Wayside Pulpit

Endings

One of the many things I am drawn to in Zen is the focus on process rather than content. I can spend lots of time talking about content, about how this person drives me crazy or how my organic avocados always seem to be rotten inside. Yes, I can talk about these and many more pieces of content, instead of talking about the process of my irritation, or the process of my disappointment.

Yet, I wonder if process is as easy to make entertaining as content. How could the process of good and evil be as captivating as the content of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy? How can I tell you a story about a major event in my life without the content? Would you still be able to relate?

In early spring of last year I made a choice. I had many choices, but I choose one, because there was only one of me. The choice was for the next step, the next adventure, the next learning experience. The choice was hard. I cried about it. I prayed about it. I worried about it. However, I finally made it. It took fits and starts; choosing one thing and then choosing another. Finally the mental trappings of conditioning let me go enough to say, “Yes, this is what I choose.”

The choice led me down a path that, after four months, I realized was a path I did not want to travel. Yet, this realization did not come slowly, it came quickly, in the matter of just an hour.

See, I had been walking down a hall for months, watching the floor; my one foot in front of the other. Then it happened, my right shoe hit a wall, then the left. I looked up and all I could think was, “There shouldn’t be a wall here.” I stood there for almost a month, angry and confused about the wall. I railed against the surface that had stopped me. I asked experts about it. I cried about the wall. I prayed about the wall. I worried about the wall. Then one night, I realized that the wall didn’t matter. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It was just a wall. The question then moved from the wall directly to me and my two feet pressed against it. Do I stay or do I go? I left.

Currently, the marketing arm of the United Church of Christ relies heavily on Gracie Allen’s phrase of, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” Yet, there are the times when God places a period and the sentence is finished.

Anger of God

I recently received a book from a friend who also understands himself to be Christian. However, the structure of our faiths is so vastly different, I feel sometimes as if we belong to two distinctly different religions. The book he sent me, "After Darkness, Light: Essays in Honor of R.C. Sproul," edited by R.C. Sproul Jr., is a book that reviews and highlights some of the theological hallmarks of the Protestant Reformation.

The first essay called, "Total Depravity," is focused on the depraved nature of humankind and the wrath of God as a result of this nature. Sproul is quoted as saying, "Man is very, very bad and God is very, very mad." As far as poetic catchiness it has potential, but for its theological merit, I can only sigh in disagreement and fatigue. This image of a vengeful and angry God is harmful to a world that is desperately in need of a compassionate God.

I have also been reading, "Anger," by Thich Nhat Hanh. In it he says, "We nourish our anger . . . with what we consume with our eyes, ears, and consciousness." According to Hanh, the anger in movies, books, television, even the food we eat, causes us to embody anger more deeply. As a result we suffer more because our angry natures are strengthen and reinforced. In the case of God then, the theological idea of an angry God can only perpetuate our own anger toward ourselves and each other.

What kind of people can we become if our God is filled with anger? How can we learn to love each other, to work for peace, to bring compassionate awareness to our lives, if the ultimate divine model we have is filled with wrath? If we become the anger that surrounds us, then a God of wrath helps to make us wrathful people.

Projecting God

We are conditioned to look outside of ourselves for answers. We attend training sessions, buy self-help books, and listen to the news on the radio. We think that the answers to what we should be, how we should act and what is really happening in the world are outside of our knowing, outside of our expertise. So, we turn to experts; authors, psychologists, religious leaders, politicians and even our favorite bloggers, looking for answers to those things that we cannot explain by ourselves.

This conditioned response to look outward, makes it all the more difficult to grasp that God is within us, not outside (In fact, I'm not even sure if there is an inside/outside, but that is for another discussion). We don't need to go find God in a church, in nature, in music, in the bible, or in our favorite spiritual anthology. It isn't that God is NOT in these places, it is that we don't need to go anywhere then right where we are to find God.

If we find God in a church, it is because we are projecting our inherent Godness into the experience of church. If we find God climbing through wildflowers in the mountains, or dancing at our favorite club, it is because we have brought God with us. God is where we are, not because of the nature of God, but because we hold God in our centers.

Conditioning presses us outward to find God, but God calls from within. We give God a window, a door, a space to enter the world. This is our gift to God.

As the Stream Moves On

I know that God does not make things happen. I know that God does not lead me places or keep me from others. I know all these things. However, right now, as I face things not going as I had planned, I am angry at – yes – God.

I did so much to get “here” because I thought it was the direction that I was supposed to go. It wasn’t that God told me to do this, or do that – but I did believe that I was following some sort of divine plan; going the directions that would lead me to the place that would, I don’t know, be where I was supposed to be.

I realize all of this now and realize how absolutely framed I am by a theology that I do not believe in. How, even though I do not believe certain things, I still hold on, somewhere in my being, to outdated notions of God, faith and how the world operates.

Yet, right now I am angry that things are not panning out as I thought they would. I am angry that I have to take, yet again, another step back and figure out where I want my future to go.

As I write this I am so aware that I am not living in the present moment. As I write this I am aware that I think life will be tomorrow not now. As I write this and know all this, I still would rather be anywhere than here.

Roll Your Own God

Last night I was talking with a friend about a new job that he is starting. He was reflecting on the anxiety that goes along with starting any new endeavor and he said, "maybe I just need to make my God bigger to hold it all."

Can we make God bigger? I think so. The limits we have set on what God is or what God isn't can be rather humorous considering no one really knows what makes God. Who knows if there even IS a God, so how can anyone possibly say that a certain "image" of God is the correct one.

If you feel that you need a "God," I'm for the idea of creating your own God. However, there is a level of integrity that is required for this creation; the integrity of admitting that you do not have the only answer to the question of God's identity. This means that all of us who create our Gods can never forget that the identity of God is not really about God, rather it is more about ourselves.

One of the worse things about Christianity has been its claim on the identity and description of God. The Christian religion has put boundaries on this small three letter word. Churches, ministers and even political leaders continue to put God in a box and sell it just like saltine crackers.

I've borrowed certain images of God from other individuals, some consciously, some not. However, for the most part, I know that the only God that I can have faith in is the God that has come through me.

mindheart of god

Inside the mind of god
is what?
Why does god have to have a mind?
I mean really.
What has mind given us that heart can’t?

And then lev in Hebrew
heart and mind in one word,
or at least the grammarians say,
trying to capture dualism where,
really, there is none.
Just our Greco-Roman ghosts showing their
never ending power

And so it should be -
inside lev elohim or inside lev YHVH even just -
inside the mindheart of god.

Mindheart - a single word.
No dash.
No hyphen.
And definitely no hymen.
No thin membrane to be broken
again and again
by theologians
that really
would like god to be,
force god to be,
Either/Or
Virgin or Not
Spirit or Not
Mind or Not
Heart or Not.