Searching for God #20

 There is always a surprise when some reading seems so congruent with one’s unsubstantiated, and intuitive and deeply felt perceptions that it seems incroyable as the French say, unbelievable.

Such an experience emerged this morning, while reading Tolstoy’s ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’ and the following lines, on page 68, jumped into view:

To whatever degrees of understanding and perfection the follower of Christ may have attained, he always feels the insufficiency of his understanding and fulfilment of it, and is always striving toward a fuller understanding and fulfilment. And, therefore, to assert of one’s self or of any body of men that one is or they are in possession of perfect understanding and fulfilment of Christ’s word, is to renounce the very spirit of Christ’s teaching.

The mystery of any search for God is, like a gossamer cloud of both beauty and uncertainty, always drawing one back and back and back into the same inescapable, unending search. And the offering of platitudes of certainty, as if to ‘know’ the mind, requirements, and purpose and intent of God and to be determined to share that certainty, ‘because it has been so impactful in my life’ as the phrase often accompanies that ‘proselytizing, is only proof of its essentially having served to terminate the search for God of and by such a person.

Strange as it may seem, the churches as churches have always been and cannot but be, institutions not only alien in spirit to Christ’s teaching, but even directly antagonistic to it. With good reason Voltaire calls the Church l’infame: with good reason have all or almost all so-called sects of Christianity recognized the Church as the scarlet woman  foretold in the Apocalypse*; with good reason is the history of the Church the history of the greatest cruelties and horrors.

*In Revelation 17, is the whore of Babylon, a symbolic figure representing a corrupt, idolatrous system that opposed God, specifically Babylon the Great.

And also, a few pages later Tolstoy’s words:

If a man can be saved by the redemption, by sacraments, and by prayer, then he does not need good works.

The Sermon on the Mount or the Creed. One cannot believe in both. And Churchmen have chosen the latter. The Creed is taught and is read as a prayer in the churches, but the Sermon on the Mount is excluded even from the Gospel passages read in the churches, so that the congregation never hears it in the church, except on those days when the whole of the Gospel is read. Indeed it could not be otherwise. People who believe in a wicked and senseless God-who has cursed the human race and devoted his own Son to sacrifice, and a part of mankind to eternal torment—cannot believe in the God of love. The man who believes in a God, in a Christ coming again in glory to judge and to punish the quick and the dead, cannot believe in the Christ who bade us turn the left cheek, judge not, forgive those that wrong us, and love your enemies. The man who believes in the inspiration of the Old Testament and the sacred character of David, who commanded on his deathbed the murder of an old man who has cursed hum, and whom he could not kill himself because he was bound by an oath to him, and the similar atrocities of which the Old Testament is full, cannot believe in the holy love of God. The man who believes in the Church’s doctrine of the compatibility of warfare and capital punishment  with Christianity cannot believe in the brotherhood of all men.

And what is most important of all-the man who believes in salvation through faith in the redemption or the sacraments, cannot devote all his power to realizing Christ’s moral teaching in his life. (p.75-6)

Attempting to say what Christianity is not, is very different from posing as the ‘authority’ on the matter. And while the clarifications Tolstoy offers, serve as a kind of light in a darkened path, resisting evil by force, is not exactly a formula easily discerned and applied in one’s life.

What constitutes evil? Is a question to which Tolstoy and many others have dedicated much of their lives to trying to answer. From the perspective of this scribe, everyone is thereby enjoined to discern what is, not only opposed to or blocking “life” as the field education supervisor in theological school put it, but even to discern what is opposed to or blocking the God of love from breaking into our existence.

From marxists.org in a piece entitled Thoughts on God,, transcription/Markup by Andy Carloff, Note to the Second Edition, we read Tolstoy’s words:

God is for me that after which I strive-that, in striving after which consists my life, and who therefore for me is: but is necessarily such that I cannot comprehend of name Him. If I understood Him, I should have reached Him, and there would be nothing to strive after; there would be no life. But, and this seems a contradiction, though I cannot understand nor name Him, yet at the same time I know Him and the direction towards Him, and even of all my knowledge this is the most certain.

From a lay perspective, it would seem that, based on Tolstoy’s ‘resisting evil by force,’ upon the recognition and discernment of evil, not only those obvious hot-button issues such as war and capital punishment, one discerns the intent, or the hidden methods of those determined to abuse power, and then discerns clearly, the potentials of the various ways to bring ‘force’ to bear against that evil, one is beginning to approach in a vigorous, nuanced, even creative and muscular manner the depth and the range of that evil.

