Process and Power

I have always been a Process theologian, more or less; I just wasn’t aware of it. I first became aware of the term, without knowing what it meant, when I was in seminary in 1999. A fellow student, who lived across the hall from me, mentioned it, but he was, frankly, intellectually challenged, and his explanations did not explain very much. 


There are several ways into Process Theology, but for me, it all begins with the understanding that God is not all-powerful. I have written about this concept before on this blog, and I have believed it for a long time. This belief is just one among several that would get me branded a heretic by many Christians. Five or six hundred years ago, it would have gotten me burned at the stake. (Not really; I’m a coward, and I would have recanted the second they showed me the implements of torture. There aren’t many things worth giving your life for—religious “truth,” when truth is such an amorphous thing that nobody can be sure of, isn’t one of them.) 


Admitting that God is not all-powerful is hard. But once you can get past that hurdle—and for most believers it’s a big one, to be sure—things start to fall into place. Suddenly, the “problem of evil” is solved. I can’t even estimate the number of times I’ve been told, or heard, or read, that someone became an atheist because an all-powerful God didn’t prevent some catastrophe, or that God allowed Hitler or Stalin to come to power, or that God allowed any number of other evils to flourish. And I have to admit I share some of their viewpoint. If I believed there was a God who could prevent evil or relieve suffering but didn’t—well, I would reject that God, too.


Orthodox Christians turn verbal and logical somersaults explaining why God permits evil to exist. Most of the explanations revolve around the assertion that “it’s all part of God’s plan” and that everything serves a purpose, and that it will all come out okay in the end. “God’s ways are mysterious,” they say, and it is not for us mere humans to understand God’s intentions or question God’s methods. Or maybe they’ll say that God is indeed all-powerful but deliberately holds that power in check in order to allow humans to exercise their free will. 


Well, I think that’s balderdash. If God is nothing else, God is love. The God I know is incapable of acting in other than a loving and compassionate manner. The God I know would never allow human or animal suffering if God could prevent it. And a loving God would never allow a 6-year-old girl to die a painful death from leukemia if that God could prevent it. What kind of God is it who could prevent but would allow millions of people to starve to death, be killed or displaced by sectarian conflict; who could prevent but would allow child abuse, rape, or other horrendous crimes? What kind of God is it whose plans include the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, Darfur, Wounded Knee, and all the rest? How on earth can one argue that this is somehow for our good? Saying things like, "It's a mystery," or "It's not for us to understand God's ways," just doesn't cut it. That kind of God is not a God of love, and I utterly reject the notion that my God is anything like that. Process Theology holds that because God is Love and always acts from love, God would prevent evil if it was within God’s power to do so. If evil exists, it is on us, not on God, because God cannot prevent it.

It bears repeating: if God could prevent evil, God would.


When you understand that God cannot prevent evil or bad things happening to good people, or good things happening to bad people, you no longer have to try to rationalize away the assertion that a loving God allows or even causes bad things to happen as some sort of master plan that we can’t understand. Which is easier to accept: that the God who is the very definition of love will allow or cause millions of people to starve to death in agony when that very same God could prevent it with ease, or that God agonizes over the starvation of those millions while being unable to prevent it?

And God does suffer with us. God is not omnipotent, but God is omniscient. But beyond that, God’s understanding, empathy, and compassion are perfect. When you hurt, God hurts with you. When you are hungry, God is hungry, too. When you are homeless, so is God.


God is indeed powerful. But God’s power is persuasive, not coercive. Ultimately, who is more powerful: the one who takes a gun and forces to do what you don’t want to do or to bear what you cannot bear, or the one who wins your acceptance and willing participation by appealing to your better nature and never giving up? God knows you better than you know yourself. God knows your needs even before you ask. And God is always with you, urging you on—luring you—into the best path given your circumstances. Some would say God is your conscience, but that would be wildly oversimplifying it. God works on a level that is far below any conscious thought we may have. We are not aware of it, but every second—every millisecond—of every day we are responding to God’s call. And no matter how we respond, God is always ready to adjust; God adapts. After each occasion in which you respond, to a greater or lesser degree, to God’s call, God re-evaluates and offers new possibilities and new choices to which we are given the choice to accept, or not.


