LITMIR.BIZ

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of her over-picture to the metaphysics offered by a few others keep me from discarding hers altogether.

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      Still Christmas Eve—December 24, 2008

      I find myself in a very strange place this Christmas Eve. This has become a secular holiday celebration for me. We will go to church this night, sing the songs, enjoy the mysteriosity of it all. But the birth of Christ feels oddly empty for me. Have I turned some corner?

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      Epiphany IV—February 1, 2009

      I can’t recall what sent me off wandering this morning, some prayer, some tiny bit of liturgy, some word from Stephen’s mouth. But it sent me wondering. What was the church to me when I was young? a lad? What did I expect when I turned my attention to it and began to imagine myself a priest within it? And then, what was the church to me during my professional life. And what is it to me now, now that I am retired, and old, and reflective, and more thoughtful, less dutiful? And then I wondered, what are these others expecting out of this? A touch of God? A vision? A hint of transcendence and a rule for living?

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      Lent V—March 29, 2009

      When I studied Jack Miles’s book, God: a Biography I was struck by the similarities between the YHWH of a particular book and the needs of the nation: during the enslavement an ombudsman, organizer, leader; during the early kingdom a family friend and moralist who stood to the side, during the eighth century a critic and pleader and then an anguished but unrelenting judge, and finally after the exile a disappearing absentee. So it is a simple step to reasonably turn all that around and see that changing of YHWH not as any variation in the godhead himself, but rather of the people’s perception of God. Maybe, after all the study and ingestion and rumination and regurgitation of Scripture, our perception of the God is hardly more than a projection of our needs. A collection of the best we can imagine and the tiny scraps of wisdom we can glean and gather. God, or rather our perception of a God, may be simply a collection of what we hope for in our best moments and the hazy axioms we intuit about how best we live together on this planet.

      This is not to say anything about the existence of God, only that what we perceive about that God may be far more projection than verifiable observation or deduction.

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      Palm Sunday—April 5, 2009

      We do this quirky little oxymoronic liturgy of palm branches and triumphal entries, and then move swiftly into the reading of the whole passion story, and a beginning of the last week of Jesus’ life. Nineteen hundred and seventy-five years ago this prophet cum seer cum healer cum teacher became too threatening for the Judaic authorities to tolerate, so they put him away, publicly, with lots of show and denunciation and renunciation and some Roman cooperation. And today I stand here celebrating that, commemorating. How odd!! What did he, this Jesus guy, do? What did THEY do? What was this whole scene, this doings all about? And what happened then? The resurrection? I mean, if I had been there, with my twentieth-century slightly-scientific understandings and methods of perception, what would I have perceived happened? And what difference would it have made? I suppose much, or an incalculable amount of this last-week story is historic fact, that it did in fact happen. But did it have some objective, supernatural effect? Or was it only metaphor, was it only impressing upon us a difference rather than effecting some objective, out-there difference? Some eternal forgiveness of sins?

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      Pentecost VIII—July 26, 2009

      I have begun reading Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. So far a re-sorting of ancient historical theology. Makes great sense, but blasts enormous holes in the Scriptured story. Follows man’s earliest notions of gods/spirits through hunter-gatherer cultures, shamanism, chiefdoms, early city-states, empires: a multitude of polytheisms gradually become a polytheistic pantheon, then a monolatry, and finally monotheism. I’ve got far to go in the book, but it’s making profound sense. Wright taught philosophy at Princeton, then religion at Pennsylvania. He started life as a hard-shell Baptist child, got the altar-call, was baptized, and now no longer calls himself a Christian, but refers to a moral compass. Neither affirms nor denies a God. But tries to align himself with the moral axis of the universe. Wright puts me in a new place, a place of saying, “Yes, it really is all metaphor, and it gives us no clues as to how the metaphor relates to God.”

      So I find myself sitting here this morning asking from a different posture, from outside the metaphor if you will, “What is this all about?” If Wright is correct (or at least more correct than wrong), then what is this, my circle of standing stones, all about? What is going on here? This morning we baptized an infant Owen into this congregation and church. Why? And what did we just do? What difference did it make? To Owen? To us? To this community? To this church? To this world? Surely it was a very pacific, and harmless initiation rite. Was it anything more than that? I think so, but am unable to say what more. I’m puzzling, what is this church stuff really about? What difference can it possibly make? What is its influence? And on whom? And to what end? The preacher (the infant’s grandfather) proclaimed that we were not doing magic, that this was a beginning that we were not about making a better citizen of Owen or providing moral direction for him. But he did not say what we are doing.

      So I find myself wandering through a strange landscape today. For sixty-five years it had been a familiar landscape, and through the years had been increasingly filled with landmarks and sign posts and direction markers that I could read with ease. It was a landscape I knew well, and better and better as I aged and grew wiser, one which I knew well enough that I could give others some direction and guidance. But today it is an unfamiliar and different landscape. The markers and signs are gone, obliterated, or erased. And it is somewhat a wilderness. Not a frightening wilderness, just a not-as-well-featured-as-before wilderness, a place where the only markers and sign posts are the ones I discern for myself, the ones I set up, a somewhat barren wilderness. And I am wandering, searching out my own way. Yet I do not feel lost. Just a little lonely. Squinting toward a tiny light on the distant horizon, looking toward a small, somewhat unconcerned figure far way on my horizon whom I cannot make out clearly, and who glances back at me from time to time, with a little curiosity. A quiet and small part of me may enjoy being out in this wilderness alone.

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      August 29, 2009

      Much water over (or perhaps under) the dam since last I wrote to this. Primarily Robert Wright’s book The Evolution of God, a fetching, though somewhat misleading title. He’s not really talking about God evolving, but about our image(s) of God evolving.

      Wright is not so much a scholar, though a prolific reader, as a journalist. He collects and disburses information, vast quantities of it. But so far as I can tell he does not do much digesting of it, more like regurgitation. With an interesting beginning, as a Oklahoman Southern Baptist background in his teens, including the traditional altar-call, self-dedication and dunking (as though an adult) baptism, then on to a first year in a fundamentalist college, next moving to Princeton and a thorough going eastern, head-trip education. He writes. And sufficiently well that he has been invited to teach undergraduate courses in religion and philosophy. He seems at this point in his life enamored of cultural evolution and game theory and in his work he seems to base his study and reporting around those two foci. So he reads pretty traditional but quite up to date historical criticism of both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures through those two lenses, cultural evolution and games theory. It makes for an interesting and unsettling read. I have read him. I am now occupied with ruminating. This cud requires heavy-duty and long-ongoing rumination, re-chewing all I’ve read, studied, and thought over all these years. I guess I see my theological understandings and formulations as in flux these days, and myself as wandering through, as re-making-sense-of. I have announced to Steve and Stephen that, while willing to celebrate Eucharist, I am no longer able to preach, that there are no more sermons in me, at least for now, and will not be until I emerge with a new understanding of it all, and some things worth being said, both to myself and to others. But for now I am in preacher’s limbo with nothing in hand or head or heart to be said.

      Where

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