Fundamentals: Love Part II

Surely my understanding of love is influenced by my having been raised in a relatively stable household in a time of great prosperity».  I can’t help it: God’s love means something to me that it doesn’t mean to a 12^th century Spanish mystic or a Bronze Age patriarch stumbling out of Ur.  And their sense of love is alien to me, too.  I realize that there are people in this profoundly privileged epoch who don’t see it that way.  In fact, I knew a woman who was reticent to even tell her own children she loved them, lest they grow accustomed to it and take it for granted.  God, for her, felt the same.  God’s love is not ubiquitous; it must be curried like a Dark Age feudal lord’s favor.  Go figure.  Relative to both my past and my reflection, I think that the ubiquity of God’s love forces people to take it for granted.

I cannot help seeing the universe through the lens of love.  When St. John says, “God is love”, he isn’t looking at that God and that love through my privileged twenty first century eyes.  He never read a Hallmark card and didn’t have any memories of those little naked doe-eyed people from the seventies saying things like, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”à He didn’t love chocolate cake, had never made love to a woman·. 

In love making there is a disruption of everything, a disordering and chaotic grinding together.  In the aftermath there is at least the possibility of new arising from the ashes of the old.  Cells collide, combine and divide, splitting and joining. 

            That kind of love, shredding division and clanging union, is powerful. 

            Love is fundamental and paradoxical.  Life is brutish and short.  All organisms are genetically selfish.  That is to say, they do not share useful adaptations with just everyone.  They only pass those along to their offspring.  So a dolphin, for example, isn’t going to give you the genes necessary to hold your breath for a long time.  That wasn’t always the case.  There was a time, scientists speculate, when simple single celled organisms had porous walls and were able to give and take genetic code from one another.  So if you as a cell had some beneficial adaptation, you could give it to me. 

            Clearly those cells don’t behave that way because they’re kind or altruistic, but in a sense love is a mindless giving.  Love is promiscuous.  It doesn’t care who it touches and rubs up against.  It gives to its last breath.  Jesus said that God showers the just and the unjust.

            When I was a gardener, I watered my garden.  I carefully set up the sprinklers to hit only my plants, with a minimum of overspray.  That way I wasn’t wasting water.  Love, on the other hand, is naturally wasteful.  It falls not only on my deserving garden, but on the lawn, the weeds, the trees, the roof, the sidewalk, the street: everywhere in wasteful abundance.

The good news of Jesus is about love.  When Jesus was asked the key to the Law and the Prophets, he said, like any good rabbi, that the commandment to love God with one’s totality is where it’s at.  Actually, the Hebrew tradition in which Jesus was so steeped was too visceral, too bodily, too bloody for as soft a summary as that. 

Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.

You shall love the LORD with all your heart,

with all your soul

with all your mind

and with all your strength¥.

Then, just like any good rabbi, and in keeping with the scriptures of his people, Jesus couldn’t resist adding a second bit to the question of which Law summarized them all.

You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Then he told the story of the Samaritan, the dying man, and the innkeeper, to show that neighbors are not just those people who look, think, speak, smell, spend, believe, worship, eat, make love, and keep house like we do or would like to do.  Neighbors can be enemies, as Jesus reminded his hearers in another place.µ 

            At the risk of sounding like those tough guys who have in recent years  taken the men’s movement of the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s and recycled it into a Christian manhood movement with a macho Christ who can hunt, throw a football, and open bottles of light beer bottles with his wedding ring, love is tough.  It’s strong and abrasive and natural.

---

» Not that we saw much of that prosperity.  The 1970’s aren’t remembered as times of enormous wealth for Americans.   My family was no different.  Even before Reganomics trickled down and made us fabulously lower middle class we didn’t have much.  But every day of my childhood I ate, lived under a roof, had access to clean water.  We even had toys and a television.  Compared to the rest of the world, and most of history, we lived like kings.    

à Which is, in my thinking, both profound and a tremendous load of crap all at once.  One of the ways I express love is in apology.    On the other hand, I would hope that I could be gracious enough to forgive before I’m asked to do so.

· I assume, based on his time, not his virginity or studliness.  Maybe first century people “made love”, but I’ve never heard it referred to that way.

