Searching for God # 42

Moltmann's theology of hope, in the face of no favourable evidence, as well as Hillman's nudge away from an exclusive literal, empirical appreception of the universe and Tolstoy's reading of the "Sermon" and dedicating the whole of humanity to that inherent vision, taken together, could not be more timely in their application than contemporarily.

The imagination lies ready, eager and able to be 'recruited, resurrected and re-applied' for all to reclaim. (From the last post)

I would like to recount a vignette from the early nineties, in central Ontario, where I had been assigned first as vicar and later as priest. It was a small village and the parish had been served previously by an evangelical, fundamentalist cleric who had encountered some conflict prior to his departure. That cleric had nurtured a small group of folk who subscribed to his literal interpretation of scripture, and were engaged in presenting the David C. Cook curriculum out of Waco Texas to children in the church school. I have mentioned this aspect previously; the curriculum directed instructors on what vocabulary to deploy when speaking with 5-and 6-year-olds who were ‘saved’ and a different vocabulary for those of the same age who ‘were not saved’. The moment I learned of this heinous division, I requested a different curriculum, what turned out to be ‘The Whole People of God’ designed in part by a former Toronto female cleric of my acquaintance. ‘Salvation’ had meant nothing to me at twelve, what could it possibly mean to a 5-or-6-year-old?

Soon after my arrival, almost unconsciously, I blurted out that the story in Genesis of the Garden of Eden was a myth. I understood myth as a word that described, not a lie, as the conventional secular culture deems it to mean, but rather a story, larger than history that has significance because it is often repeated. My understanding came from a literary perspective, specifically myths written and orally transmitted by the Greeks to help them explain processes they observed for which they lacked understanding. The Oxford Languages website says this about myth:

A traditional story especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.

Instantly, and publicly, I was branded a heretic, and some even went so far as to label me the ‘antichrist’! If that sound beyond belief, it is a true story. I was both shocked and somewhat bemused. “How could I say such a horrible thing, when everyone knows that the Garden of Eden story is an important part of the holy word of God, and therefore is truth, absolute truth?” was one of the pathways through which I learned of my ‘theological blunder.’ The stated and whispered implication was that some were incredulous that such a statement could come from one who was assigned to their church as a clergy. Shortly after this incident, some plotted to show a video prepared under the auspices of the Dobson group, Focus on the Family. James Clayton Dobson was an American evangelical Christian author. I first learned of the plan when a lay reader who was about to read the announcements, whispered in my ear that this was planned. Although I did not know the source or the content of the video, I had my suspicions, and abruptly vetoed the announcement. As this was a three-point parish, and the announcement was to have been made in the first of the three Sunday services, I wondered what I would meet in the second of the three services.

Sure enough, the Warden rose, during the announcements, to inform the congregation that he was planning to show a video on Tuesday evening of the upcoming week. I had no opportunity to veto his announcement, until, immediately following the service, I met the then Warden in the sanctuary and informed him that until I had viewed the video and determined whether or not I was in agreement  that it be shown, it was not going to be shown.

His comment to the congregation, as justification for the proposal was ‘to demonstrate how the homilies of this man are heretical’….I had barely been ordained deacon in this obviously fractured parish, whose full history was never shared with me prior to my assignment. Needless to say, the video was not shown, and within the week, I asked for and received the resignation of the Warden.

However, the story does end there. The divide between born-again and some other kind of Christian lingered, very close to the surface of all conversations. Some were pleased that the literal, evangelical, fundamentalist regime was receding, if not being replaced. As the labelled ‘anti-Christ’ I nevertheless never regained a footing of either confidence or calm.

Was it brash and bullying of me to exert such pressure on those who were determined to derail my first assignment? In reflection, some thirty years on, I sometimes wonder if I might have shown more diplomacy, tact and political acumen. Nervous, anxious to establish myself in such a parish, and somewhat arbitrarily resistant to the whole evangelical, fundamental movement, from my childhood, as I have continued to be for decades, I was highly skeptical of the motives and methods of my adversaries, all of whom had been members for decades, and considered themselves ‘in charge’ of the affairs of that parish. I was an uninvited, unwelcome and pirated interloper, just out of theology school, and as I learned not much later that our paths, the parish’s and mine, were going to go our separate ways, in part because of my intransigence, and in part because of the incompatibility of the predominant theology of the parish and my own.

Analogously to the Democrat-Republican difference in perception and methods, the Democrats are generally less combative, and less strident in their opinions than the Republicans. In this case, compare the clergy with the Democrats and the power structure to the Republicans. And, like oil and water, there is little likelihood of a compatible blend.

Another personal anecdote, shortly after  the death of my father, when I learned that my father did not ‘hit it off’ with his father-in-law, my mother’s father. After spending a morning in a coffee shop reading a piece of research done by American scholars on the difference in thought processes between ‘conservatives and ‘liberals,’ I wondered out loud, while preparing brunch from my recently widowed mother, if this research might shed light on the tension between the two men in her life. I knew rather confidently that my father would call himself a ‘small-l’ liberal, and I suspected that my long deceased grandfather would have considered himself a small and a large ‘C’ Conservative.

