Frederick Buechner  on God speaking to us –

“Here is your life.  You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t be complete without you. 

Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don’t be afraid.  I am with you . Nothing can ever separate us.  It’s for you I created the universe.”

 While I’m sitting here trying to decide how much money to spend on Christmas gifts, the guy over there   is trying to make a living substitute teaching after losing his job.  And my friend’s husband just left her after 42 years of marriage.

 We are all in a story of truly epic proportions and yet we know so little of the story.  Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy gives me some sense of the multiple stories that intersect and affect one another in unkown ways.  I’m thinking in particular of Frodo and Sam  carrying the ring to Mt. Doom and how the attack on the black gates lets by Aragorn is critical to their success.  And even the tragedy of Gollum is the final necessity for the destruction of the ring.

 How imperative it is to walk humbly with God, to seek his will, to listen hard, and to obey.  Even  knowing that the email I sent to Steve became a part of the retreat, reminds me that it is the little things that move the story forward — as God wills, or off-course away from God’s plan.

 Our Father who art in heaven, you see the whole story from your perfect perspective.  Jesus is your only begotten son and he is the hero.  But to you, the minor characters like me, matter.  My role in your story is important, so important that you have made me a joint heir in the kingdom, right along with Jesus.

 Hallowed be your name, you are the Creator of all that is and was and will be — except yourself, who  art holy, set apart, transcending space and time.  You are God.  Your ways are unsearchable.  You are who you are, entirely, consistently, eternally.

 Let your kingdom come – where all is set to right.

 Let your will be done on earth — where the story plays out — as it is in heaven — where the story originates

What if it is impossible and God is not?

I feel myself peering into the never-ending abyss of nothingness, knowing that if God doesn’t exist then the abyss is life.

The abyss is the place where it is dark and I am free-falling, where all the ‘irrational’ fears, anxieties, and dread of panic attacks live. It is the island of nightmares in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  The abyss is the place where the veil over my eyes gets darker and darker and my peripheral vision narrows until all I can see is mist and gloom.  Not the light, sweetly mysterious mist of a summer morning, but the choking, sooty, grey mist of an industrialized city.

The abyss is the place where the only thing that makes sense is desperate attempts to stimulate feeling and pleasure.  Desperate because I’m free-falling deeper and deeper.  Desperate because the things that should bring pleasure and relief don’t quite do so.  Ice cream tastes dry and bland.  Flowers smell sickly sweet.  Alcohol dulls only momentarily and then becomes waves of nausea and dizziness. I can’t quite escape into a movie or book.  Instead, I depart from my own body and watch myself watching a movie or reading a book.

The abyss is the place where nothing tempers the fears and hurts and where I understand how people can crave alcohol, drugs, and sex – not because they satisfy, but because they are the things that don’t quite satisfy.  And maybe next time they will satisfy.

I know the abyss.  I don’t want to forget the abyss because of what I learned there. But it is not life.

But even though my brain cannot completely comprehend who or what God is, somehow I know, in the absolute way of knowing that is based in truth, but goes beyond reason, that God is.  He is and he reigns in sovereign mystery and perfect love.

I just finished reading The DaVinci Code. The story was exciting — secret codes, adventure,  symbolism, and plot twists. But repeatedly I was struck by the small view of God.

One of the characters who embodied this was  Silas, a member of a Catholic sect. He was  fully committed to his mission of finding the location of documents that would prove that basic tenets of Christianity were false so that the documents could be destroyed. For a number of reasons he was a tragic character, but what I found most tragic was  his ironic lack of faith.  He seemed to believed his commitment to “doing the work of God”, no matter what, was faith. But the reality was, his view of God was too small.  He  was devastated by his failure to fulfill his mission, convinced that without his success, all was lost for God.  It never occurred to him that God was awesome and omnipotent, that Christ had completed the ultimate triumph in death and resurrection, that since Christianity is true, God  himself is enough, that indeed Silas could place his faith in God and not Silas’s mission.  And that was the view of God from those who believed in Christianity.

The other side allowed that Jesus was a great guy but incomplete without union to Mary Magdelene. In their view, the tragedy of the current age was the loss of the sacred feminine.  That is,  God is doing the best he can for this world, but limited by his masculinity.  Therefore, what the world really needs is a spirituality that re-embraces the ancient understanding of divinity, both a masculine god and a feminine god.

My reaction to this is that God transcends masculinity and femininity; he is complete and has no need of a counterpart. I shake my head and want to say “can’t you conceive of a God who is not limited to the human paradigm of male and female?”  Yes, I realize that  God is referred to with the masculine pronoun “He” and that Jesus was  masculine in his earthly body.  But isn’t it possible that the dichotomy of gender applies to humans but not to God?

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that Genesis 1:27 suggests this. “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them”.  It’s easy to get tangled up in the limitations of our language which separate words by masculine and feminine.  For example, one might think that “created man in His own image” applies only to male humans. But when I read the whole verse, to me it goes something like this: God created people in his own image.  Let me repeat for emphasis, in God’s own image, God created individuals, both male  and female.

Again, I could be wrong and I certainly wouldn’t understand  how to interpret the original language.  But I take away from the passage an understanding  that God’s image is in both male and female:  some “masculine” characteristics of God are revealed in males, but not females  and some “feminine” characteristics of God are revealed in females and not males.  While humans may be incomplete without both genders, I don’t believe God is.