¥ Look at The Story of Heaven.

µ There are plenty of resources available to tell you how many times Jesus talked about various things, most usually noted are money, love, hell, and homosexuality.  Suffice it to say that Jesus talked a lot about love.

Fundamentals: The Story of Heaven Part I

Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.

You shall love the LORD with all your heart,

with all your soul

with all your mind

and with all your strength

Going to Sunday School in junior high I heard all about how we have a body, which I could see, a mind, which I could on occasion exercise but chose not to, and a soul, which was . . . you know, kind of like . . . your emotions and stuff.  To be honest, there was always a vague and ultimately unsatisfying discussion of “soul”.  Spirit was sometimes in there, with soul taking on the attributes of mind and then spirit used to identify those unclear pieces of emotion and whatnot. 

I guess the whole thing was supposed to reflect the Trinity.  We saw the Trinity and our own trinitarian nature is everything: apples (red skin, white interior, seeds), eggs (shell, white, yolk), water (solid, liquid, gas)V, even the chocolate, caramel, cookie crunch goodness of the Twix bar. 

So leave it to the Bible to contradict the West’s traditional (Greek) theology of the human person as tri-partate: 1) Body, 2) Mind 3) Soul.  Heart + mind + soul + strength = four pieces.  One more reason to love the Bible.

And humanity comes in two genders, and my hands have ten (or eight) fingers, and despite my other symmetry, I have only one heart.  Maybe seeking evidence of the divine Trinity in nature or humanity is just shouting down empty wells. 

Then, to be honest, I’m still not sure what “soul” or “spirit” mean, though I do have an intuitive sense of these words.

For instance, you’ve no doubt experienced a writer’s spirit in her work, or an artist’s soul.  In encountering a piece of art, no matter the medium, I often feel like I’m actually in touch with the best part of the artist.  I imagine it’s the same for a lit of people.  Maybe that best part of a person is their soul or spirite.

But it should also be noted that mind and soul and spirit are emergent properties of bodies.  That is to say that they are physical, or in some sense dependent on physicality, rooted in the flesh and blood material world, even if that physicality is electrical impulses and chemical interactions.  Continuing the vein of art, you realize that the transcendence of art is rooted in the physical.  Without the page or the canvas, the vibrations of air and tiny ear bones, waves of light, optic nerves and brains, the artist is not present to you.  Human beings are physical creatures, not souls locked in these cages of bone and flesh, and we appropriate the world though our physicality.  We have no other means.  There is no such thing as a mind apart from a body.  The same is true of soul, psyche, spirit, essence, or whatever words we can use to describe those immaterial parts of ourselves we wish might live forever.

When I was a young pastor I found a book in the church’s tiny library.  It was mainly about proper doctrine and why it’s important.  It was written from a very conservative fundamentalist/evangelical perspective§.  In the section about “MAN”, I read, “Man was created with an immortal soul.”  Then I threw the book away.  In the trash.  I didn’t tell anyone, either.  I just got rid of it.  The audacity of claiming to possess anything with a shelf life of always is astounding.  We’re naturally finite beings, with a beginning, middle, and an end.

Whenever I have questioned the validity of the immortal soul among Christians, the conversation always comes around to one specific issue.  “But if people don’t have an eternal soul or spirit, what about hell?”  It troubles some to contemplate a universe wherein some poor souls do not suffer forever.  Or, less cynically, maybe it makes it harder to grasp salvation.  What is it Jesus saves us from, if not hell?  And, if there is no threat of eternal damnation, why accept Jesus?  Why seek friendship with God, if no to be rescued from God’s terrific anger?

In talking about the spirit/soul, the science of emergence has a lot to offer.   From a hectic conglomeration of atoms, empty spaces, electrical impulses, an ever changing cast of characters, your body emerges.  Every day, despite the lack of any centralized authority, despite this rotating roster of players, your body remains the same, at least externally.  You remain the same.  That, to me, is an amazing thing.  Coherence comes not from the constituent parts, but from something else: the whole is greater. 

