This will be the last in our current “Things that Catch My Attention” series – at least for the time being. Next week will be Thanksgiving week and the following week we will begin the season of Advent for this year.
I have to admit that I was beginning to despair of finding a quote to discuss this week – I still have lots of notes around, but they were beginning to be repetitive in nature – just different ways to say the same thing. I finally gave up and walked away from my desk, made a cup of coffee, and picked up my daily reading book to see what today has to tell me. And there it was, the perfect quote with which to end this series.
The book is “Hope as Old as Fire” ** – as mentioned, a book of daily readings – written by Steven Charleston, former bishop and indigenous elder. Bishop Steven has appeared in this series once before – the first duplication, I believe, but I could reflect on his writings for months and never run out of things to say about them. He is a very wise man who always shows me ways to see things from a different angle.
This is the quote:
At one point or another in my life, God has been each of these to me. But I am a person of words – and I try to use words carefully – choosing them to fit just what I want to express, and more and more as I grew older, not any one of these words – father, list-checker, comrade, Spirit, healer, wisdom – has really conveyed what I try to express by God. Each is one piece, but each alone is limiting. I struggle with the immensity of God as well as with the intimacy of God. I don’t struggle with the fact of God’s immensity, but with what to name it. For me, God simply doesn’t fit in any one or two of the words at my command.
This may not be an issue with many of you, but it has been for me – and, I suspect, many others. For a long time my prayers became overly complicated when I got hung up on the issue of who it is I’m praying to. Maybe that’s my own oddity – maybe not. This issue has largely been resolved, for me, by accepting that God is un-namable. My prayers these days largely consist of me saying “thank you” and then shutting up and listening. It works for God and me.
The problem of naming God, as Bishop Steven makes clear, does not lie with God. God IS, and God does not change – we change. When I was a child I was entirely comfortable with a Father-God – my own father had died when I was very young and I had a daddy-sized hole in my life that God filled very nicely. I wasn’t so happy with the list-checker-God, but as a child I accepted it as totally reasonable.
As I grew into adulthood I no longer wanted or needed a Daddy-God laying down rules for me. I wanted guidance and direction but not “do it this way or displease me.” I also found myself needing a God who understood what it meant to be female – not as a mistake, not as the weaker vessel, unfit to serve in any way besides cooking and child-bearing – but as a whole, valued person.
Part of this is the fault of our language -- English is sometimes very limiting. It generally doesn’t have both/and words, just either/or words. God is male or female -- we don’t have a word for both. We are just lately starting to build that vocabulary. God is here or there -- in my heart or up in heaven. If you listen to many people today it appears they believe God lives in the United States. Also. in scripture, God is so relentlessly gendered as male that it is almost impossible to escape it, and yet I do not for a moment think God is just a big man in the sky.
In Genesis we are told that “God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” This is a truly schizophrenic sentence. It makes no sense as written, because the original writer, perhaps, and certainly the later translators simply could not find a way past their own conviction that God must be male even when the scripture is trying to tell us differently.
Scattered throughout the Old Testament are multiple references to God as a mother bird, feeding and sheltering her young and yet these disappear once we reach the New Testament. Scripture also calls God Spirit (and again, often using descriptive words in the female gender). The new Testament also uses words such as Light...and Love...and Fire. God is all these things – and more. And sometimes, less.
Because however many times scripture refers to God by any of these non-male-specific words, their use is totally over-run by the hundreds of references to God as King, as Lord, as Father—dominating male figures. ‘King’ is a political word and should not have any connection with God. ‘Lord” is a word connoting the subjugation of a slave to a master. ‘Father’ clearly locks God into one gender only. These terms are leftovers from a time when gentleness was scorned as weakness, and brutality was admired as strength.
Because of all this, I do not find scripture particularly helpful in giving us words for God. What Scripture does give us is Jesus, who is, by far, the clearest image of a loving, caring being. Not Jesus’ words always – because he was often a man of his time as much as any other. But Jesus’ actions: healing, welcoming, inviting, embracing, up-lifting. All these things are God, and God is all these things. We see God through these actions. We feel God. We experience God. We know God.
I believe that Jesus is the language God uses to tell us about Godself. And it is a clear and easily understood language. If you occasionally get tangled up in words -- in scripture or anywhere else – as I do, we can always turn to Jesus, where the meaning and the identity of God is always crystal clear.
God will be for us whomever we need God to be at any given point in our life. If we need a parent, loving and comforting and teaching us through rough times, that is who God is. If we need a comrade to stand with us as we stand up for justice, that’s who God is. And if we need a wise elder to help us untangle the particularly puzzling trials in our lives -- there God is.
We change. God does not. God is simply here for us as whatever, whoever we need.
And we are blessed.
Amen.
** Hope as Old as Fire, Steven Charleston, (c) 2012, Red Moon Publications
I have to admit that I was beginning to despair of finding a quote to discuss this week – I still have lots of notes around, but they were beginning to be repetitive in nature – just different ways to say the same thing. I finally gave up and walked away from my desk, made a cup of coffee, and picked up my daily reading book to see what today has to tell me. And there it was, the perfect quote with which to end this series.
