melek ha-olam

Shortly after I retired from parish ministry over a quarter century ago, I had a phone call asking me to serve a few Sundays as supply minister at a couple of Presbyterian churches in the area, and I did that, enjoyable and different experiences. At one of them I was greatly surprised to see an old schoolmate, though not classmate, from Cove School years - - surprised for reasons that go way back and don't need retelling here - - who told me he was an active member there because it meant so much to his wife, though, he told me, "Carroll, I don't believe all the stuff." 

My thought, which I probably should have expressed but did not, was that "It isn't necessary to believe all the stuff" - - because we are a religion of stories, stories and songs actually, that identify us as Christians and bind us together in agape, a kind of New Testament love that is not a feeling but how we treat each other and other people. 

Furthermore, that a sense of needing to believe, as Mark Twain wrote, "faith is believing what you know damn well ain't so," is not part of my religious package. I love reading, hearing, telling, (earlier in my life preaching), and studying the stories, and I love singing the songs; all maybe sort of in the way that Linda loves setting up and decorating the Christmas Tree even though it can be traced as basically a pagan symbol of the winter festival. I can love and enjoy all the stuff without, as someone wrote, worrying about it too much. 

And as someone else whom I have come to respect wrote, or copied an earlier writer saying, that the need for belief, the need to have objective truth to believe is a symptom of intellectual adolescence. 

It's a difference in realizing that one's faith is (as defined at Hebrews 11:1) confidence, assurance, hope expressed in story and song, as opposed to historic, objective knowledge, concrete certainty. A close acquaintance once told me about salvation into afterlife, "I KNOW where I'm going; I don't just believe, I KNOW," and I recognized a damn fool when I saw one. 

You don't need to "believe all the stuff," but you will appreciate, enjoy, sense the faith more if you relax and let it be part of who and what you are, with all its mystery-meat of memory and make-believe.

Decorate the Christmas Tree, mingle the two completely different nativity stories, appreciate and understand both totally different creation stories, enjoy four different accounts of Jesus feeding the five thousand, even smile at Martin Bell's  “The Way of the Wolf: The Gospel in New Images” where he writes that very early that Sunday morning, God stepped into Jesus' tomb, said "Get up, Son," and they went home to color Easter eggs. You don't have to "believe all the stuff," but it helps if you are open to imagination and hope not only from those who live in our generation, but from an ancient world of flat-earther fishermen and those who told us about them.

It's Monday morning again. We have a couple of things on calendar for today, so I'm stopping now, but remembering, as I look back over this morning's nonsense, that my original idea was not to wander again but to observe of myself, that if I have a religious symbol, maybe it's a NASA image of Pantokrator's greatness rather than any concern that Creator is obsessed with my sins. 

So what might my closing be? Baruch ata, Adonai Eloheinu, Melek ha-olam, Blessed art thou, Lord God, King of the universe, a word of praise instead of asking something for myself - -

such as, make me seventeen again. When I was seventeen, it was a very good year - -

I'm even finding that eighty-nine is a very good year.

RSF&PTL

T89&c