In one sense, it should come as no surprise.  After all, we are physical creatures.  People who have appropriated the Jesus story should especially appreciate this.  The Creed says, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”  In one sense the Creed just says something we already know intuitively, naturally.

Beyond that, the gospel message is that Jesus took on flesh, not as a ghost shrugging on a skin suit, a disguised divinity, but entering into the realm of humanity.  It is in flesh, as flesh, for flesh.  That’s the Incarnation.  The material world is where salvation is worked, not in an ethereal space beyond imagining, but here, where I live, where I can touch it and it can touch me.

---

V Did you know that H₂O is the only compound that exists in nature in the three forms of matter?  I’m not sure what that means in the big picture, but it’s pretty interesting in itself.

e The best part as soul or spirit should make ghostly haunting stories difficult for me.  I heard a story a few years ago about a couple who spent three nights in the refurbished barn of an Italian castle, feeling a strange presence.  On the last night they were there, the husband told me later, he saw a man dressed in “old style clothes” standing above him, leaning down.  When he told his wife next day what he’d seen, she said she’d seen the same figure floating near the ceiling when she looked into the room.  They weren’t surprised to learn that a man had hanged himself in the barn, right above where their bed stood.  What my friends had seen, they believe, was the same tableau from different angles.  Is it possible that such a traumatic event might leave a psychic stain like an artist leaves in her poetry?  Is that kind of understanding of hauntings less dissonant with Christian theology than full fledged angry ghosts flitting about the attic?

§ I know, fundamentalist and evangelical are two different points of departure.  Evangelicalism was a form of 19^th century liberalism, working for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth. 

Fundamentals: Love #I

            When my daughter was in fifth grade I chaperoned her class to an over night trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  We spent about five or six hours flitting from one area scientific inquiry to another before racking out in a hallway for a solid four hours of fifth-grade shut eye.  At some point during our museum meanderings we sat in the planetarium and watched a film about what the Big Bang might very well have looked like, if an Imax film crew had been there and if Archimedes had shared his place to stand.  Liam Neeson narrated.  His smooth baritone was both a full frontal assault and a warm blanket.  We watched explosions and flashes of light as Neeson rumbled at us, telling us that it is in chaos that the worlds come into being.  The birth of everything was a great clash, a violence that spins out into the universe and down to this very day.  Material existence, including us carbon based life forms, is violent and terrible.  Maybe especially so for life forms.

            The beauty of the film and Neeson’s authority captivated me, but the narration made little sense.  I started thinking about the little films of cellular division I saw when I was in fifth grade.  There was struggle, to be sure, and a great rending, but after it was over, there were two, then four, then sixteen cells.  I don’t know that violence and chaos is the best language for talking about that microscopic process or for the cosmic events forming and shaping our universe.  I wonder if the overarching theme might not instead be love. 

            There are people who argue that the story that unfolds in the first chapter of Genesis is really not about creation ex nihilo, but is instead a tale of order from chaos.  Read it again, you’ll see that they’re right.  That doesn’t mean that God did not create ex nihilo, but instead that the Genesis story takes place much later, after chaos crept in.  And God, whose breath hovers beautifully and poetically over the face of the waters, speaks order into the elements already swirling about. 

In a sense, that’s what love does.  Love brings order where there was none, not like Mussolini or some other fascist making the trains run on time, but like DNA allowing a tiger to be.  Love might be at the bottom (or top, or side, or around, or through) everything we see and don’t see.  And the reason some things seem wrong is that they’ve slipped the track and are no longer expressing love.

Fundamentals: God, Part III

Lent is probably as obviously a time of humility, albeit usually our own.  We’re humbled by the knowledge and acknowledgement of our own sinfulness.  We begin the season with ashes and lament and end with a vigil commemorating the murder of love himself.  The word kenosis sometimes gets tossed around in those forty days.  Kenosis is Greek for self-emptying.  Christ willingly laid aside power and glory and majesty in order to enter the human scene and sublimated himself to that scene.  The scourging and death of Jesus isn’t just a side note in his story.

Every so often (or too often) I get an email citing statistics on theists and atheists in America.  Here’s the message in part:

"It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore, I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having `In God We Trust' on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why don't we just tell the 14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!!"