And that is God’s power. God never tires; God never surrenders; God never gives up on us. God is now and forever by our side urging us along God’s path—the one that leads to universal peace and understanding, and economic, racial, and sexual equality. Whenever we act in love; whenever we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned, or fight injustice of any kind, we are accepting God’s call, regardless of whether we know it; regardless of  whether we admit it.


My prayer today is that whoever may read this will gain some understanding, despite my poor word choice and compositional skills, but, more importantly, will respond to God’s call in love and with an open heart, seeking always to create the world God intends for us. Blessings upon us all--everyone, no exceptions.
Amen.

They Who Have Not Seen

Passing the time on a boring evening. No big woop. Here’s an example of how internal evidence might lead one to surmise that more than one author was at work in each of the New Testament Gospels, or, at least, that Jesus very likely didn’t say much of what was attributed to him.

Jesus, having been resurrected, comes to the house where the disciples had been staying (locked in, “for fear of the Jews”). It is Sunday evening. Jesus’ resurrection is immediately embraced by all who are present, save one—the Disciple Thomas (“Doubting Thomas”). Thomas literally cannot believe his eyes; he demands proof that the figure standing before him is indeed Jesus in the flesh. So he reaches out and touches and feels Jesus body and knows the resurrection is real.  “Have you believed because you have seen me?” Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” (The Gospel of John 20:29 NRSV.)

Why would Jesus say such a thing—that those who have not seen him yet “have come to believe” in the resurrection are blessed. What would prompt that specific remark? Earlier that day, at the tomb, Mary Magdalene had encountered the risen Jesus and run to the disciples to tell them the news. John says nothing about whether the disciples believed her. But she believed in the resurrection. Jesus came to the disciples, and they believed in the resurrection. At this point, as far as we know, there is nobody who has not seen Jesus who believes in the resurrection—the word just hasn’t had time to get out. Israel in 33 C.E. had no mass communication. 

So why would Jesus speak in the present tense about a group of believers who have yet to exist? Why wouldn’t he say, “Those who believe without seeing me will be blessed” instead? It would be easy to say that belief was spreading around Jerusalem—John just doesn’t mention it. Or that Jesus knows something we don’t. Those explanations, however, require us to read into the text things that just aren’t there. No, all we have to go by is the text, and, according to the text, on Easter Sunday evening, the only people who believed in the resurrection were those who had seen him. In that context, Jesus’ statement makes no sense.

Consider, though, that the mainstream scholarly consensus is that John’s Gospel was written around the turn of the century, 65-75 years after Jesus’ death. By that time, it is more likely than not that nobody alive had seen the risen Jesus. Perhaps a very scant handful of people managed to beat the long odds, live into their 80s or 90s, and remember that famous day and year. In any event, it is almost dead solid certain that anybody living in 100 CE who believed in the resurrection took it on faith and only on faith. Those were days when the Church had been persecuted from Jerusalem to Rome. It is easy to lose belief when belief comes at the cost of an excruciating death. Those Christians may well have needed some reassurance that their faith was not in vain. They needed to know that there was a point to their suffering and that they would be justified—blessed—in the end. In that context, it makes perfect sense that the Gospel writer or editor would put these words of encouragement on Jesus’ lips, not as a historian but as a pastor assuring a wavering Church that their faith was in something real even if unseen.

Remember the Gospel writers were not writing history and they especially were not writing up to modern historical research standards. They were writing theology. I don’t think they would have had a problem putting words in Jesus’ mouth that were consistent with his character and probably would have said in the appropriate circumstances. Such projection happens all the time. It’s sort of like the words, “Father, I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down that cherry tree.” We all know that the cherry tree story was a total fabrication of Parson Weems, yet the words ring true. Why? Because Washington could well have said them had those circumstances arisen. They were totally within what we know of his character.

Frustration and Sadness

I am a minister without a flock of even a single parishioner. I long to share the love of God with someone, and pray with them, because it is in those actions that I can truly feel God’s love and caring and help them do the same. People need to hear the Gospel—not the gospel that is preached in so many of our churches today. The Gospel has nothing to do with Jesus’ divinity, or lack of it. It has nothing to do with who his father and mother were or what special qualities they had. It has nothing to do with miracles. The Gospel is in the words  Jesus spoke. And people need to hear the words he spoke, but more importantly they need to feel them in their hearts. They need reassurance. They need to know of God’s infinite love—infinite, but individual. People need to know that God’s love extends to them personally—that God carries each of us very close to God’s great heart, always. They need to feel God’s comfort and encouragement when they are grieving.

