Searching for God # 94

 But there is also something the spiritual life teaches, again and again, in ways both gentle and severe. (The Emptiness that Heals, by Rev. Allison Burns-Lagreca, on Substack, Thoughts, Prayers Art,  March 18, 2026)

Reverend Burns-Lagreca, in this piece is reflecting on her unexplained loss of ten years of digital writing, memories, prayers, significant days when reflections really matter, and, as she acknowledges, a part of herself is in that loss. Poof! Gone! Never to be recovered!

Sitting in the grief and loss, in emotional pain and confusion and self-doubt, there comes a moment of, ‘what might this be teaching me?’ Not as a short-cut to avoid the emotional angst, but as an inner voice evoking a thought-pause, an emotional modulation, into a new key without losing the anguish.

Individuals caught in such moments when whatever has happened has no perceptible cause, no explanation, and no access to recourse and recovery, we all know about this, feel small.

It is at such moments when Jurgen Moltmann’s notion of hope when there is no sign to suggest or to enable its being envisioned, as one of the cores of the Christian faith, somehow, for many, almost without evocation or prompting, speaks from deep inside. And while Reverend Burns-Lagreca has heard its soft whisper and paused to listen intently, many in the church do not, perhaps can not heard that still small voice.

Over the last few posts in this space, has heard from Robert Funk, organizer of the Jesus Seminar, William Blake and James Alison.

Funk deplored the habit of many Christian clergy of simply repeating the stereotypical, conventional stories from the life of Jesus, without examining much if anything of the more recent scholarly work that has uncovered new facts, new insights and new images from the ‘old wine in old wine skins that we are all fed in Sundary school.

Revisiting William Blake we discovered a slice of his somewhat unconventional, even provocative and arresting interpretation of The Fall, in which he notes the androgyny of God and of Adam and Eve, which then separated into masculinity and femininity, a separation which  has been dragged into the 21^st century in many Christian communities. Whether or not, over time, considerable time, we humans can or will ever return to a place where androgyny is not only acknowledged and tolerated, but perhaps even celebrated, remains an open question. Blake’s posing it so long ago illustrates both an imaginative and courageous faith of a sceptic and offers some potential new ‘soil’ for extenuated discourse in the next decades.

James Alison, for his part, was noted for his take on the death and Resurrection, a view hardly likely to find any of the pillars of Christian theology signing on as adopters or even ones who might give consideration to his incisive and imaginative theological insight. Suggesting that Jesus is potentially portrayed as a sacrificial victim of unjust human violence and death, both being integral aspects of human culture and society, and then posing the image of Jesus as model for all of us, in the cause of what Alison calls relationality. We have all endured unjust violence, and even perhaps some forms and faces of various deaths, as part of our lives as humans. And few of us were ever likely to have imagined the crucifixion and Resurrection from Alison’s perspective.

Funk, Blake, and Alison, only three among hundreds of Christian thinkers, men who have pondered, reflected and written their thoughts as expressions of the courage, and support of the love of God, each of whom conceived and bore that love and support in his own unique manner. And we are all the better for their speculation, searching and tentatively, yet assertively, stretching themselves and their readers.

And it is the stretching, the searching, the pondering, that is, all of it, contiguous with and dependent upon whatever moments of darkness, self-doubt, and even self-abnegation with which we are all familiar.

Divides, separations, alienations, losses, deaths, divorces, lost manuscripts, (yes, while that may seem inconsequential, for writers, it is not!), serious and life-threatening diagnoses, wars, fires, famines, droughts, severe poverty, homelessness, and many of those lesser losses, (some call them unconscious) racial and/or colonial, and/or sexual, and/or religious  put-downs. Many of them are so subtle as to pass unnoticed and certainly not mentioned in polite society.

The Christian faith is anything but a static, fossilized, set of museum-pieces of dogmatic moralizing and judging, self-righteous arrogance and the then militant imposition of that hubris on others as a way of ‘building the faith community.’ Nevertheless, it has, and continues to suffer from a kind of ‘sacralizing of the literal, historical, empirical’ repetition of the same parables  A good example: The Good Samaritan, as imitating of God, when, as the Jesus Seminar proposes, it is the Jew taken for dead in the ditch that better serves as the image of the Christ.