Erupting, I now discern partly in grief and partly in release of repression, my mother blurted, “The only reason your father and my father did not get along was that your father was ‘no good’!” Shocked and surprised, I noted that it would be difficult to continue the discussion, following that remark….which prompted another outburst, “Shut up!” to which I objected, now on both scores, that my father was ‘no good’ and that at 54 I was being told to ‘shut up.’ After I threw the frying pan with semi-cooked eggs into the kitchen sink, protesting both issues, I heard, ‘Pack your things and get out of this house immediately!” I did, sadly, although the break had been decades in the making.

How and why do these anecdotes merge in this page, today, when I intend to explore the relevance of the imagination in my search for God?

It is the adamant, absolute convictions of some, from my experience mostly of political and religious ‘conservatives’ that has shaped my thinking and indeed, many of the conflicts in which I have been engaged throughout my life.

My imagination refuses to acquiesce when a clergy confines God to a box of rules including, ‘if you are a Roman Catholic you are going to Hell; if you wear makeup or go to dances, or the movies, or prepare meals on Sunday, you are going to Hell!’ that was at sixteen, when I refused to attend that church with that clergy.

And those memories, those encounters with the absolutes and the absolute convictions of the literal words of scripture as well as the moral codes that have been birthed from various period of Christian church history and debate.  Absolutism, as defined by colllinsdictionary.com, is:

A political system in which a monarch or dictator has unrestricted power, the triumphal reassertion of royal absolutism.

Of course, reading the bible literally as an historic account of empirical events, is not absolutism. Believing in the accuracy and inerrancy of the literal truth contained in these stories, whether from the Old or New Testament, is however, to deny both the degree of knowledge we have about who and when the Old Testament was committed to papyrus, and then translated multiple times, as was the New Testament a product of more than a single writing or a single translation. Church history, as well as biblical history, not to mention the various genres of writing, psalms, poems, battle and lineage accounts, visions, and decades-later repeated stories about the birth, ministry, crucifixion and Resurrection of one Jesus of Nazareth have all been enwrapped in holy writ, as much a political and historical document as a theological blueprint.

This is not intended as a screed against those who see ‘absolute truth’ in every word in the Bible. It is merely to say that such a view is anathema to everything I think, conceptualize, visualize and imagine about God. Indeed, so far outside my ‘capacity to know’ are the literal details of much of scripture, that, for continuing to search, I need and perhaps have conceived some kind of implicit alliance of God with my questioning and imagining mind….indeed questions about God are more important to me that ‘hard facts’ about God’s life, purpose, meaning and relevance to my life.

I have had to assuage young boys and girls about to take part in their confirmation ceremony, after answering various questions from their bishop. And finally I had to assure one young twelve-year-old, ‘I really don’t believe the bishop is driving four hours to conduct this celebration of your Confirmation in order to reject your name and application!’ Her response, a high sigh, with the words, “Oh that feels much better!”

The absolutism of conviction that ‘his homilies are heretical’ and ‘your father was no good’ perhaps have taken root in the manner by which the decalogue has been considered to be absolute. Ten Commandments, the standard to which all must aspire? or attain?  or be judged by?

And it is not only the Decalogue that helps establish such authority. The church, too, has adopted multiple ‘absolute’ dictums from scripture that, for example, prohibit abortion, prohibit female ordination, prohibit divorce among Roman Catholics, and without annulment renders a remarriage as adultery and prevents remarriage within the church. The whole abrogation of human sexuality under the umbrella and the rule of the church would be considered appalling to many, if they were to become familiar with the origins of that doctrine with Augustine. Indeed, for any church to consider it either has or needs to rule on the sexual relationships between humans seems, on its face, to be a self-sabotaging theological proposition.

While there are many theories about the basis of ethics, Lionel Tiger, the American anthropologist posits a biological basis. In his penetrating and challenging work, The Manufacture of Evil, (1987), he writes the following:

It is possible we have been systematically misled about our morality from the beginning. Why should God have interfered with Eden as he did, evidently for the dual offenses of sexual awareness…and empirical skepticism, that forbidden fruit? And why blame poor Adam, whom after all God made? And why was what happened in Eden the ‘Fall’? And why were Adam and Eve so harshly and disproportionately ridiculed for their sexual frisson? Were not those perplexingly pleasurable nerve endings in their genitalia there for a purpose? Was orgasm an accidental spasm, which happened to be so mightily pleasing that (later on when churches got going) its occurrence or not could be held up as a measure of obedience to God?

This is mad. No wonder practitioners of the morality trades have so enthusiastically separated man from animal, culture from nature, devotion from innocence. If morality is natural, then you don’t need priests as much as you’re likely to enjoy being informed by scientists. If morality is a biological phenomenon, then it is merely insulting to harass mankind for its current condition because of an historic Fall in the past and a putative Heaven in the future. When spirituality became a special flavor and ceased being fun, when mystical congregation and speculation became instead   a matter of bare knees on cold stone and varying renunciations: when involvement with the seasons and the other subtle rhythms of nature became formalized into arbitrary rituals governed by functionaries, then the classical impulse for moral affiliation became translated into something else: into a calculation of ethical profit and loss supervised by an accountant Church and a demanding God. A new tax was born. The Tithe. Ten percent for the first agents. (Tiger, op. cit. p. 32-33)

Talk about absolutism!....it never seems to end!

To be continued……..