CONCEIVING OF GOD – METAPHOR AND REALITY

Our generation struggles with believing in God, not that this, as Reginald Bibby states, puts God in trouble. God isn’t in trouble because people stop believing or going to church.

Today God is not so much denied as ignored, though there are growing numbers of people who now profess that they no longer believe in God. Those numbers however (to quote Bibby again) aren’t nearly as high as is commonly supposed. Atheism is still relatively rare and, as Michael Buckley says, is not a problem, but “a situation, an atmosphere, a confused history.”

Of more concern, I believe, are the ways we try to think of God. On the one hand, we see a creeping fundamentalism, where our concepts and language about God are being taken ever more literally. The bible is taken as a history book and the language surrounding God is taken at face value. On the other hand, we see a tendency to take the symbolic character of religious language to its extreme, namely, to a place where it excludes all claims to historicity and ontology (as having any reference to anything that actually exists in the real world). God then becomes just a symbol, a myth, not real in the normal sense.

Both of these views are gaining in popularity. Fundamentalism is appealing more and more to those who are tired of a relativism wherein everything can mean anything, and the reduction of God to a symbol (without truth claims) is attracting more and more people who, rightly, have grasped that the human mind and imagination cannot wrap themselves around the idea of God in a literal way. So what’s to be said about this?

Perhaps a quote from Karl Rahner can set the stage: “We are just discovering today that one cannot picture God to oneself in an image that has been carved out of the wood of the world. … this experience is not the genesis of atheism, but the discovery that the world is not God.”

What’s contained in this caption?

First, that God is ineffable. God cannot be captured in any picture inside the imagination or concept within the mind and all our language about God is, by definition, necessarily metaphor, analogy, and is more inaccurate than accurate. God cannot be thought-of or spoken-about in the way we think about and speak about anything else.

Consequently, we must be wary of taking religious language too literally. When we turn analogy into univocity (metaphor into physics) we set ourselves up for the impossible task of trying to conceptualize the infinite within finite categories. That leads to atheism because when we try to literally picture God and imagine God’s existence, the imagination runs dry and we easily conclude that, because God is unthinkable, God doesn’t exist. But that isn’t a necessary equation, knowing and thinking aren’t the same thing. We know infinitely more than we can think.

However with that being said, at least for Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, no matter the language, God is more than simply an impersonal force, the deepest principle of life, the intelligent DNA inside of evolution, directing things. God is that, but more. While God is not a person who can be thought of in the way we think of ourselves and other persons, God is a person in that at some deep place there is a divine mind, heart, and personality that’s meant to be personally related to and is meant to be the object of worship, love, affection, and appeal.

God is both symbol and reality and symbol here isn’t just Harry Potter fantasy, nor, at least inside the great religions of the world, just a rich expression of the deep archetypal structure of things.

In his autobiographical writings, Nikos Kazantsakis makes an interesting confession. Late on in life, he came to believe that Christianity happened because Mary Magdala loved Jesus so deeply that, after his death, she refused to let him die inside of her heart and began to proclaim that he was alive. Her story grabbed hold in the hearts of others and the rest is history. Christianity arose out of that love – and that lie. When Kazantsakis wrote Zorba, the Greek, he was trying to do like Mary Magdala, give some immortality to Zorba because he loved him so deeply and thought him so exceptional. What happened?

Zorba, the Greek made for a good book and great movie, but we don’t measure time by Zorba’s birth. Kazantsakis’ wish to bestow a certain divinity and immortality on Zorba didn’t exactly take off and shape history in the way the resurrection of Jesus did. Why not? Because for a religious myth to have a long-term grip on history and on the hearts of hundreds of millions of people, more than just a symbol needs to be involved. The great religions of the world have their staying power because, at least at a few key times, a God who is very real, alive, and personal, manifested a real, physical, tangible presence within actual history.

Stanley Elkin once suggested that “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for an irritated person to enter the kingdom of heaven.” True enough.

An old German axiom submits that you can die of irritation and, I suspect, more than a few have succumbed. The rest of us cope, albeit with high blood pressure. Irritations beset us like mosquitoes at a picnic, unwanted little gnats, not significant in the big picture, but still capable of taking the joy out of the moment.

The same is true for marriage, family, friendship, church, and life in general. Irritations can so easily take the joy out of them. We can love and respect someone deeply, share the same values, be willing to die for him or her, and yet be constantly irritated by some minor quirk or habit that he or she exhibits – the way he habitually clears his throat, the way she’s always late for everything, his need to tell a joke at a party, how she eats her food too slowly, the fact that he snores, the way she does her hair, his incapacity to choose clothes that match, the particular octave of her giggle, his fancy for Country and Western music, her elitist disdain for hamburgers and fast foods, his tendency to leave dirty cups in the sink, the list goes on. None of these is really important, but, like mosquitoes, they can take the joy out of a picnic.