Despite my own style, poor grammar annoys me.  Three exclamation points are not only redundant, they’re useless.  We get it.  You think it’s important.  Conventional rules of grammar are adequate to communicate your thoughts, believe me.  Then there’s the historical issue.  “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.  Finally, the very act of pledging one’s allegiance to a piece of cloth ought to remind Christians of burning incense to Caesar’s effigy. 

All that aside, it never fails to astonish me that people who claim Christ could hold such Christless views, let alone send them to all their email contacts.  I always respond.

To claim a connection to Jesus is to claim connection to the oppressed, not to try and oppress others.  To profess allegiance to any form of historic Christianity means humility.  To follow Christ means to shut up oneself, not defend one’s own rights, and demand justice for others before oneself.  It sure as shit does not mean telling other people to shut up.

I certainly haven’t exhausted even my thoughts about God, nor the myriad other ways to talk God.  But it might be nice to move on, n’est pas?

Fundamentals: God, Part II

I lived in South Dakota on 9/11.  I’d like to think I was in shock at the time, but long term ramifications sometimes take a while to seep into my brain, anyway, so the idea of war and retribution, let alone invading a third-party-uninvolved country just because it was possible, etc., never occurred to me that day.  I also never thought about the religious conversations that would soon follow.

            Two days later the people of that little town in South Dakota started talking about Islam.  Their conversations ran between the deep ignorance and bigotry to profound nuances, brimming with the kind of wisdom that percolates through limestone decades of living.  Several times someone asked me if Muslims pray to the same God as “we” do, a simple question that sparked days of debate.  I used to tell people in response to questions like that that it’s important to look not only at the words people use, but how they use them.  If I say “God” and you say “God”, and then we describe that God differently, are we talking about the same God?

            Now I’m not so sure about my own answers.  Does anyone pray to the “right” God? 

            Do Muslims pray to the same God as Christians do?  It’s a different question than “Does the same God hear the prayers of Christians and Muslims (and Hindus, Jews, Animists, Buddhists, atheists, and Pagansd)?”  I suspect that that’s the better question.  “Do they pray to our God?” puts us on the right side and them on the wrong side.  But if the gospel teaches us nothing else, it ought to first teach us that we’re all on the wrong side, that each of us opposes God in our own ways, and that the incarnation is about God crossing over and taking our side, not against our human enemies, but against sin, death, and true evil. 

            My brother Eric recently reminded an email conversation (I know, email!  How late ‘90’s of us) that Jesus doesn’t say in Luke that some people never knew him, but instead, “I never knew you.”  Where does that fit?

            At any rate, I suspect that no two people on the planet conceive of God in the same way, so one might as well ask if any of us pray to the same God.  In a sense, we all paint little pictures in our hearts.  Sometimes those pictures become idols, walls preventing us from glimpsing the true God behind our crude drawings.  But sometimes those weak images become icons, doors and windows and portals and ragged holes through which the true God, the one who is and is, can climb or step or pour or filter or blow or wander or whatever it is the true God, the one who is and is, does.

When my dad used to drag me to AA meetings, I was annoyed by the phrase “the God of my understanding.” 

“What about how God wants to be understood?” I’d think.  It’s still a valid point, but one that very much misses the nuance.  God is.  How I perceive God is vastly different from how you perceive God, but maybe the little God of your understanding might expand the little God of my understanding.

At one of those AA meetings a man told a story about a woman he heard respond to questions about the God of her understanding, “Well, first of all, she’s black . . .”  It’s a beginning.  And it’s only funny and unsettling because no one says but many people feel, “Well, first of all he’s white . . .”  Rather than say those things are untrue (which they are), it might be more helpful to start expanding my own picture of God, allowing those pictures to be icons rather than idols for me.

That’s not to say that everything we can say about God is true.  How could it be?  An ancient way of doing theology (god-conversing) is sometimes called the Via Negativa, the Negative Way, or Apophatic theology.  We describe God in terms of what God is not:

God is not me.

God is not limited.

God is uncreated.

And on and on.  As in, God isn’t good or evil because good and evil are dependent on God, not the other way around; God doesn’t exist or not exist, since, again, existence hangs from God. 