I have, over the years, attempted to convey that love to so many people. At first I wrote letters in the hope and expectation it would help me make friends, but I soon learned to expect nothing. I still hoped, but eventually I gave that up, too. For years now, I have written letters sharing God’s love with no expectations and no hope. I guess that is what altruism is. Yet I am in no way altruistic, for in every letter I write, in every conversation I take part in, I issue an unspoken, yet no less real, invitation to take the relationship to a deeper level so that we can experience God together. In that invitation, I suppose, I still hope and on some level expect that it will happen.

Yet my invitation has never been accepted. I expect that each of us experiences God in his/her own way. I cannot find fault or be angry with any individual.  But when after years not one single person has called upon me to share my experience with them and they with me, I have to accept that there is something wrong with me—that there is something my character that drives people away or at least stays their approach. So, I can’t think of a single person I could call upon in times of spiritual crisis and know that they would respond. And I can’t think of a single person who would call on me.

People need to be ministered to. I need to minister. We will never get together.,

My Memories of Liz

The first great love of my life, and I’ve only had two, was a woman in San Angelo, Texas named Liz Marquis. She was going by the name of Liz Honea when I first met her, and that was the name she took back after her brief marriage to that smooth-talking self-indulgent viper, Roger. I met her in the same way I met one of my oldest and best friends, Mike Breen, through our work on a play at the San Angelo Civic Theatre, “Dial M for Murder.” I played a British detective; Mike played a would-be murderer who was himself killed; Liz was nominally part of the crew, but mainly she was just hanging out. When we first met, she told me how much she enjoyed my performance in another play, “Night Watch,” in which I played an over the top gay gossip columnist in a performance that would just not be acceptable today. Naturally that endeared her to me, and we struck up a friendship. She thought I was hilarious; as a result, I thought she was wise and insightful.  That friendship and endearment later developed into my full-fledged infatuation with her, an infatuation that later developed into a deep, true love. She was my first true love; I think she loved me back.

Hardly a week has passed since she died in 1981 that I have not thought about her. She was a plain woman, and tall for her sex. She was not beautiful. She was five or six years older than I and her body had started to spread out just enough to be soft and full and…sexy. Sometimes I feel guilty thinking about how I loved her. Feeling guilty is my default setting, of course, but it seems somehow disloyal to Carol to be carrying a torch after all these years. To be clear: Carol is the woman I married, and she is the universe to me; “I am quite contented nowadays to have joined my life with [hers].” But I can’t help it: every time I think of Liz, which, as I’ve said, is often, my old passion and, let’s be honest, lust comes back to me as strong or even stronger than when we parted in 1979.

I really can’t say why I fell in love with her or why I stayed in love with her through thick and thin. She was never “my girl” in the sense that we shared romance—romance always seemed tantalizingly just out of reach. We never had sex although God knows I wanted to—we came awfully close a time or two. She was a failed human being in many ways, or maybe just the victim of a lifetime of bad luck. She was married and divorced three times. She was poor as a church mouse. She was self-effacing and humble to a fault—somewhere along the line virtually all of her self-confidence had been beaten out of her. She was a sucker for a certain sort of sweet-talkin’ confidence man, slender and oh-so-charming (Which, I guess, is one major reason that we never went to bed.  Being fat has prevented me from so many sexual liaisons. Not only has it made me unattractive to women, it has put my self-esteem in the gutter along with Liz’s. In fact, my guess is that I never would have landed Carol if I hadn’t lost a lot of weight in the Fall-Winter of 1979-80. On the other hand, my involuntary near-celibacy kept me safe from sexually transmitted diseases and paternity claims. It’s an ill wind…) But she was smart and funny, and she liked me—really liked me. She loved me after her fashion, and I think that despite my size she would have eventually married me, which was my heartfelt desire, had things turned out differently, i.e., if Carol hadn’t come along or Liz hadn’t died.

