Hello, Again

It's been awhile since my last entry, and there have been way too many earthquakes going on-- literally and metaphorically. Haiti, Japan, Chile, and Taiwan experienced great shifts of techtonic plates that left them shaken, dazed, and confused. The tremendous loss of life saddens me profoundly. If I had my way, these things would not happen at all. But life demonstrates over and over that my will is secondary at best. Probably less. No, definitely and infinitely less!

This point serves as the segue into what's been happening in my heart and mind-- great shifts of soul that has rearranged the deck chairs of my understandings of God, theology, Jesus, the Bible, etc. It all stems from growing increasingly weary of being a religious "believer". By that word, I mean being someone who subscribes to certain patterns of religious thought without any empirical evidence upon which to base it all. I want to have faith-- faith that is beyond belief and soars into the realm of deep trust. A faith that is beyond intellectualism and emotionalism, but at the same time embraces both of those.

The very fact that I don't get my way most of the time (and I suspect you don't either), and confronted by the vagaries of life on a daily basis (and I suspect you are also) leads me to believe (or know) that there's something else going on in the dynamics of life that surpasses knowledge. For example: The Sun, Earth's source of heat and light, doesn't get it's way either. It burns 4 million tons of itself every second so that life on Earth can continue. I'm quite positive that, if the Sun could talk, it would tell us that it's just way too hot around here. Of course, I could be completely wrong. Maybe it's the Sun's nature to fuse hydrogen into helium and it's just enjoying its time being the Sun, biding it's time until it burns itself out and goes supernova. Either way, it's making a big sacrifice for us Earthlings.

Maybe it's just my nature to not always have my way, but I doubt it. I fight it every step of the way and it comes out as anxiety, headaches, IBS (Google it), depression, listlessness, fatigue, and other anomalies that only serve to compound the problem. It would most likely serve me best to surrender to "the way of it all", whether I like it or not.

So, what's God doing through all of this? Perhaps God is "the way of it all" (or "the WAY of it all") that drags me down to the depths and occasionally lifts me up to the heights, and in between times coasts me along through life on autopilot. If that's the case, then the One we call God may not be personal as we understand that word. God could be way beyond personal, or transpersonal. Many of our images of God, in my estimation, are silly and trivial (The Bearded Grandfather in the Sky, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Giant Amorphous Blob).

In the first two chapters of the book of Genesis we are given very different pictures of God. Genesis 1 portrays God calling all things into existence by speaking from a distance and proclaiming all things to be "good" and "very good". In Genesis 2, God is portrayed creating man and woman, getting His hands dirty. A distant God and a God very near, so near as to be shaping the very fabric of life.

Modern evolutionary science is giving us a very different picture (or is it?). Rather than rehash the old and tired "Creation vs. Evolution" brouhaha, perhaps we people of faith ought to give evolutionists a fair shake and not be so apoplectic when a discovery seems to contradict the Scriptural record. It might be an awakening exercise for us religious people to review how the Church reacted to the findings of Copernicus and Galileo. For the record, and speaking for myself, I find evolutionary discoveries to be intriguing and in many cases even poetic. There is much yet to be discovered, but quite a treasure trove that has been discovered.

And this is where my upset occurs: I sense a beckoning call beyond trivial and literalistic interpretations of Genesis. It seems to me something much more profound is going on in the opening chapters of Genesis than merely, "See?! It says six days!" Is that all we get from our readings of this? Talking to many literalists, it sure looks that way. Many pastors teaching adult instruction courses use this chapter of Genesis to talk exclusively about instant and miraculous creation. Arguments ensue, and the adult instruction class becomes a cauldron of heated discussion and positioning.

At the same time, I'm pulled in another direction: I don't want to "upset the applecart", as it were. I don't want to cut against the grain of my upbringing in Lutheran schools and training as a pastor. I'm afraid of being misunderstood by peers who hear me saying something that I'm not saying. I'm scared to death of one day being brought in front of some theological tribunal and stripped of ministry. Which begs the question, "What kind of atmosphere have we created for serious theological inquiry?"

More later.