The Goodness of God

In one chapter of his book Religion in the Making, created from lectures delivered in Boston in 1926, Alfred North Whitehead explores the historical effect on religion of travel beyond what he calls “the tribe.” He suggests that when people were exposed to “others”, strangers, outside the tribal boundaries in a way that was kindly, those extra-tribal explorers could think more “dispassionately” (and with less hostility) about others than before their travels. The result of empires and trade was that “everyone traveled and found the world fresh and new. A world-consciousness was produced.” (p. 29) Whitehead felt the “disengagement” from one’s social location that came with travel led to a change in how people perceived their relationship to God. In the old way of thinking, he writes,

Alfred North Whitehead

Conduct is right which will lead some god to protect you; and it is wrong if it stirs some irascible being to compass your destruction. Such religion is a branch of diplomacy. But a world-consciousness is more disengaged. It rises to the conception of an essential rightness of things…The new, and almost profane, concept of the goodness of God replaces the older emphasis on the will of God. In a communal religion, you study the will of God in order that [God] may preserve you; in a purified religion, rationalized under the influence of the world-concept, you study [God’s] goodness in order to be like [God]. It is the difference between the enemy you conciliate and the companion whom you imitate.  (p. 30)

Too many religious people these days talk about God as if God were an enemy to “conciliate” or placate. According to a 2010 article written by Amanda Terkel on thinkprogress.org, Virginia State Delegate Bob Marshall (R) suggested that year that women who had had abortions were punished by God through being given disabled children in subsequent births. Who could even worship such an evil and immoral god? Shouldn’t we at least be able to assume that God has the level of morality of the best human beings we know?

One of my greatest email pleasures is reading Fr. Richard Rohr’s brief meditations that arrive in my inbox bright and early each day. A recent entry touched as well on the idea that God and Jesus might best be thought of as those we should imitate due to their goodness. He writes,

 It seems to me that it is a minority that ever gets the true and full Gospel. We just keep worshiping Jesus and arguing over the exact right way to do it. The amazing thing is that Jesus never once says, ‘worship me!’, but he often says, ‘follow me’ (e.g., Matthew 4:19).  Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, inclusive, and loving. We made it, however, into a formal established religion, in order to avoid the demanding lifestyle itself. One could then be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain at the highest levels of the church, and still easily believe that Jesus is ‘my personal Lord and Savior.’ The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.

The suffering on Earth is great, indeed. Does it lessen that suffering or increase it if we pummel others with an image of a God who is not worth worshiping or following? It seems pretty simple. If your God tells you to kill an ambassador, or to kill an abortionist, you’re listening to a false god.

Update:  As I can hear the distant hoof beats of accusations of heresies such as Arianism on the horizon,  I just want to clarify a line of thought in this post. First of all, Fr. Rohr does not use the word “imitate” and it’s really not the exact word I’m looking for here.  Nor am I saying that we should not worship and be filled with praise over the grace that flows to us from Christ. What I believe, though, is that those who worship Christ but who are not willing to walk his path are merely projecting their healing onto Jesus as an outer figure, but that those who follow Jesus, walking the Way he walked, will experience the inner transformation of the Christ, and realize the Reign of God that Jesus realized as present right here, right now. In Spiritual Traditions for the Contemporary Church, Boniface Ramsey, O.P. writes of the spirituality of the early Church: “Christ was the measure, the model, and the goal of the spiritual life.” This is still true for Christians.

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We All Fall Short and We are All Still Loved

One of my favorite movies is 1984’s “Places in the Heart,” starring Sally Field, Ed Harris, John Malkovich and Danny Glover.  It is set in Depression-era Texas where Field plays a young woman suddenly widowed when a young black boy who’d had too much to drink shoots her sheriff husband and then himself and thrusts her into the role of provider for herself and her two small children.  She is helped in her efforts to raise a crop of cotton, and to bring it first to the cotton gin for extra prize money, by Glover’s character – a drifter – and the blind “Mr. Will,” played by Malkovich.  It was through this movie that I first heard the hymn “Blessed Assurance,” one I’ve loved singing ever since.

The movie is full of pain and tragedy although, thankfully, it ends on a positive note.  I’m not sure if the saying I’ve associated with it ever since was featured in text in the opening credits or not, but the words I remember go like this: “There are places in the heart that do not yet exist; pain must be in order that they be.”  I take this to mean that the sad truth about human existence is that our hearts can be expanded – new places created – through painful events.

In searching the Internet for that phrase and its attribution, I’ve learned that it was written by French author Leon Bloy and that mine is not the correct version.  In truth, Bloy wrote:

Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.

The writer who set me straight says that Bloy’s wisdom reminds him of something said after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by President Kennedy: “My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”

I’m also aware of a passage from the 30th Chapter of Isaiah that the Jerusalem Bible translates in this way:

When the Lord has given you the bread of suffering
and the water of distress, he who is your teacher will hide no longer,
and you will see your teacher with your own eyes.
Whether you turn to right or left,
your ears will hear these words behind you,
‘This is the way, follow it.’

What this says to me is that if God emerges as our visible teacher after we experience suffering, then God is first our invisible teacher through the disguise of that very suffering.

Oftentimes, a sticking point for unbelievers is the inability to understand how an all-powerful God could allow suffering.  Yet it’s my opinion that a human coming to an understanding of suffering is like a dog coming to an understanding of calculus.  We’ll never have the capacity to reach that level of perspective.  From my limited perspective, though, wisdom isn’t the only by-product of suffering; it is in suffering’s pressure cooker that we develop compassion and humility as well.

The reality-bending final scene of “Places in the Heart” is unforgettable.  In that scene the congregation shares the bread and wine of Holy Communion, and all are present in that feast – from the hard-working heroes of the story to the now-dead drunk who shot the sheriff and even those who in their racist fury beat Glover’s character to try to prevent his success.  All are at this table of forgiveness – those who suffer and those who caused that suffering – for we all contain both aspects.  This is the humbling truth of human existence, we all fall short and we are all still loved just the same and the suffering we experience along the way can give us new places in our hearts of more forgiveness, more compassion and more love.

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