It seems to me that we  view God in much too much of a small way by seeing the metaphors in the Bible as something that completely contains who God is  rather than only partially revealing the unfathomable in a way that our little minds  can grasp.  I think we have done this with God as father.   This metaphor reveals that we can understand that God’s attributes include all that is best about earthly fathers: provider, protector, comforter, etc.  But we are wrong to think that somehow that limits or proves that God himself is limited by masculinity in the way that human fathers are limited by masculinity.

So let ‘em fall down
There’s freedom waiting in the sound
When you let your walls fall to the ground
We’re here now

This is where the healing begins oh
This is where the healing starts
When you come to where you’re broken within
The light meets the dark
The light meets the dark

Afraid to let your secrets out
Everything that you hide
Can come crashing through the door now
But too scared to face all your fear
So you hide but you find
That the shame won’t disappear

So let it fall down
There’s freedom waiting in the sound
When you let your walls fall to the ground
We’re here now
We’re here now oh

This is where the healing begins oh
This is where the healing starts
When you come to where you’re broken within
The light meets the dark
The light meets the dark

Sparks will fly as grace collides
With the dark inside of us
So please don’t fight
This coming light
Let this blood come cover us
His blood can cover us

This is where the healing begins oh
This is where the healing starts
When you come to where you’re broken within
The light meets the dark
The light meets the dark

So here’s what I’ve come up with:

My life is a great and mysterious opportunity for knowing the God who transcends space and time, joyfully sharing my earthly adventures with family and friends, and serving others with excellence.

Matthew 11:28-30    Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.  Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.

Isaiah 30:18 Therefore the LORD longs to be gracious to you, and therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you.  For the LORD is a God of justice; How blessed are all those who long for Him.

I love the dissipation of anxiety and the assurance of peace that washes over me when I read those words.  I feel transported to a place of safety and beauty like this picture of Vermont by Ric Ergenbright that looks a lot like my best childhood memories. (Interestingly enough, I just realized that this photo was actually taken south of Woodstock — where I lived.)

I love to know that Jesus is gentle and that he gives me rest.  I love to know that the Lord longs to be gracious to me.  Sometimes I need to just bask in that knowledge.

But sometimes I need to dig a little deeper, and read the rest of the story.  The parts like:

Matthew 11:29   Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me

Or the parts like first verse of Isaiah 30, before the comforting section about the Lord longing to be gracious to me:

Isaiah 30:1 “Woe to the rebellious children,” declares the LORD, “Who execute a plan, but not Mine, And make an alliance, but not of My Spirit, In order to add sin to sin.

Sometimes I need to remember that this is God’s creation and kingdom.   There is a special place for me, where I will find rest for my soul and where God will be gracious to me.  But it is God’s creation. It is structured in the way that he has ordained, not in a way that allows for the gratification of my desires and fulfillment of what I think is right, when and how I imagine as good.  God’s established order will result in good – in rest and grace and blessing   — but that good is only within his established order.

Jesus, therefore, commands (but doesn’t compel) me to live within that established order, where I will experience rest for my soul and the blessings of the Lord.  John Piper’s book, What Jesus Demands from the World, has helped me see those commands more clearly, both in terms of what they mean and why they matter.

I’ve been thinking about your

• Puzzlement that students are in disbelief at the idea that Christianity is a relatively new religion and the related,
• Observation that students cling to their religious beliefs far out of proportion to what makes sense, given the facts.

I thought about how this might relate to something I have been reflecting upon for the last several months. I have been increasingly aware that so much of what appears to be disagreement is rooted in misunderstanding.  When I say misunderstanding, I mean not only the misunderstanding between two or more people; but also one’s internal misunderstandings, that is, failure to reflect deeply enough about one’s own ideas to be precise in the inherent definitions and to recognize the natural implications of those ideas.

In regard to your recent comments, I wondered, what is really meant by “religion”? Here are partial excerpts from dictionary.com

Religion

1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe
2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sect
3. ritual observance of faith

I most readily think of religion as formal statements of belief, operationalized in agreed upon practices and rituals – a blend of definitions 2 and 3 above.  I intentionally use the phrase “formal statements of belief” in an effort to convey the idea that this means static, and within clearly marked boxes.  I think of it as similar to policy statements in a large organization.  They are agreed upon as essential for good order and generally “right”.   Under this definition, I think it’s obvious that the Christian religion is only a couple thousand years old and that it undergone significant  revision several times within that period.

However, if I go back to the first definition, it’s not so obvious to me that the Christian religion is relatively young. If instead of defining belief as formal statements akin to policy, I define belief as a gut-level conviction of a dynamic nature, I start to think very differently.  Consider the idea that the Christian religion is a gut-level conviction that the cause, nature and purpose of the universe has to do with the mystery of an infinite, omnipotent being creating the universe, and all it contains, for the love of his penultimate creation: humans.  If so, maybe the Christian religion isn’t so new.  Maybe the Christian religion predates the earthly appearance of the Christ for whom it is named.  Maybe the essential nature of the Christian religion has existed since the beginning of time. Yes, the particulars have evolved (I like the irony of that word here) through the progressive revelation of who that infinite, omnipotent being really is and what his love really means, but the gut-level convictions of the essential cause, nature, and purpose of the universe remain unchanged.