We spent a lot of time together. Much of the time we were alone together at her mother’s lake house, but mostly we were together with the members of our ka-tet (see Stephen King’s Dark Tower books). Before her ill-fated marriage to the rank and evil son-of-a-bitch Roger and ill-fated sojourn to California, we were both a part of a group-of-five that consisted of folks who had the Civic Theatre in common: me, Liz, Roger (whom I liked before I discovered what a pathological narcissist he was), Mike Breen who was my best friend and who remains one of my two best friends (and, to his credit, was the first among us to see through his Roger's  “mellow” new-age persona), and a woman whose name I can’t remember (Diane? Diana?), who was a sergeant in the Air Force and Roger’s girlfriend before he grew tired of her and decided to prey on the vulnerable Liz instead.

1977 was a magical year for me, right up until I moved to Oregon to live with Mike there. The five of us did virtually everything together. We were together constantly, usually smoking vast quantities of Mexican dirt weed (Back then, you had to smoke a lot if you wanted to get high.) and listening to music—usually on the sound system, but sometimes Mike—a gifted singer/songwriter/guitar player) would sing for us some of the songs he had written and some covers (Liz and I both were taken with his rendition of Paul Simon’s “Duncan.”). I was living with Mike at the time (sharing a house, that is, lest ye get the wrong impression) at a place we dubbed “Baxter’s” after the Jefferson Airplane album. You know that Fleetwood Mac album that sold so many copies back then? “Rumors?” (That was the one that in retrospect was nothing more than a formulaic collection of ten three-minute tunes strung together, each designed for maximum commercial appeal. It seemed as if each song was only included after extensive focus-group testing.) It was the virtual soundtrack of my year. I still enjoy listening to that album, hackneyed and trite though it may be. 

I was constantly following after Liz and thought I was in love with her that summer (it wasn’t until the next year that I learned to truly love her), but she only had eyes—sexual eyes, anyway—for fuckin’ Roger. He could be a seductive bastard. The fact that she wasn’t very modest and had a casual attitude about how much skin she showed, practically never wearing a brassiere, only fueled my horniness. I did a lot of jacking off back then, and most of it was while I was thinking about her. Even now she sometimes comes up in my fantasies. But it wasn’t just her appearance that made her seductive to me. As I have mentioned, her appearance was plain—no one except someone who was—or thought he was—in love with her would have called her beautiful. She had lived a hard life, and it was starting to show. (Having said that, I do want to emphasize that she was not unattractive by any means.) She never seemed preoccupied with her appearance, the way so many of us seem to be. She used little or no makeup. She wore her hair in a practical short cut, and she always dressed as though she had come straight from Goodwill, but tastefully. She seemed unconcerned about her appearance and seemed to have no qualms about appearing in public in her bathing suit. No, it was not her looks, per se, that won my heart, though she had a dazzling smile: it was the way she carried herself with her soft aura of sensuality and affect of vulnerability (I was to learned that she didn’t just appear vulnerable—she really was vulnerable). And, despite the chaos that was her life, she always seemed centered, an act, of course. And she always made me feel like the most important person in the world when she was with me (Was that an act?). She was kind and generous. She was the world to me.

She wasn’t afraid of intimacy and touching me. She was very sensual—not overtly sexual (not with me, anyway)—but we kissed each other frequently and held each other in our arms. Full body hugs were routine, and sometimes we would just sit across from each other and explore each other’s face, gently outlining our lips, chin, jawline, forehead. How I craved her touch!

She loved sitting in the candle light, listening to music. At night, we would switch from “Rumors” to an album by a band I’ll bet you never heard of but that we loved: American Flyer. I loved that album. Years later I found a CD of it: I treasure it and listen to it , growing melancholy, every now and then. Or maybe we’d listen to that Eagles album that contained “Lyin’ Eyes.”

She married that devious Fritz Perls-loving bastard Roger and moved with him to California, not very long before I pulled up stakes and went to live with Mike in Oregon. After a couple of months of sponging off Mike’s kind and generous parents, I decided I couldn’t hack it and moved back home, tail between my legs. I got a job on the night shift at the San Angelo Center (for the adult mentally retarded) and proceeded to mark time, waiting, I suppose, to grow up.

But in the Late Fall or early Winter, word somehow came to me that Liz was back from California—without the sociopath. I called my friend Carol Price, whom Liz adored, and asked her if it was true what I had heard and, if so, if she thought Liz would want to see me. Carol replied that it was true and that Liz had told her that she would love to see me. I called her that very day, and we got together.

