Spirituality is...A Partnership of Miracles

    God: People ask me to do things - big things, little things - billions of times, every day.

    Joan: What do you expect? You're God!

    God: I put a lot of thought into the Universe; came up with the rules. It sets a bad example if I break them - not to mention, shows favoritism. Why should one person get a miracle, and not everybody else? Can you imagine the confusion? It's better when we all abide by the rules.

    Joan: No miracles?

    God: Miracles happen within the rules.

Joan of Arcadia "The Fire and The Wood"

Like most people in our world, I have been touched by  horror, sadness and fear as I watched Japan struggle with earthquake, tsunami, and a nuclear power crisis. I have also been touched by horror, sadness and fear as I listen to media commentators, television preachers and political pulpit-teers suggest this suffering was the punishment, and/or will of God.  It simply boggles my mind that churches will spend thousands of dollars and hours on programs to "bring people to God" - only to turn around and suggest that God created this terrible loss of life as some sort of "lesson" or "punishment" never realizing they just drove countless  people in opposite direction from God's love.

I have told more than one person when they’ve spouted off, “it is God’s will” to be careful when saying that around me. After a quizzical look comes my way I’ll add, “That statement gives me an allergic reaction.” Why? Two reasons:

First - It’s a write off, not a theological truth. We throw around God’s unknowable, indefinable will and we don’t have to think anymore.

“I don’t know why I didn’t get that job, it must have been God’s will that I do something else,” we say. Without ever bothering to admit we were entirely unprepared for the interview or lacked the necessary experience, we hang our coat on the “God’s will” rack and fail several more times. God’s will is that we learn, seek and change. What does God say through the prophet Jeremiah?

“You will seek me and you will find me, when you seek me with your whole heart.” (Jeremiah 29.13.)

God’s will is that we LOOK for an answer, not just fill in the blank check of mystical, deterministic desire and go about our business without investigation. Did you ever notice something about the car keys and wedding rings we credit God in helping us find? We were looking for them when they showed up! God’s will is not separate from us; God’s will involves us.

Second – taken at face value, the idea that “everything that happens is God’s will” is a very disturbing idea.

In the book A Good Friend for Bad Times: Helping Others Through Grief, author Deborah Bowen explicitly says, “Do not say to a child who has lost someone, “It was God’s will.” Regardless of what you as an adult believe about spirituality and death, such a statement will negatively shape a child’s view of God and spirituality.”

It isn’t just children who can get a negative understanding of God through the idea that everything that happens in our world is what God wants. A deity who wants families to lose their homes, planes to crash, or disease to devastate a loved one is not someone I want to worship, serve, or even spend much time hanging around. From the violence of child abuse to the hypocrisy of church leaders damaging faith to promote profit, it’s clear not everything that happens is the will of God.

I do believe that while not everything that happens is God’s will it is also true that God has a will – a desire - for everything that happens. God desires abused children to be rescued, and restored. God desires hungry people to be fed, hurting people to healed, lonely people to be held, and all manner of good to come to our world. God’s will for us is all around us. But in order to see it, we must seek it and we must pursue it. Just as Jesus spoke of kneeding a little yeast into the bread - we must work God's will into fabric of this world.

 We’ve looked at all the unsatisfying answers to our questions and disappointment. Now let’s ask the question again. If God is all-powerful, and has this overriding desire for life abundantly to come to us, then why doesn’t it? Is there an answer that will satisfy our hearts? I can’t say I have found “the” answer, but I have found a peace – a place to rest and ponder this question. That resting spot is the understanding of our divinely designed partnership with God.

Want to understand the design? Then study the designer. Want to understand the designer? Study the design.

God made a system, not a “stand alone” world. God created a universe with things like gravity (as one of my favorite bumper stickers says, “Obey gravity, it’s the law!”), systems and structures. God made life - all life - into a system and gave that system some mechanisms to secure it. Earthquakes happen because tectonic plates shift and the pressure must release or the earth will explode. Hurricanes happen because of hot water, wind and the earth’s rotation. It’s the natural consequence to a set of parameters. It’s not because someone is bad or good. It’s not because God loves or hates. It’s the way the design works.

 A good parent obeys the rules he/she sets forth for the child. So I don't think God messes with the design a whole lot. I am not suggesting that God is forced to obey gravity, but I do think God chooses to let the system work as it was designed, even when the outcome is sometimes great loss. When that happens, God's tears fall, and God's inspiration is seen in all who aid, help, sacrifice and struggle.