Another way of expressing apophatic theology is through transcendence.  God transcends existence, creation, good and evil, etc.  Like all theologies of transcendence, apophatic theology is helpful for big thoughts, but immanence, nearness, and intimacy must inform the other piece of our thinking.

            At least twice a year I’m struck by the humility of God.  It isn’t popular in many Christian circles to speak of God’s humility, weakness, brokenness, and loss, but here it is, twice a year in the church calendar: once at Christmastide, once during Lent.  God condescends to us in every interaction with humanity.  Condescension is kind of an ugly word for many of us.  It implies arrogance and power plays.  But condescension is about a relinquishment of power, a giving over of oneself to a weaker person for the sake of relationshipÅ.

The mere description in Genesis of the LORD walking in the cool of the day with Ad’am should make me think of walking with my children when they were babies.  I’m crouched over, holding a chubby fist in my own, snail-pacing it across the yard.  And, when patience inhabited me from beyond my ken, I paused every time a leaf or rock or grasshopper distracted those little eyes.  That’s the LORD walking in the cool of the day.  That’s condescension, corny though it be.

Christmas, despite its family friendly schlockiness¶, is about the humility of God.  God in diapers, God nursed to sleep.  We get little glimpses of it in the crèches and the songs, but it’s rarely pointed to so explicitly.  In fact, conservative pundits have coined a phrase so contrary to the concept of Christmas that I’m surprised that can say it with a straight face: The War On Christmas.  Jesus is under attack, and it's up to them to defend him.  In 2010 they said they were winning the war.  They had forced merchants to say “Merry Christmas”.  Christmas is, after all, ultimately about power over.  But the Christmas tale is about power under.  It’s a story whose power runs like a subterranean river under the walls of might, under the armament factories, under the prisons, under the propaganda centers and slowly sinks them.  But, as the New Testament says, this world doesn’t understand that, and tries to use the sleeping baby as a bludgeon against its perceived enemies.

How in God’s Name Does One Win a Christmas War?

---

d No, I’m not sure why atheists don’t get capitalized.  They just don’t, alright? 

Å Right, it reminds me of that line from True Romance: “Don’t condescend to me, man.  I’ll fuckin’ kill you, man.”  That’s how most of respond to condescension.

¶ I rather like the pagan elements to the midwinter season; I just wish it weren’t so closely associated with Christmas.  What I really can’t stand is movies about the last minute salvation of Christmas by smart-ass elves.  Not only are they boring, they ruin even the pagan elements of the season.

I'll confess, I've never read The Fundamentals, the clarion call to a ceetain kind of Christian beginning about 100 years ago, but I've cerrainly heard the fundamentals expounded, proposed, defended, and assumed enough to get a good feel for them. I think the fundamentals are actually pretty narrow and limited, even too thin for a robust Christian expression. Since I feel that way, I'd like to try to think about what seem to be basic assumptions of Christian faith and examine them in a moderate level of depth. This will be a work in progress, so I cannot outline the next pieces.

Where to begin? I tthink that any serious Christian thinking has to begin with a loose hand and an appreciation for paradox. If I hold any one belief too tightly, or stress any one piece of this fabric, I run the risk of losing another part of it. Beliefs are at best temporary stop gap measures to hold one's place. They change and flex, depending on where you stand.

Jesus himself was comfortable with paradox. "If you want to save your life, lose it." To think like a Christian means holding what G. K. Chesterton called furious opposites together. Only them, in the malestrom of contradiction, can a true faithfulness emerge. There is no logic in Christianity, no balance. Instead, it is a tightrope stumble, constantly pitching from one extreme to another, refusing to let go of one for the safety of another.

Sometimes people want to laugh with me about the folly of one religious trsadition or another, usually one not their own. They say, "That doesn't make any sense, does it?" I usually laugh and say, "Of course not. But I worship a man who lived 2,000 years ago who died naked and ashamed, friendless and weak, then came back to life. So, nothing should strike me as too weird."

Fundamentals: Pieces of the Sun

We were eating breakfast at the coffee shop downtown. Maybe it was the coffee or maybe it was the air, but the sunlight was leaving little pieces of itself in her hair.