Between that day and the day I left San Angelo to attend law school in Austin, we spent at least some time together almost every day. It was during that period I realized that what had been mere infatuation on my part had evolved to mature love, and, on reflection, I believe she came to love me, too. There is nothing—nothing—that feels as fine as loving and being loved in return. I know that I was the most constant friend she ever had. Nobody—not her mother, not her father, not any of her husbands—gave her the kind of unconditional love and support that I gave her. Well, maybe her children.

It was unconditional--really, unconditional--love that I offered her, and it was unconditional love and support that she needed. There were things I longed for, but I never asked anything of her.  She was emotionally worn out and frail. I like to think that’s why I didn’t press her, but it was probably because I was a coward. I'm certainly not made of the stuff of nobility. As I said, she returned from California a broken woman. Liz would never speak of it, but I learned from Carol Price that the Beast Roger had physically beaten her. I learned, too, that Liz had become pregnant and lost the baby. Carol didn’t know for sure, but from comments Liz made, Carol believed she lost the baby as the result of Roger’s battery.

At any rate, for nine months or so, Liz and I were best of friends. We had lunch together, dinner together, and went to the park together. We had long talks—some substantive, others frivolous. We took in a movie from time to time. We held hands a lot. We kissed—not makeout kisses, but serious for all that. The one thing we didn’t do together was have sex. I didn’t even try. I wonder if she thought that strange? But I just couldn’t bring myself to push the issue. Instead, we became soul mates. I wanted to marry her, but I never asked. I think she would have said yes, but maybe I’m just kidding myself. (I do that a lot.) I wanted to spend my life with her more than I had ever wanted anything. But then I went to law school; Liz and I didn’t drift apart, exactly, but we were no longer together. I met Carol and found that I could love another while still being love with Liz. I took Carol to meet her, kind of like taking her home to meet my parents. I was so happy when they hit it off.

Carol and I were married in March, 1981. We went home to San Angelo for Christmas, returning to Austin on December 26. On December 27, my mother called with the news that Liz was dead. I found out later that she died in a hotel room in Lubbock after being treated that day at the emergency room. I never found out what her illness was. Mother called because she had seen the funeral notice in the paper; it was too late to get to San Angelo for the funeral, but I drove to her mother’s ranch in Mertzon in the freezing weather to find her children, by themselves in a mobile home, calmly making their dinner. Little Rachal Honea told me that she was glad I had come because she knew there was “something special” between Liz and me and Liz had often spoken of me fondly. I stayed awhile in silence.  I could find no words to say. Then went out to my car. It was a half-hour or more before my tears dried enough for me to drive. I feel so disloyal to Carol, now, as I relate my feelings of sorrow, but a person gets only one first love, and I think Carol understands.

I wonder what would have become of us had I stayed in San Angelo and married Liz or if she had moved to Austin with me. Or if I had stayed and things had just continued as they were. Perhaps we would have been happy. I know we would have been happy for a while. I may be kidding myself, but I truly believe I gave her the happiest days she knew. But she was a sad woman, and I am essentially a sad man. My guess is that, in the end, our sadness would have won out and we would have parted. Our last real moment together came the night before I left for Austin as we stood outside and she kissed me more fiercely than I have ever been kissed. For a golden moment we were each other’s universe. I will never forget the taste of her mouth and the warmth of her body. I will never forget her kindness or her friendship. I will always feel her loss.

Twelve hours or so since I posted this,and now I'm sort of regretting it. Second guessing myself all over the place. What if our relationship, from her point of view, wasn't at all as I've described it? What if she thought I was ridiculous? What if she thought I was some sort of stalker or emotional leech and was just being nice to me? Shit. This always happens after I post something. Writer's remorse. I should be happy that no one ever reads this thing, except I know at least two people--good friends--have read it, because I sent it to them. I hope they.re not laughing up their sleeves at me.

Help Wanted

I need a prayer partner. I am not looking for a spiritual director. I may need a spiritual director, but the thought of being in any sort of hierarchical relationship, even one so benign as spiritual direction, leaves me cold. I do not want to sit at the feet of a mentor. I do not want to feel obligated to report back or turn in “homework” assignments. I don’t want to talk about spirituality—I do, really, but in another context—I want to do spirituality. I simply want a relationship with a person with whom I can meet—every week or more often if it should develop that way—as an equal partner and, keeping chit chat to a minimum, hold hands and just pray. I don’t want to be a student; I do not want to be a teacher; I just want to pray with another pilgrim. Aloud. Back and forth as moved by the Holy Spirit. I want a friend with whom I can experience God in a way that I never can alone.