Who, in this century of gender politics and invective, would conceive of countenancing Blake’s view of God as androgynous and the concomitant imagining of both Adam and Eve also as androgynous, until the Fall? Occasionally, we will read about a ‘new kind of man’ in a novel, one who is scorned by the conventional male models as ‘effeminate’ and instantly dismissed, if not, in real time, actually taken to a broken fence, murdered and left there to die, as was Matthew Shepherd in Wyoming in 1998. A quarter of a century on, and we still have macho-male-stick-men attempting to govern the richest and most powerful nation on the planet….with their fingers on the nuclear buttons, not to mention alpha-male imitators of their kind in various other counties.

Over the next few weeks, as we approach Easter, some churches may actually fill up a little as compared with their meagre congregation sizes on regular Sundays. And they will be remembering their early Christian education and scattering Easter eggs for their children and perhaps even being invited to join in singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. It will be an emotionally uplifting moment, given the Resurrection from the dead as the bare-knuckles of the story has had it and told it in churches for centuries.

The dubiousness of the actual historical resurrection, however, will likely be either avoided or glanced by so that no parishioner complains, refuses to put his or her cheque in the plate and stamps out. The difference between history, and myth, too will likely suffer what in football we call an ‘end-run’….when, it is only in theological, mythical and spiritual connotations that these stories make far more sense (not rational sense, but imaginative, spiritual and outside of the time-space constrictions in which we all live).

I once encountered a group of very angry parishioners who gasped at my deliberate poke at their literal fixations, when I intimated God might be a ‘she’….And in another conversation, when I used the word myth to begin a conversation about  Genesis and both creation and the Fall, I was dubbed the anti-Christ, an apostate, and a heretic.

It will take eons  to shake the Christian establishment out of its ‘comfortable pew,’ an homage to Pierre Berton’s provocative book written in 1965.

Berton considered ‘the church as irrelevant to mainstream society.’ And to a large degree he was on to something very important. In the ensuing half-century-plus, there have been many worthy attempts to integrate the Christian theology with modern life, some more successful than others. One tragic and bereft trick was to think that by adding popular music in instrumentality and rhythm and volume, it would attract younger people.

Christian theology is not a brand to be marketed. It is not an ideology to be campaigned for through a regimen of popular advertising and political rhetoric. Nor is it a corporation whose ‘service’ exceeds all of the other religious ‘services’ of all the other faith sects and denominations and heritages. Nor is the Christian faith analogous to a bank, storing up treasure in investment portfolios so that future generations will not have to worry about heating or putting a new roof on the building.

God is not an object of thought, rationality, or scientific investigation. God exceeds, supercedes, and also remains unreachable, ineffable, and mysterious all of human attempts to ‘pin him/her/it’ down as on a pegboard in a science lad, as if he were an insect or an animal awaiting a biopsy.

Perhaps foreshadowing James Alison’s view of the Resurrection, Leonardo Boff, writing in Jesus Christ Liberator, in 1986, writes:

The kingdom (of God) entails a more radical liberation, one that gets beyond the breakdown of brotherhood and calls for the creation of new human beings….Jesus’ resurrection is intimately bound up with his life, death and proclamation of the kingdom. If the ‘kingdom of God’ is the semantic term connotating total liberation, if Jesus life weas a liberated and liberating life and if his death was his completely free offering up of that life then his resurrection realizes and fulfils his program in its eschatological form….As such the resurrection is simply the triumph of life and the explication of all its latent potentialities. It is the liberation of life from all its obstacles and conflicts in history. It is already an eschatological* reality; as such it reveals God’s ultimate intention for human beings and the world….In Jesus’ resurrection, light is shed on the anonymous death of all those who have lost out in history while fighting for the cause of justice and ultimate human meaningfulness. As one author suggests, ‘the question of resurrection is rightly posed from the standpoint of insurrection. The resurrection tells us that the murdered shall not triumph over his victim. (Boff, op. cit. p. 290-291)

Has the stone been, or is it being, rolled away from the tomb of each our lives? Whether we seek the serene or the severe,  in the resurrection, liberation is our’s from all the obstacles we and others put in our way. This Easter, let us shake off the binds of literal, empirical and open our minds and hearts to the eschatological* of which we are an intimate part.

*Eschatological-the study of last things, including death, judgement, the afterlife, and the final destiny of humanity, not reducible to the historic, the literal, and embraceable only in and through the imagination.