There are places in this world that happens. It happens in the mountains, and in deserts, too, I've noticed. Sunshine's an animal here. It flows around you, presses your bones and runs liquid through your core.

She didn't know about the sunshine, though I'm sure she could feel it clinging to her. I could feel its maternal motion on my own scalp. Her hair was shot through with colours like legends. It was an entire landscape, that spot above her ear, a steep canyon in New Mexico, where the rock strata, cut through by rivers, glows in the dusk. The mineral sea flashes in undulating ribbons: translucent pink, dappled crimson, claret, auburn, russet, and finally gold.

We sipped coffee and chewed pastries, but my eyes could not leave her hair. When she moved it threw rubies, topaz, diamonds at me. I nodded and talked, my thoughts barely my own. I could feel my heart cracking and those colours pouring into me. At times I had to look away to keep from singing. I don't know what I'd have sung. Instead I laughed to let the beauty escape.

And here's the thing: she isn't what you'd call beautiful. She's a little short and those hairs that were catching fire in the air are shot through with silver. She's got those eye wrinkles that open and close in her animation. That's where more beauty pours out. She was trying to tell me a story about something, but it wasn't her story, it happened to a friend, and she kept losing the thread.

The aspens were waking, shrugging off winter. I could almost hear them starting to breath again. Snow slurried into mud in the streets of our unkempt town. People walked past with dogs on climbing rope leashes, forced into quiet contemplation by the mud on their mountain playgrounds.

I don't know her well, but I was full of her then, that dizzying fullness that won't stop and isn't about desire, because there is more. And then, when it's done, it's done and I can't quite recall what it was that so captivated me.

            And I loved her then, carelessly, with a passion that shifted with the sun's generosity. I loved her in her transfiguration, and even now, when I see her plainness. It's not a love born of desire, but of gratitude, I love her for beauty's sake. I love her not for being beautiful, but for being beauty, and arbitrating it to me.