Death and loss in Japan, or Libya, or at your neighbor's house may not be God's desire. But bringing light, life, hope and healing to those places is definitely encapsulated within the heart of God. Instead of legitimatizing those phony baloney media hounds who are slinging blame and condemnation in the name of the God who made us, let us show God's true "will." Let us show charity, compassion, giving, hope, interaction, selflessness, and love. Most of all, love. That would be downright miraculous.

"The Architect" by Jared Cullum

Spirituality is...Challenging

Helen Mirren as HRH Queen Elizabeth II in "The Queen"

 (c) 2006, Miramax Films

Robin Janvrin:  Prime Minister, I understand how `difficult' her behavior must seem to  you..how `unhelpful'..but try to see  it from her perspective.. (searches for right words) She's been brought up to believe its God's will that she is who she is.

Tony Blair:   I think we should leave God out of it.  It's just not helpful.

There is a rise of atheism (or at least claimed atheism) in our country.  I encounter it on websites such as "Better than Faith" (an atheist site dedicated seemingly to making fun of the religious and their beliefs), on Reddit, which has an entire /subcategory for atheism, and in discussion with friends from work and the community.   The common thread all those folks seem to have is the same as Tony Blair's line from the movie "The Queen".  In dealing with difficult situations, they've chosen a life where they can simply "leave God out of it."

Let's face it. In the game of life sometimes it does seem like it would be easier to leave God on the sidelines, or in the stadium seats or kept in a playbook inside someone's locker that is only opened on Sunday mornings.  It would be easier if we didn't have to ask God such difficult questions like, "Why me? Why this? Why now?"   Its nicer to think its just all the laws of science and rules of the random universe than wrestle with a deity that created us and knows the pains and struggles we face.  It's much less effort to believe there isn't a God, than to try to understand in the darkness around us that there is one. 

It is always easier to claim there are no answers than to ask difficult questions.  But, it's also emptier, unchallenged, and disencarnated.  Spirituality involves embracing the challenge of asking about the hard stuff. 

Someone has to answer for suffering children. Someone has to be responsible for the tears of sorrow a betrayed woman cries into the night. Someone should reckon with the prayers of a man who needs a job, a hope, or a dream. Someone needs to explain Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and the Virginia Tech shooting.  Someone must respond.

You think that someone is God.

It’s highly possible that God thinks that someone is you.

Wait....What?   

How did this become a staring contest?  How did you just become responsible for the waking nightmares we on earth endure?  I mean, you aren’t responsible for having an answer for all that stuff, are you?

No.

And, yes.

Or, at least you’re responsible to seek it.

Where was God when all that was happening? God was with you.

God With Us – the Divine Partnership

It’s pretty clear from early on in the creation narrative that God is not interested in existing alone. God makes living things swiftly – trees, fish, plants, animals and finally people. With humans (certainly the most involved experiment) God shows a desire not only to be with someone, but to be chosen by someone. God doesn’t want a robot. God wants love – the kind of love only free will can grant. Chosen love.

In order to have that kind of relationship, God creates a system or pattern of being that is a divine partnership. God the creator makes us – the creative. God plants a garden and we tend it. God grows an orchard and we harvest it. God builds the car and we drive it.  Or not.  We can choose not to tend the garden, and then the weeds will overtake the food. We decide not to harvest the trees and the fruit will rot where it started. We can refuse to drive, or worse – drive without caution -- and the vehicle will be more burden than blessing to the world around us.  All the while, even when we are rejecting the tasks set before us, we are still a part of the divine partnership with God. 

So when we ask where God is, the first thing to remember is that God is with us – beside us, around us, within us. God is hoping we choose to tend the garden. God is encouraging us over and over to harvest the fruit, and God is begging us to drive more carefully. God cries when we cry, and God longs like we long. But, God is determined. We started this evolutionary journey of life together and together we will continue.  God’s not likely to push us out of the car and take over, although God will sometimes provide an airbag when we go too fast and hit too hard. The all-seeing deity can be asked for a map (and family and friends who turn out to be good back-seat drivers) to guide us along our way.

Like any partnership, there are rocky times and necessary things that must happen along the way. We should always be honest with God about our needs, our expectations, our fears and our disappointments. Only in truth can we work together effectively.  We must avoid trying to do God’s job, and we must make sure we are not making God entirely responsible for doing our job.  Partnerships change and grow in time, but as long as the love remains even the toughest challenges, biggest losses or greatest disappointments can be overcome. 

Being a part of this partnership is definitely harder than simply writing God off as  far-away or a fantasy. But the life, the joy, the challenge, and the love make it the much better reality.