And, of course, there’s still “Murphy’s Law”, those endless irritations that arise from a mischievous aberration within the universe itself. These are not about quirks or bad habits, they’re all about bad timing: “Why is this slow driver in front of me just now when I’m late for an important appointment? Why did the hairdresser choose just this time, my high- school reunion, to make a mistake on my hair? Why did Bobby get the measles just when we’re about to set off on a hard-earned vacation?” There’s a malicious little gene within the DNA of the universe itself whose sole purpose, it would seem, is to try our patience and tolerance. “Murphy’s Law” isn’t responsible for the great tragedies in life, but it is responsible for a lot of language that shouldn’t be used in the presence of children.

Funny thing about irritations, they usually don’t reflect upon what’s important in life, character, values, love, or overall graciousness and meaning, but they make us lose perspective.

Thus, you can come down to breakfast on a given morning and, because someone has spilled milk on the floor and not mopped it up, you can be irritated enough to lose all gratitude for the fact that the sun is shining, you’re healthy and in the prime of life, are surrounded by people who love you, have meaningful work to look forward to, and are about to sit down to bacon and eggs. A little spilled milk and, instead of thanking God, you’re invoking God’s name in less gracious terms.

Similarly, you can walk into your bathroom and instead of being grateful for the marvels of modern plumbing you groan and swear inwardly because nobody has taken the thirty seconds required to put the toilet-tissue into the dispenser (“Am I the only person in this house who knows how to do this!”) Not exactly the stuff of mysticism, but then life has an earthiness that mystics must, at a point, confront.

What do we do with all those irritations?

Irma Bombeck once wrote her own version of the classic piece: If I had my Life to Live Over Again. In it, she talked about the many times, as a mother, she was irritated when her young children would disturb her, smear dirt on the walls, make a mess in the house, or smudge her clean dress with affectionate, but grimy, hands. If she had it to do over again, she writes, she would cherish those disturbances, ignore the dirt and mess, and kiss the child who’d just smudged her clean clothing because, all too soon, long before we’re ready, those loved ones move on, disappear from our lives, and we’re left with just memories, longing ones, of all those wonderful things that once irritated us.

Time and distance, all too soon, take away so much that’s precious and the day will come when we’ll look back with longing (and hopefully humour) to the days of spilled milk in the kitchen and of toilet-tissue dispensers that seemed forever to be empty and we’ll wonder why we couldn’t, then, seize the moment. And the time will come too, all too soon, when our loved ones are gone or we are preparing to leave, when it will be only with fondness that we remember how such a wonderful person once snored, cleared his throat too often, ate her food too slowly, couldn’t match his colours, loved Country and Western music, disdained hamburgers and fast foods, and, for too short a blessed time, shared life with us.

There are many reasons why our churches are greying and emptying. Conservatives attribute it to the intoxicating power of secularity, to a pampered culture that has lost its sense of self-sacrifice, to rampant individualism, to the sexual revolution, and to an adolescent grandiosity in the adult children of the Enlightenment. Liberals suggest other reasons: People are treating their churches the way they treat their families and, today, family life has broken down in Western culture, little wonder the church is struggling. They point too to what they see as a church out-of-step with the culture, a church too rigid, too patriarchal, too much perceived as anti-life, anti-erotic, too much consumed with its own agenda.

There’s some truth in all these assertions, but I’d like to suggest another reason: We’ve lost a romantic ideal for our faith and church lives. We’ve no idealistic fire left. We’ve subjected faith, religion, and church to a scorching exorcism and have not yet moved on, to restore to them again their angels, their proper light, their beauty. We need to re- romanticize faith, religion, and church and give people something beautiful with which to fall in love.

And to do this, we need more than good theology and good pastoral programs. Good theology stimulates and inflames the intellect. Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan would add that it also helps move the will. Love needs vision.

Thus, the Christian community is always in need of good academic theology. As history shows, every time the church has compromised on its intellectual tradition, seeing it as unimportant, it has paid a heavy price. Good, solid, academic theology is perennially the great corrective within church life and spirituality. Without it we lose balance.

Recently we’ve been blessed with an abundance of good theology. It’s hardly the academy of theology that is weak at the present time. The last thirty to forty years have produced (literally) libraries of wonderful books on scripture, church history, liturgy, dogmatics, moral theology, spirituality, and pastoral practice. We’re not lacking for solid ideas.

What we’re lacking is fire, romance, aesthetics, as these pertain to our faith and ecclesial lives. What needs to be inflamed today inside religion is its romantic imagination and this is not so much the job of the theologian as it is the job of the saint and the artist. We need great saints and great artists, ideally inside the same person.

We see this, for instance, in Francis of Assisi. Francis was not a great theologian by the standards of the academy of theology and it was not his insights as a theologian that so moved history and transformed Christianity. He does not have major cities named after him and more than 300 congregations of men and women trying to live out his charism because of the books he wrote. His greatness lay in his sanctity and in his art and in the particular way he brought those together. It was as a saint and artist that he was able to inflame the romantic imagination of the church and the world. When he took off his clothes and walked naked out of Assisi, he wasn’t preaching from a pulpit, lecturing from a university podium, or writing a book. He was making an aesthetic, saintly gesture, and that gesture, complete with the commitment he made afterwards to back it up, helped restructure the romantic imagination of Christianity and the world in general. Seven hundred years later, his gesture and his life still speak. Such is the power of great saints and great artists.

