It struck me recently that, in my anxiety about whether or not I
believe, I'm not exactly clear what I'm trying to believe in.
There are a lot of ideas of God in circulation, maybe always, but
especially now. A friend of mine who is an atheist carries around a
very particular image of the God he doesn't believe in, one he claims
is dominant in our society: it has never occurred to me to believe in
that “God”, either. But when I actually read the Gospels, it
occurs to me that my idea of God, and Christ in particular, may be so
limited that for all intents and purposes it is no more meaningful
than my friend's.
Here are some things I'm pretty sure Christ wasn't: a model
for how we should live, a solution for everyone's problems, a
get-out-of-jail-free card with respect to the law. What He was – is
– and what He's offering is harder for me to work out. He said
Follow me and Believe in me, but: follow Him where, and believe what?
That He's real, that He's God? That the resurrection really happened?
Is deciding that those things are true going to transform my life?
Because I grew up believing that, and judging from the parched nature
of my life much of the time, the water Jesus is talking about must be
something different from what I grew up drinking.
However: in college and grad school, I wrote papers on the nature
of poetry: how poems gesture towards something other than what they
are saying. Lately, I've been thinking that the Gospel works the same way. The words we have at our disposal can only set the stage for the Word
that they are trying to talk about; they can't contain it. Reading
them doesn't so much tell you what God is as it provides a starting
point, a place from which you can begin the work of opening yourself
to ghost in its particular machine.
I think this is why people who have no real interest in God or
Christ can read the Bible and not feel anything powerful in it, can
get caught up in the ways in which it doesn't function well as
history (it doesn't) and doesn't really answer a lot of legitimate
questions about God (nope). Like prayer or church or the 12 steps,
the Bible can bring you closer to God, to the Gospel, but it's not a
substitute for experiencing Him/It. Jesus deals in absolutes for a
reason. Engaging the divine isn't easy, a thing you accumulate along
with your career, hobbies, friends. It's meant to consume you, to
take over, to permeate every other area of your identity and life.
This terrifies me because it seems to indicate a conflict between
my relationship with God and the other relationships I have -- with
my husband, my parents, my son. I don't want my faith to
supersede my love for other people, and it seems like the natural
conclusion of what Christ is saying here is that it must.
But that same atheist friend is also polyamorous, and in his
experience, loving more than one woman actually enriches his other
relationships. While I work hard to not have an opinion on
polyamory, I am willing to shamelessly employ it here as a paradigm. It seems
reasonable that a love for God would enrich my love for people rather
than supplanting it, that by loving God more, I access a source of
love that runs over into other parts of my life -- so that instead of
grasping at the people who matter to me and finding I've somehow
missed out on what is most essential about them, I can love them
without being afraid to lose them or mixing up what I love in
them with what I want from them. I can recognize that they are
like God in the sense that I can't contain or limit or define them; I
can only hope to approach them, to come close enough to know them,
rather than my ideas
about them.
No comments:
Post a Comment