Today, in a period of the bandying about of various ideologies, as if they were either or both God’s will or the purpose of a person’s life or even the purpose of a state or nation, it can be quite challenging to discern the ‘wheat from the chaff’. God is not amenable to a political philosophy; God is not amenable to a historical theory, for example the Divine Right of Kings. God is not amenable to a marketing strategy that declares, for example, “Death is caused by our sins” that blares on an urban billboard on an office building in a modern urban city. God is not amenable to the appropriation as sanctification of a war, as, for example, the war in Ukraine endorsed and supported by the Russian Orthodox Church and its hierarchy. God is not amenable or able to be contained in the declared intent of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives ‘to bring about the Kingdom of God in America now’. God is not amenable to profound and largesse amounts of philanthropy for any of the highly relevant, useful and absolutely necessary programs to prevent or to forestall starvation in Gaza, or to prevent or sustain civil war in Sudan.

And then, we get to those intensely radioactive issues like, ‘The Ten Commandments’ posted on the walls of Oklahoma public school rooms, as if for the government of that state to declare, ‘we know we are doing God’s will’ God is not either amenable nor containable in such a public show of religiosity.

And it is the public show of religiosity to which  Tolstoy is so vehemently opposed. There is an inescapable element of hubris, self-righteousness, pride and self-promotion in many of the acts of altruism, philanthropy, and the writing of cheques for various causes. It is not that those causes per se are evil. Indeed, given the kind of destitution in which millions are expected to attempt to survive, no one can deny their necessity, nor the generosity of the donors who help them to survive and to their work.

And yet, God is not amenable even to such high ideals…..the question of ‘resisting evil by force,’ what Tolstoy considers the core injunction of the Sermon on the Mount, stretches beyond doing ‘good’…..and we have been reminded of this ‘resistance’ theme by others like Martin Luther King Jr….

From Amsterdam News, in a piece entitled, When Dr.King broke his betrayal of silence, by Herb Boyd, January 10, 2024, we read:

‘When machines and computers profit motives and property right,s are considered more important that people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.’ …These words belong unmistakably to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The words were part of a speech he delivered on April 4, 1976, a year to the day before his assassination….It was a speech that, although loudly applauded by the audience that day at Riverside Church in Harlem brought a wave of condemnation from proponents of the mainstream media, and even several of King’s fellow clergy, which was no surprise because many of them had chastised him at the beginning of his ministry of peace and justice…..

And also, from the same piece:

‘The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit., he said, ‘and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy and laymen concerned committees for the next generation.’

It may not be considered rocket science, by some, to discern what amounts to ‘evil’ in a culture; for many who are sentient, and intuitive and engaged, it seems it might even be obvious. What is not so simply and easily discerned or proferred is the commitment to commit to speaking out publicly, without fear or also without sugar-coating the truth, knowing that the establishment will engage in retribution, and that word has more recently become a litmus-test applied to himself for the current occupant of the Oval Office…. ‘I am your retribution!’

No matter how many seminars and lectures, law suits and public debates, and even laws and constitutions declare that the state and the church as separate, there is still the overriding fact that men and women populate and comprise both the church and the state, and their lives intersect both ‘entities.’ And while freedom from and freedom for religion is an important aspect of the concept of separation, the words, and the perceptions and attitudes of people know no boundaries.

Another intuitively grasped, as well as historically and almost genetically grounded, is the notion that every single one of us ‘knows’ within if and when we witness or even ‘sense’ evil in our midst. Dogs too, flag persons they do not trust. So do we and whether that flagging proves literally true, or merely reinforcement of our inherent radar for ‘sensing’ and perceiving and feeling evil (choose the word you prefer), the question upon our realization is ‘what do we do about it.’

Since 9/11, we have heard the chant, ‘If you see something, say something!’ and yet, while many do, many do not. Evil is not contained exclusively in violent acts, robberies, rapes, murders, and wars, although these are among the most sensational. Tax frauds, corporations that lie and deceive their clients, and governments that envelop themselves in layers of lies, out from which entanglement they are loath to emerge, because for the most part they have come to believe their own press reports of their own lies and deceptions and propaganda.

Resisting evil by force, in a world in which evil men and evil deeds, both of commission and omission proliferate the world’s cultural, political and environmental and military theatres, the theatres in which we all live and breathe, and drink our water and grow, harvest, cook and consume our food has come to be a monumental, even dangerous disturbed mountain of hot lava, about to explode in our faces…We all know that. There is not  sentient human who can or will deny it.

And, it is almost as if the size and the scope and the ubiquity of the evil is so overwhelming in scope, size, range and ensnaring for the whole world population, that, even to speak out as a individual seems to be a mere whisper when compared with the decibels of propaganda and lies to which we are being fed.

Hierarchies, whether they are governmental, ecclesial, academic, corporate or military, medical, legal, or scientific converge into a kind of cultural ‘bolus’ of attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and conventionalities, in which we all both swim and paradoxically drown.

The drowning in this case, may not be literal, but metaphoric, in that what we know in the intimacy and privacy and secrecy of our hearts and minds, even though it may correspond and echo the same thoughts and feelings around the world, remains ‘behind our choice, in effect, to hold our breath, and stop our larynx, for fear of ‘retribution.’

It is that retribution itself, that is the evil facing every one of us. Can and will we agree and begin to start breathing and rehearsing our voices in  forceful protest?