Fundamentals: God, Part I

I’m thinking about the way people talk about God. I mean religious types. Like me, maybe. Usually we use ancient Greek philosophical categories to speak of God: omni- -ent words like omnipresent ,. I’m well aware that I’m not the first person to point that out, nor am I the first person to lament that state of affairs. Nothing new here; but bear with me for a while. All language mediates, and all complex language is a series of extended metaphors. When I say that all language mediates, I mean that the words – grunts, groans, grinds, and glottal stops – are a way of conveying something we cannot carry to other people for them to see, smell, hear, and experience. We cannot carry it, so instead we bring them words. We translate the experience into words and they translate the words into experience, in what might be humanity’s greatest asset and greatest curse: imagination.
As a writer, I love adjectives and adverbs. They can colour and nuance a phrase and make it pop. But maybe using adjectives to speak of God does God a disservice. In the anti-hellinization conversation, we say that it isn’t always useful to speak of God as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc., because the scriptures do not bother to do so. We say that it might be better to use the language of the people who encountered God (sometimes in a completely unmediated way) and recorded their thoughts in what we now call the Bible. The Hebrews didn’t go for abstractions. They used metaphors, to be sure, but metaphors that hit closer to home and whose referents could be seen in everyday life. So, God was for them rock, king, fortress, and redeemer-kinsman. God rides on the clouds, God’s voice makes things happen.
Carrying that idea further, I’m thinking that maybe we should be careful about using mediated language to speak of God – the language of adjectives: loving, beautiful, merciful, kind, judging, etc. Instead, perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to begin to speak of God as exclusively as possible in nouns and verbs. Two outcomes immediately spring to mind from such an effort.
First, it makes God less abstract. The Epistle of First John, for example, likely written at least by a friend of a friend of Jesus, says that God is love. That is unmediated language at it’s purest. Love is not tempered by the addition of a suffix like –ing. Moderns/post-moderns would be tempted to say that God is loving. And, no doubt, God is loving. John (or John’s friend) wasn’t interested in parsing God away, though. God is love. Does that mean, therefore that love is God? Maybe, in some sense, encountering even something as faint as the love a mother hen shows her chicks shows us God. John does go on to say that to live in love is to live in God. When we encounter love, even lower case, small potatoes, easy-cheesy love, it ought to make us think of God.
I do a little acting in a community theatre (you know it’s artsy because it has the
–re, instead of –er). While were rehearsing “It’s A Wonderful Life” a few years ago, I realized that the story was a parable of love. There is no God figure per se, but the love and sacrifice of common people, spurred by the uncommonly common love of George Bailey, defeats evil in a very theologically appropriate way. Evil, perpetrated by (and in a way, personified by) Mr. Potter simply melts away, forgotten. That love made me think about the love who is God. It also says something very powerful about the nature of evil, but I’ll hold that thought.
Second, we’d be better able to see the ways all virtue, all characteristics, all of the cosmos are reflections of God. Maybe other things like kindness and beauty we see around us are emanations of God’s own beauty and love. I do not mean to speak like a modalist or a pantheist, but maybe the pantheists (or, better still, the panentheists) have something to teach us here, that God is not contained by our clumsy attempts at definition or description and that God’s works might show God peeking through the paint.
The other part of speech to examine, in addition to nouns, verbs, and adjectives to speak of God is conjunctions. As School House Rock taught me, “and, but, and or, they get most of the work done.” Let’s talk about buts,,. “God is loving,” I’ve been reminded, “but he’s also just.” “Just what?” never gets the laughs I hope for, but I keep going. In fact, it’s almost as though one segment of the Church has invented a new theological term, “lovingbut”. To say that God is love and God brings justice might be more Old Testamentish.
“Brings justice” uses verbs. In nouns: God is the best judge in one of those cases where an old woman is tossed out of her house so developers can make a killing and the court sides with the old lady and gives her back her home plus a ridiculous amount of damages. That’s Old Testament justice. To bring justice in the OT meant to make sure that the wealthy didn’t become so on the backs of the poor and that the hungry were fed, widows looked after, and that aliens fairly treated.
A lot of modern Christian conceptualizations of justice looks like a gunslinger riding into town, blowing everyone straight to hell, mumbling some cryptic wisdom, then leaving the young widow and her ten year old son to her now-restored farm. That ain’t far from the truth. It just stops short, is all. Old Testament style justice is about bad guys getting theirs, but it’s also about the poor being elevated, the hungry filled, and the full going away empty-handed. That last bit’s what’s hard to swallow. I’m full. I’ll go away empty. Not because I took it from someone, but because I didn’t share it with my neighbor.
There’s another thing about God: God is unfair. Those third world theologians who pioneered liberation theology liked to say that God has a preferential option for the poor. “Foul!” first-worlders cry. “God doesn’t have favorites!”
But if you want to find God, unadorned, raw, obvious, look at the bottom of the human pile. Jesus is in prison, in the soup line, holding her child dying in the desert south of Tucson. God apparently likes being in the mud of humanity. God chooses slaves, clowns, and sinners over the powerful, the wise, and the righteous. At least, Jesus seemed to see it that way.
And that preference extends to giving away my hard earned stuff to those who didn’t work for it. At least, that’s what the Bible says again and again. I don’t like it any more than you do. Although I scrape from week to week to make ends meet, I’m a king compared to the rest of the world. And the Magnificat says that God pulls the powerful from their thrones. Great. In my little house, we’ve got three.


, Isn’t it interesting that the triumvirate of God-words – omniscient (all knowing), omnipresent (present everywhere), omnipotent (all powerful) is so concise but there isn’t a compact word for all loving? The 1611 English translation of the Bible uses the term lovingkindness to translate a Hebrew word that means . . . well, it means lovingkindness. I’ve seen bumper stickers recently that say, “Lovingkindness Is My Religion”, usually on cars of people who don’t self-identify as Christians, but whose impulses are pretty close to the gospel of Jesus. “Lovingkindness-is-my-religion” is actually quite in keeping with the way St. James (not the Bible translation authorizing guy, I mean the epistler in the New Testament) defines true religion: visiting widows and orphans in their affliction and keeping away from the favoritism of wealth. The words we use and even the words we do not use but have access to shape our understanding of God.

,, Remember in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure when he said, “Everyone’s got a big but. Let’s talk about your big but, Simone”?