Praying together, however, is such an intimate thing. It takes trust, and I don’t know of anyone who would trust me enough to share the experience of God. I have known a few such people—Shelley Wagener, my old pastor, and Amy Adams, my old friend, for example—but now, I just don’t know. I have a friend out in Texas with whom I would like to pray, but I don’t bring it up because I know that she is intensely private about her spirituality.

So I wander, breathlessly, experiencing God as I can, always trying to live in a state of grace. It is so hard.

Working Through the Process

Everything that exists, exists only insofar as it is in relationship with everything else. Every moment, or occasion, of our existence consists of our creative response to the sum of every other occasion—in all time, everywhere—that has come before. As the man said, no person is an island; no island, even, is an island. We are not only part of everything we have experienced, but we are a part of everything that everything we have experienced has experienced which is, in turn, part of everything else all the way back to the big bang. And it is all a part of us.

In every argument with an atheist concerning God's (non) existence, sooner or later, without fail, the atheist will offer the problem of evil as proof that God does not exist. We all know the argument: if God exists, why did God allow evil into the world, even create it? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad people? The God on whom they hang this argument—the God the atheists reject—inevitably is some variation of the bearded white man sitting on his throne up in heaven, micromanaging our lives and generally screwing up his creation. This caricature—or a slightly more sophisticated and nuanced version of it—is the only God they will admit and the God they reject. Well, hell, I'm atheistic about that God myself.

God is the author of all possibilities; God is not the director of our lives. It is true that God has a plan for you, but it is not that you be either rich or poor, sick or well, black or white, happy or unhappy. It is not God's plan for you to enter a particular profession—even the ministry—or even to be a particularly nice person. God does not: choose your sex or race, grant you “abundance” if you do the right things, or keep you from falling from the sky in a crippled aircraft. God does not randomly select persons on whom to bestow either blessings or curses. Bottom line: God didn't get you that promotion. God didn't send that tsunami. God did not and does not do those things, because God cannot do those things. Our God is not that kind of God. The fact is that God is not the omnipotent, omniscient super being at which the atheists scoff and who makes it so difficult to answer their constant question, “If there is a God, why did [fill in your catastrophe] happen?”

I can't say why bad or good things happen, but I can say it's not because God allows or causes them to happen. It is not within God's power to cause anything to happen or not to happen. Things happen to humans as a result of the interplay of natural laws, the exercise of free will by ourselves and others, and pure blind chance.

But God is always there, always interested in us, always urging us on to our best. Each occasion of existence builds on the occasion before. Each occasion is the result of what the preceding occasion has transmitted, which is nothing more than an attempt to replicate itself, as it is affected by every simultaneously occurring occasion and harmonized by our own creative response. Even if we think we respond automatically, without thinking, our response is the result of a process wherein we choose how the next moment will play out from among a number of alternatives.

One of those alternatives will be the one that God has chosen for us, that God desperately wants to choose. This is the alternative that will result in the best of all outcomes, the best launching pad into the next occasion in a series of occasions that lead to fulfillment of “God's Plan.” We can choose God's path, or we can choose another—it's totally up to us. But here's the thing: no matter how we proceed, God is undeterred. God is active in this process. God understands the choice you have made in all its dimensions (as you probably don't) and adjusts God's own plan to the new reality, the new occasion, wherein God will again offer the God alternative.

And what is God's plan for us? It is not a plan at all, really—it is an ever changing series of choice offerings—but the goal is that you emerge in union with God as a reflection of God's love and an agent of God's grace. 

The Idolatrous Worship of God.

Facebook is generally a very bad place for the exchange of ideas that rise much above the level of idle chatter.