We see this too, though to a lesser extent, in the effect of great works of religious art. Take, for example, the painting of the last supper by Leonardo di Vinci: Nobody today cannot not picture the last supper as he painted it, even though scholars agree that Jesus and his disciples at table would not have looked anything like his imaginative depiction of it. But one great artist and one great painting can permanently brand itself into the imagination.

It is this, saints and gospel-art, that we most need to revitalize our faith and our churches today. Generally speaking, the theologians are doing their part and so too are diocesan and parish programs. But solid ideas and solid programs alone are not enough. They need to be backed by saints and artists in way that can re-inflame the romantic imagination. We need a new Francis, a new Clare, a new Augustine, a new John of the Cross, a new Therese of Lisieux.

Intellectuals and artists come at conversion from different sides: Bernard Lonergan, a great intellectual, used to say: “Conversion begins in the intellect”; Morris West, a great novelist, used to say: “All miracles begin with falling in love!” I doubt they ever met, but I’ve no doubt they would have respected each other because both are right. Without vision the heart doesn’t know where to go; but, without romantic fire it doesn’t want to go anywhere, least of all to church.

Lorenzo Rosebaugh, an Oblate colleague shot to death in Guatemala two years ago, used to share at Oblate gatherings some advice that Daniel Berrigan once gave him. Lorenzo, contemplating an act of civil disobedience to protest the Vietnam war, was told by Berrigan: If you can’t do this without becoming bitter, then don’t do it! Do it only if you can do it with a mellow heart! Do it only if you can be sure you won’t end up hating those who arrest you!

That’s hard to do; but, in the end, it’s the ultimate challenge, namely, to not hate those who oppose us, to not hate our enemies, to continue to have gracious and forgiving hearts in the face of misunderstanding, bitter opposition, jealousy, anger, hatred, positive mistreatment, and even the threat of death.

And to be a disciple of Jesus means that, at some point, we will be hated. We will make enemies. It happened to Jesus and he assured us that it will happen to us.

But he also left us the ultimate example of how we need to respond to our enemies. When scripture tells us that Jesus saved the people from their sins, it doesn’t just mean that in offering his death to his father as a sacrifice in one eternal act he took away our sins. It also points to his way of living and how, as he demonstrated, forgiving and loving one’s enemies take away sin, by absorbing it. Jesus’ great act of love, as Kierkegaard once said, is meant to be imitated not just admired.

But how do we do this? It seems that we don’t know how to love our enemies, that we don’t have the strength to forgive. We preach it as an ideal and naively believe that we are doing it. But, for the most part, we aren’t. We really don’t love and forgive those who oppose us. Too often we are distrustful, disrespectful, bitter, demonizing, and (metaphorically speaking) murderous towards each other. If there is much love and forgiveness of enemies in our lives, it’s far from evident, both in our world and in our churches. As Ronald Knox once said, as Christians, we have never really taken seriously Jesus’ challenge to love our enemies and to turn the other cheek.

I say this sympathetically.  We need help. The old saying is true: To err is human, to forgive is divine. So how do we start?

We might start by both acknowledging our failure and admitting our helplessness, individually and as churches. We aren’t very loving and forgiving in the face of opposition!  Next, we need to highlight this inadequacy and the importance of this failure in our preaching and teaching. Loving our enemies is the real moral and religious litmus test! We don’t have a right to call anyone a “cafeteria Christian” or a compromised follower of Christ unless, first of all, we, ourselves, are persons who are gracious, respectful, loving, and forgiving in the face of anyone who opposes us. Let’s start, all of us, from this humble place of admittance: We aren’t very much like Jesus in the face of opposition.

Then, perhaps most important of all, we need to seek each other’s help, akin to the dynamics of an Alcoholics’ Anonymous meeting. Alone we haven’t the strength to love those who hate us. We need grace and community, God’s power and others’ support, to retain the most difficult of all sobrieties, that is, to walk within a steady strength that enables us to  remain warm, gracious, forgiving, loving, and joyful in the face of misunderstanding, jealousy, opposition, bitterness, threat, and murder.

Speaking personally, I consider this to be the greatest challenge of my life, morally and humanly. How to love an enemy: How do I not let a jealous glance freeze my heart? How do I not let a bitter word ruin my day? How do I not demonize others when they oppose me? How do I remain sympathetic when I’m misunderstood? How do I remain warm in the face of bitterness? How do I not give in to paranoia when I feel threatened? How do I forgive someone who doesn’t want my forgiveness? How do stop myself from slamming the door of my heart in the face of coldness and rejection? How do I forgive others when my own heart is bitter in self-pity? How do I really love and forgive as Jesus did?

I often wonder how Jesus did it. How did he retain peace of mind, warmth in his heart, graciousness in his speech, joy in his life, resiliency in his efforts, the capacity to be grateful, and a sense of humor in the face of misunderstanding, jealousy, hatred, and death threats?

He did it by recognizing that this was, singularly, the most important challenge of his life and mission, and, under the weight of that imperative, by falling on his knees to ask for the help of the One who can do in us what we can’t do for ourselves.