"What you say about God—who God is, what God cares about, who God rewards, and who God punishes—says nothing about God and everything about you. If you believe in an unconditionally loving God, you probably value unconditional love. If you believe in a God who divides people into chosen and not chosen, believers and infidels, saved and damned, high cast or low caste, etc. you are likely someone who divides people into in–groups and out–groups with you and your group as the quintessential in-group. God may or may not exist, but your idea of God mirrors yourself and your values." -- Jim Palmer
I noticed this quote from Jim Palmer the other day (listed among a group of other "14 things the misguided religious establishment doesn’t want you to know") and got really excited by this particular point.
I can only "speak" for myself, but I've found this to be incredibly true in my life, both from my relationships with other religious people I have known and in my own faith as well.
It would be easy to address the faults in others by referencing this quote, but that's not my intention. Instead, I want to mention only my own piece of timber instead of the stick in anyone else's eye.
Rather than approaching my faith as the "get out of hell free" card or the "cosmic lawgiver" or even the "celestial lover" that have become the predominate metaphors for our relationships with the I Am (i.e., Christ/God/the Holy Spirit), my own metaphor has always been that of the great mystery, the ultimately unknown and unknowable. Now, I know the whole point of the faith is that Christ is knowable, but for my understanding of my chosen religion, no matter how well I may feel I know or know about, it is but a mere pittance and the tiniest fraction of what I could or should know.
For me, my journey of faith is about the journey, the search for growing deeper and deeper into the great mystery. It hasn't always been so. As a child and a teenager, I was very much indoctrinated in the fear of Hell, the "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" version of the gospel. Later, in my twenties, I discovered C.S. Lewis and Mere Christianity and the books of Francis Schaeffer and embraced the faith as an exercise of the rational. As such, I embraced the world of theology and apologetics. Some time after that, I read the wonderful Singer trilogy by Calvin Miller and began to seek out the version of the Christ who was the romantic leading man for his bride (the church's role in this metaphor).
The next step is the one that has captured my mind and ensnared my imagination for the past 20 or so years. It came from learning that none of the previous understandings fully helped me to seek the heart of God, the almighty, the infinite, the beyond creation. Finding freedom from Hell gave me little more than the need to say magic words. Apologetics and theology gave me a deeper knowledge about God (or at least what the writers I read knew or felt they knew about God). And pursuing Christ the great lover left me feeling empty as if I had only been fooling myself all those years and I was supposed to be more secure and solid on my standing, as if I could physically see, touch, hear, and know someone so beyond my ability to comprehend.
Only by embracing the object of my religion as the great mystery allows me to embrace the journey and not become a tangle of guilt as not feeling knowledgeable enough, loving enough, following the rules enough, etc., because I can acknowledge the truth (my truth, anyway) that it's okay not to know the rules because we made them up for the most part, not to feel the tender affection of the bridegroom because I don't possess yet the ability to feel such things until I can know as I am known, not to be able to place the mystery in a box called theology and apologetics and say "this I know and it will never change."
Only by embracing the journey toward the great mystery can I come to terms with a gradually growing (but never getting beyond the simplest of childish grasping). Only by embracing that the "out there" is something that can't fully be an "in here" -- after all, even in Christ, there was still God that couldn't fit and remained as the Godhead -- and therefore something that I can't trust my senses to know or not know, to feel or not feel.
I think this is why my writing also takes the direction of the adventure of uncovering or discovering the mystery. Because of who I am, some might say who I was made to be, my stories helped me to understand this part of me and how it relates not only to my craft as a storyteller but also my understanding of my faith.
As I embrace the adventure of seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, I can fully understand (finally) how to extend grace to all others on that journey (or not on that journey). A journey means each person is on their own trip and my business is my trip, not yours. It allows me to give latitude to those who may believe differently than I do, because if God is ultimately a mystery, they have as much right to try to put the mystery into words as I do. It means that I don't judge those who follow different rules because the rules come from theology and theology comes from individual and group study, and that my rules apply to me alone based on my study. It means that until the journey is over all the answers aren't found, like U2 said, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for."
Or, as Carolyn Arends sings in her song " Reaching":
There's a time I can recall
Four years old and three feet tal
Trying to touch the stars and the cookie jar
And both were out of reach...Well, I should not have thought it strange
That growing causes growing pains
'Cause the more we learn the more we know
We don't know anything...So when we taste of the divine
It leaves us hungry every time...
And perhaps I never will find what I'm looking for or reach the stars and the cookie jar. At least, not until maybe I become a flower leaning towards the light, to borrow from the metaphor Dante used in Paradiso. After all, it's as good (or perhaps even better) a metaphor as any of the others I've lived under up to now.
As I embrace the journey of seeking the heart of the mystery of God, I have only one guiding law. Adapt as I follow and grow.
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