a Hum

 

Not too early, magic mug of Club hot & black highly complimented and generously complemented by two triscuits piled high with Russ & Ds's chopped liver. Wed Jun 17 7:39 AM in St Andrews: better than Good, Life is Extraordinary here in 7th Heaven. 

Sitting in my living room chair with my back to the Bay, laptop actually in my lap, the annual summer "fiction issue" of The New Yorker lying open ready for me to pick it back up and resume reading the second fiction piece, "Firstborn Immigrant Daughter" at leisure. TNY fiction is unusual to, using the trite expression "say the least," eccentric, often weird bordering on bizarre. You don't begin a short story in The New Yorker knowing you're in for a happy ending, nomesane? Someone's dream may be dashed; the reader must expect to be stunned. 

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In the church, an ordained person is commissioned to teach and preach established doctrine, dogma, and discipline, not released to wander off as some have done, thinking Curran and Küng, but submitting one's personal life as well as one's professional/vocatioinal life to the institution's authority. 

For comfort and assurance, as well over the ages as for fear and control, we image Divinity with characteristics that we admire as the human ultimate, a man at his best; and different Christian denominations perceive qualitative perfection and the Divinity differently; which effectively yields different Divinities -> there is not "One God," there are as many Gods (Elohim is plural after all) as there are certainties about God.  

In my church, for example, God is Love and we commit, in our Baptismal Covenant (our entry rite to membership) to lives of "becoming" what we understand God to be. We do not worry so much about the doctrine and dogma that other denominations believe, and "salvation to everlasting life" is not an obsession. 

Saying a Creed is part of our worship liturgy, but most Episcopalians do our own thinking and day in and day out are not much concerned with institutional doctrine, in daily life more with practice of the faith - - "WWJD?". Only once in all my years as a parish priest did anyone come to me to make sure our doctrine was correct before committing to join the Episcopal Church (they did not, they joined an "evangelical" church, which was fine, we remained friends).

Most Christian denominations are communities of folks with much in common, who care generously and lovingly for each other and have ministries to help people, insiders and outsiders, in need, with varying concern about assiduously believing institutional doctrine. God is as they perceive or experience God, perhaps guided by authority such as the Bible, upbringing, culture. 

I love and sing "good old Baptist" hymns that I grew up singing in my grandfather Gentry's church, especially such as Fanny Crosby's happy praise hymn "To God Be The Glory," and it doesn't bother me to sing the line "the vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives," even though I disagree with the sentiment: we are not simply called "to believe," we are called to live life a certain way because of what we believe; although Crosby's sentiment somewhat echoes Christian ancients including Augustine and Constantine.  

In human life, God is not hegemonic, one and the same for all, God is who and what we proclaim and practice, not always "Love" - - Christian history is replete with extremes, including unspeakably inhuman treatment for deviation from doctrine or rejection of authority; including shunning, excommunication. For some, not Love, God is Hatred (Westboro Baptist Church picketing funerals with their creed "God Hates Fags"), or God is Separation, Exclusivity, Conditional. As I've told here many Times over the years, in response to the confrontation "Brother, are you saved?" my father used to say of the Episcopal Church, "We have a religion to live by, not a religion to die by." 

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Why is Bubba on this rambling kick or rant?

For one, because it's Wednesday and I don't have a sermon to write, nomesane?

For mainly, because I'm having, both in personal mental exercise and in real life with a "mind companion," a conversation about Religion, that surfaces my theological seminary theology professor's perpetual challenge to us, "Who or What is God?" And his own personal, scriptural, answer: "God is Whoever or Whatever led Israel out of Egypt; God is Whoever or Whatever Jesus called "Father"; God is Whoever or Whatever raised Jesus from the dead." I have my own conclusions, that "shepherd" my heritage, education, and life experience out into what a line in our Eucharistic Prayer C calls "the vast expanse of interstellar space," the Universe, Creation itself and Whoever or Whatever said permissively and perhaps even casually, "Yeh-Hi" - - "Let There Be" - - and it was and is so. 

Just so then, what is my religion? 

At this age the topic is not an overwhelming obsession, more of an ongoing Hum. Not unlike "The Hum" that I blogged about, maybe last week, that to me is the sound of the Universe expanding.  

So, not instead of, but for me on beyond, with the permission Seek The Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Will, and mindful that No Amount Of Belief Makes Anything True, and recalling my colleague Margo's sense of her Native American/Indian heritage that, "we know the stories are not true, but They Are True For Us," I set aside standard doctrine and dogma in favor of Rudolf Otto (Das Heilige), his term "totaliter aliter" and Karl Barth's phrase "das ganz Andere" - - the idea that God is not subject to human understanding or, worse/worst "humanizing" (God is not Daniel's wooly white-haired Ancient of Days, at best an anthropomorphic metaphor), but is totally beyond creatures' comprehension except, and this is the Christian experience, in and as divine revelation, God making God's self known to humans through Jesus Christ - -

- - and of the world's thousands of religions, only Christianity holds that belief and makes that claim; which some others, notably the monotheistic Judaism of Jesus' day, regard as capital blasphemy.

So, what's my religion, Who or What is God to me? I can't say, because that would only be yet another human's image of God. As a lifelong someTime amateur astronomer, I can only look out into Creation, a Universe of some two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe alone, and marvel and wonder. Sunday mornings, I can say the Creed and consume the Bread and Wine by which, doctrine has it, God becomes part of me and I become part of God. 

That's maybe the best that I can do, mindful that, as I once heard a strict US Navy ship's captain say, "Your best is never good enough." Fine.

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A problem for me, as with Bart Ehrman, Charles Darwin, and many, is the problem of Theodicy, which tries to rationalize the proposition, "If God is all good and all powerful, why is there pain and suffering in the world?" But theodicy is its own problem in that it goes with the premise "God is all good and all powerful" instead of challenging it. The premise is not a Divine Statement, it is a human image of what humans feel, think, believe would be the perfect God in the life of humans and other creatures. It doesn't fit creation and reality. There is pain and suffering: the Holocaust; innocents ill and suffering; crocodiles eating wildebeests as they cross the river; oxen screaming as lions tear bites from their writhing bodies; Darwin's spider web-wrapping a live wasp to be eaten alive later by the spider's offspring; the mullet in the claws of the osprey that just flew by 7H window: it will jerk and flap in pain as the bird tears it apart, starting with its mouth and bit by bit, eats some bites and feeds other bites to the osprey hatchlings; the pig who screamed in panic at the slaughter house as it was made into the slice of ham in my refrigerator. Yes, Genesis 9:3,4, but theodicy is theodicy, we are all animals. God in whose Creation pain and suffering are part of life is not in a box with human specifications on the carton; YHVH, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, God is Whoever or Whatever God Will Be. Is not subject to human reason. 

Enough for now. On a humid Wednesday morning, my wandering, rambling thesis. 

RSF&PTL

T90      

image that appeals to me: some artist's notion of what Jesus the itinerant Jewish prophet probably really looked like: a real man of his day and age, not the soft, feminine, blue-eyed blond portrait in my old Sunday school room