The book is “Hope as Old as Fire” ** – as mentioned, a book of daily readings – written by Steven Charleston, former bishop and indigenous elder. Bishop Steven has appeared in this series once before – the first duplication, I believe, but I could reflect on his writings for months and never run out of things to say about them. He is a very wise man who always shows me ways to see things from a different angle.
This is the quote:
- When I was a child, I thought of God as an old man, seated on a throne, making marks by my name. When I was in my twenties, God was a comrade in the struggle, calling us into the streets to demand an end to war. In my thirties, God began to morph into Spirit, a mystic force of truth. In my forties God matured, a householder of heaven. Through my fifties, God was Grandmother, constant source of healing.....Now, I just smile. I have changed. God has not. We see the God we are.
At one point or another in my life, God has been each of these to me. But I am a person of words – and I try to use words carefully – choosing them to fit just what I want to express, and more and more as I grew older, not any one of these words – father, list-checker, comrade, Spirit, healer, wisdom – has really conveyed what I try to express by God. Each is one piece, but each alone is limiting. I struggle with the immensity of God as well as with the intimacy of God. I don’t struggle with the fact of God’s immensity, but with what to name it. For me, God simply doesn’t fit in any one or two of the words at my command.
This may not be an issue with many of you, but it has been for me – and, I suspect, many others. For a long time my prayers became overly complicated when I got hung up on the issue of who it is I’m praying to. Maybe that’s my own oddity – maybe not. This issue has largely been resolved, for me, by accepting that God is un-namable. My prayers these days largely consist of me saying “thank you” and then shutting up and listening. It works for God and me.
The problem of naming God, as Bishop Steven makes clear, does not lie with God. God IS, and God does not change – we change. When I was a child I was entirely comfortable with a Father-God – my own father had died when I was very young and I had a daddy-sized hole in my life that God filled very nicely. I wasn’t so happy with the list-checker-God, but as a child I accepted it as totally reasonable.
As I grew into adulthood I no longer wanted or needed a Daddy-God laying down rules for me. I wanted guidance and direction but not “do it this way or displease me.” I also found myself needing a God who understood what it meant to be female – not as a mistake, not as the weaker vessel, unfit to serve in any way besides cooking and child-bearing – but as a whole, valued person.
Part of this is the fault of our language -- English is sometimes very limiting. It generally doesn’t have both/and words, just either/or words. God is male or female -- we don’t have a word for both. We are just lately starting to build that vocabulary. God is here or there -- in my heart or up in heaven. If you listen to many people today it appears they believe God lives in the United States. Also. in scripture, God is so relentlessly gendered as male that it is almost impossible to escape it, and yet I do not for a moment think God is just a big man in the sky.
In Genesis we are told that “God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” This is a truly schizophrenic sentence. It makes no sense as written, because the original writer, perhaps, and certainly the later translators simply could not find a way past their own conviction that God must be male even when the scripture is trying to tell us differently.
Scattered throughout the Old Testament are multiple references to God as a mother bird, feeding and sheltering her young and yet these disappear once we reach the New Testament. Scripture also calls God Spirit (and again, often using descriptive words in the female gender). The new Testament also uses words such as Light...and Love...and Fire. God is all these things – and more. And sometimes, less.
Because however many times scripture refers to God by any of these non-male-specific words, their use is totally over-run by the hundreds of references to God as King, as Lord, as Father—dominating male figures. ‘King’ is a political word and should not have any connection with God. ‘Lord” is a word connoting the subjugation of a slave to a master. ‘Father’ clearly locks God into one gender only. These terms are leftovers from a time when gentleness was scorned as weakness, and brutality was admired as strength.
Because of all this, I do not find scripture particularly helpful in giving us words for God. What Scripture does give us is Jesus, who is, by far, the clearest image of a loving, caring being. Not Jesus’ words always – because he was often a man of his time as much as any other. But Jesus’ actions: healing, welcoming, inviting, embracing, up-lifting. All these things are God, and God is all these things. We see God through these actions. We feel God. We experience God. We know God.
- Jesus engaged in argument with the Syrophoenician Woman on the same level he might have argued with a man – and she won!
- At the feeding of the 5000 there was no sorting into worthy and unworthy. Everyone there was fed, for no other reason than that they were hungry.
- Jesus invited himself to dinner with Zacchaeus, then invited the despised tax collector, into his – Jesus’ – life.
- Jesus healed a Roman Centurion’s boy – who is described by a word that modern scholars insist translates as a sex-partner, or lover.
- Jesus physically embraced and healed beggars and lepers and outcasts of all kinds.
I believe that Jesus is the language God uses to tell us about Godself. And it is a clear and easily understood language. If you occasionally get tangled up in words -- in scripture or anywhere else – as I do, we can always turn to Jesus, where the meaning and the identity of God is always crystal clear.
God will be for us whomever we need God to be at any given point in our life. If we need a parent, loving and comforting and teaching us through rough times, that is who God is. If we need a comrade to stand with us as we stand up for justice, that’s who God is. And if we need a wise elder to help us untangle the particularly puzzling trials in our lives -- there God is.
We change. God does not. God is simply here for us as whatever, whoever we need.
And we are blessed.
Amen.
** Hope as Old as Fire, Steven Charleston, (c) 2012, Red Moon Publications
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