spent in seminary, developing all the left-brain capacity I was capable of, through logical, academic questioning of my faith, pursuing friendships with male classmates over female, dreaming regularly of attempts at hiding my womanhood, often, to my dismay, to be “found out” by male colleagues.

By the time seminary was over, my masculine side was a well-developed, perilously over-worked mess.  My feminine was an atrophied waif.

Time, friends, therapy, books like Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter and Secret Life of Bees, Loreena McKennitt, Indigo Girls – all of these became my doctors and surgeons and medications in a blessed move toward health, a gift of recovering in increasing ways a love of myself, a love of women, a love of the wholeness of life lived masculinely and femininely, together.

Which brings me to today.  I find myself mostly still burned out on the world of debate – theological or otherwise; I did more than my share in seminary.  I find myself far more eager to explore life and faith through unworded experience, ritual and intuition than through exposition on a page.  And I’m undeniably pregnant, full with the mystery that is life inside.  None of these lend to the kinds of thinking and writing and relationship-building I grew so comfortable doing in the past – activities my confidence and identity were tightly wrapped around.  I’m a fawn in this new space, uncertain how to stand.

So I’m asking, these days, what it means to be this me.  What do I do with my ongoing need to express myself with words when words right now (apart from fiction-writing) feel often a) freighted with the lop-sided me of my past, the me I’m burned out on and don’t have energy to maintain, and b) strangely foreign to the kinds of things going on in my soul?  What do I do with my need for relationships when relationship-building takes so much…talking, so much trying to explain who one is, who one was, what one likes or wants to avoid? 

I’m sitting, today, in the space between words, recognizing my need of them, but not quite sure what to do about my need just to be.  To be wordless.