I don’t want to be misunderstood: I like FB. Facebook is fun—people post funny cartoons, travel photos, cute puppy videos, little inspirational posters, right-wing rants, left wing rants, and non-wing rants—and some of this stuff is actually interesting and rewarding. Without FB, friends and acquaintances I had known years ago would have been lost to me forever. I have been surprised and gratified to learn that people remember me kindly and to realize that many people I didn’t much like “back in the day” turned out all right after all. And one of the most powerful messages I ever received came via FB, a shared inspirational quotation (from whom, I do not know) that said: “Be kind. Every person you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” A pithy reminder to love my neighbor as I wish to love myself.

Having acknowledged the pleasures I have derived, however, I have to say that if you’re looking on Facebook for the kind of live exchange that increases your understanding of humankind, the nature of God, and God’s relationship to humankind, you’re going to be disappointed. That sort of exchange is just not what most people go on FB for, and I doubt that it was ever designed for that sort of deep, “meaningful” exchange anyway.

Not that I don't keep trying. I’m always posting something provocative or “serious” and I’ll get—maybe—a few “likes” and—maybe—a brief comment or two. Frustrating. Or, sometimes, I'll post a link to my latest blog entry—now there’s an exercise in humility. My blog posts, most (not all) of which I really labor over and, I think, are at least worth reading, are just flatly and not-quite tee totally ignored. (I have a blog follower—I don’t know who and I don’t want to know—and not even my follower reads me!. Why go to the trouble of signing up as a follower if you’re not going to follow?) I don’t know if it’s me (in darker moments, I just know that people aren’t interested in what I have to say because they loathe me) or if people get home after work and just want to relax and not have their brains overly engaged or if it’s something else. I’ll never know, because there’s no way I could ever approach someone and say, “Hey! Why don’t you read my blog?”

Today, however, I enjoyed an interesting exchange. The Progressive Christian Alliance (one of the groups I “like”) posted the following: “God is our comforter, redeemer, husband, mother, fortress, father, provider, shepherd, and teacher. When you think of God, what do you see?” The responses ran from “sta-puf marshmallow man” to “Hands holding me safely, keeping me warm, guiding me, no matter what happens. I just have to be aware of the presence.”

So, after 490 words (by Microsoft Word count), I reach the real subject of my blog entry. I have been reading a lot about the emerging church movement, especially Peter Rollins, lately, and I’ve been struck by Christian Wiman’s book, My Bright Abyss, as well. Their ideas about God coincide, to agree, with some things I’ve read by Thomas Merton. I’ve learned enough to show how ignorant I am, but I think I’ve picked up a few gems along the way.

My response to the question was this (not an exact quotation): God is incomprehensible, beyond language and ideologies (doctrines). It is counterproductive to try to distill him into one image, or a set of images, or into even a set of beliefs. Images and ideologies are boxes, and, no matter how beautiful a box or it’s contents may be, God doesn’t exist in boxes. Ideologies exist in boxes. And when we create an ideology about God or an image of God we begin to worship the ideology or the image—not the God who transcends ideologies and images. In other words, we are worshipping the golden calf; we are committing the sin of idolatry. I think the closest we can come to describing God with language is to admit that he is indescribable, but also he is there.

Someone responded to me by saying (again, not an exact quotation): “And yet, ideas and words are the only way we have of communicating ideas about God.”

How utterly wrong that statement is! I minored in Interpersonal Communication (in the Speech & Drama Department) as an undergraduate, so I’ve had some exposure to this: there are far more ways—and better, more reliable ways—to communicate about God than by the mere use of language. (There was some saint—St. Francis?—who once said, “Preach the Gospel continuously. [Only] if necessary, use words.”) Nonverbal communication conveys vastly more information about matters of the heart and spirit than words ever can. Matters of the heart and spirit—and god is, if nothing else, surely a matter of the heart and spirit—are simply not subject to quantitative analysis or “reasonable” deconstruction (I have no idea whether I’m using that word correctly). The facts of God and Christ—and I believe they are facts—are not the sort of facts that are subject to analysis and proof by the scientific method (which, by the way, is why those poor spiritually crippled rationalists who cannot conceive of a world outside their senses become atheists). Too, neither God nor Christ can be defined in words, no matter how polished, reasoned, or eloquent, though some of the best minds in history have tried.

So, I know nothing about God save that I can never know him, and I celebrate that uncertainty as part of my faith. But I can say this: the simple act of sitting quietly in the dark with a friend who is in pain, just holding their hand, conveys more about God’s nature and presence with us than all the volumes written by Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, or Rudolph Bultmann.