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into a demanding family protector, then on to a violent and sometimes cruel war-god and coercive law-giver, compact-enforcer, next a jealous and loyalty-demanding overlord who moves on to take up international roles, and then, when his covenant with his chosen people fails, a half-insane (manic-depressive?) God who, alternately pleading and then abusing, abandons his people, condemns them into exile, and after they return, becomes an increasingly absent God who, while not totally abandoning, fails to make any significant difference. I have not done a similar study of the God of the Gospels and early Christian writings, but at a first glance, the picture is only slightly more attractive.

      I’ve been plowing my way through Karen Armstrong’s book, A History of God, in which she tracks the development of the several images of God in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, just barely touching Buddhism and Hinduism. It is fascinating to watch the evolution, from familial and tribal gods, through Scriptural presentations, and as those prove insufficient, through further evolving images. I get a portrait of a God who, when frozen into Scriptures, wanes insufficient, and is then further explored with philosophic (on the rational side) terms and in mystics’s (on the imaginal side) terms. Several things become clearer:

      1) Armstrong points out (and others echo) that the mystics’s ways are for the few, that not many of us can achieve mystical vision, but that on the other hand, religions begin with the mystics’s visions full of energy and magnetic excitement, but that as the mystic’s vision is codified into a religion it becomes frozen, static and unmoving. The religion is the lay (i.e., non-mystic) person’s effort to respond to the mystical vision, but it is doomed to fail (i.e., to not be as inspiring and motivating as the mystical vison itself).

      2) Each major religion has evolved its own mystical side, but that side is always on the fringe, too radicalizing to be at the center, and while it may subtly and gradually shift the focus or direction or center, it is at the same time threatening and at odds with the center.

      3) Those mystical visions often wander off in directions quite different from the center’s vision, and are sometimes even antithetical. The God of most mystics is quite unlike the YHWH of Genesis-Isaiah. And

      4) Armstrong, along with others, points out that Christianity in the West has been taken captive, and held hostage, by rationalism, spurns the non-rational, the irrational, the imaginal. We in the West have little patience for the mystical visionary, we give him only slight berth, and certainly ignore his wisdom, while most of the rest of the world, particularly Islam, values his contributions and leadership. We are, religiously, out of step.

      And I’ve forced my way (with elbows and shoulders and knees) through William James’s lectures, Varieties of Religious Experiences a book I should have read thirty-five or more years ago. While those lectures are now a hundred years out of date, in some ways they are still seminal, in other places they’ve not yet been heard. On reading him I momentarily understand the fundamentalist mind set (not completely, not really, certainly not sympathetically). James divides us into two sorts, those of “healthy-minded” or “mind-cure” religious experiences (not so positive as those words might imply), and those of “sick-soul” experiences (sometimes as unhealthy as those words imply). Or in other words, those of us whose faith grows slowly vis-a-vis those whose faith, like Paul’s, is marked with a dramatic conversion experiences. And as I read James with twenty-first-century understandings and insights, I can only wonder to what extent our religious experiences are hard-wired genetically or hormonally etched into our neurological pathways. Is it possibly written in my bones that I will have or require a conversion experience, or that I will not and will instead slowly mature into my faith? Or that I will have no faith at all, no aptitude towards a god of any sort? (I am not referring to the recent discourses about the possibility of a religion gene within our DNA; until it is proven otherwise I think that a stupid notion.)

      And I wonder about the imaginal. There is a part of me would have liked to be a mystic, to experience the God directly, without any mediation. I understand that at my age, and lacking as I do the essential discipline, and being probably completely without aptitude, that is not a possibility; but those reasons do not appease my yearning. Yet I can imagine. And I think I could learn to accept my imaginings as another reality.

      As I reckon up this small pile of odds and ends, clods and droppings, I begin to wonder about the whether of Christianity as the religion. Is this belief system any better that any other. Or is it simply the one I grew up with, the one scribbled on my tablet by my parents, and the neighbors (most were Catholic) and the culture. Could I have been just as content (or discontent) as a Muslim? Or a Buddhist? Or a Kabbalist? Is this Christianity no more than one way godward among many? Is it mine simply because it was the most marketable religious system in the fourth-century Mediterranean world? I think that might be. A system grown out of the mystic Jesus’ experiences, codified by the brash, enthusiastic genius of the mystic Paul. Did it simply make the most sense for the most people throughout most of the Mediterranean basin in 200 AD? Was it simply better coinage than the state religion and folk piety of that day? I remember Dr. Solomon at Bexley Hall commenting in an aside about folk piety. Though I cannot recall his words, I do not remember that he disparaged folk piety, rather he seemed to be alerting us to it. I had never heard the term folk piety before, but had come to Bexley deeply imbued in it. Christian folk piety was my religion when I arrived, and I was in the process of exchanging it for a much more intellectual, and intellectually acceptable religion, orthodox Western Christianity. But in retrospect, was the orthodoxy any better than the folk piety? And was it any closer to a relationship with God himself? Or was first century Christianity simply the more marketable folk piety of its day? And converted by those early Church Fathers into a supremely acceptable (for its day) intellectual religious system? And I inherited it. And it’s no closer to God that the other stuff, loved mainly because it could claim a real, live martyred human Jesus as its founding mystic?

      I am wondering. And wandering. But not feeling lost!

      ********************

      XIX Pentecost—September 21, 2008

      Arrived at church a quarter of an hour before the service, greeted warmly Drew, now a cancer survivor, and settled in to muse a few minutes. Ed Burdick sat down beside me, asked if I was working on my sermon. Notes were appearing, scribbled on the front of my bulletin. It was a productive morning, the musings just kept coming, so cryptic notes kept filling up the blank spaces on the bulletin cover.

      I get occasional glimpses. Susan says she doesn’t give a hang for the unseen God. And while I sympathize with her disinterest, I do (and just how-hard wired is that need, I wonder?) I am curious, but more than just curious. There is a vague yearning, one which I suspect will never be satisfied, at least in this life, to experience God for myself. My occasional glimpses are so vague as to be indescribable. The divinity I glimpse is not the very personal, but very incendiary and inconstant, very human and anthropomorphic YHWH of Hebrew Scriptures. Nor the warmly loving Abba of Jesus’ gospels. The God I glimpse (“It,” I am inclined to say) seems remote, impassive. I cannot tell from this perspective whether It has concern for me, for us. My yearning is to see Its face, though, as in the Hebrew writings, to see Its face may be to die. So far I’ve glimpsed only what seems to be Its backside and I’m still alive. Still, maybe in some sense I have died; at least that ancient, childish comprehension of God has died, and the more matured, Christian comprehension has died as well, along with my clinging to those. In the glimpses I get the God does not seem to care that I am peeping at It, yet I sense It may care in some vague sense. I read others’s words, that everything exists within God, and that somewhat expresses what I sense, and yet It is transcendent, out there, separate but still united with the creation.

      Then I suddenly realize how much my thinking, my intuitions have been so shaped by the culture, by what I’ve learned, by all the forces that have gone into the shaping of this being, of this mind which I hold at this moment, that I don’t know what to trust. Which images of God arise out of my glimpses of the infinite and which lurch out of the muck of my own unconscious shaping?

      Still Pentecost XIX—September 21, 2008

      As Ed Burdick joked about my making sermon notes, I remembered what I’d learned long ago, that the word “sermon” in the Latin (which stands far-distanced behind our use of it) meant a conversation,

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