“Stonehenge,” someone said.
Someone else remarked that our primitive forebears were not as primitive as we have sometimes thought.
One young man in New York on leave, wearing his sailor’s suit so that we could not forget we were in a world of war, scowled and said that the ancient Hebrews lived in a polytheistic world where they nevertheless understood themselves to be chosen by God as special people.
Circumcision was the sign of that specialness, and certainly was a sensible health measure in a desert world of little water and no daily showers.
“I take two showers a day now,” someone said. “Once I get sent overseas, who knows when I’ll see a shower again.”
“You have to do it—”
“Take a shower?”
“Stop Hitler.”
It was not an ambiguous war. If Hitler was allowed to take over the world, wipe out the Jews, we might be plunged back into the Dark Ages where the stories were kept alive only because the old monks with infinite patience copied out Scripture and other available writings.
We talked about Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, with their radical visions of their universe, putting religion and science deeply in conflict. Bruno was burned at the stake because of his speculation that there might be different times for different planets. Why was this seen by the established church as a threat to Jesus? Galileo had to recant what he knew to be true, murmuring under his breath, “But it does move.” Our growth in knowledge changed our understanding of the universe, but surely it neither changed nor threatened God. Yet it did threaten the power of the church and our place as the center of the universe. Could God love us as much if we were merely a planet in an ordinary solar system in a spiral galaxy, instead of the center of the universe?
To some people it seemed that the intimate God who loves us, knows us, blesses us, could not be great enough to cope with the billions of galaxies flying away from us and still have attention for us tiny creatures. But yes! Yes, our God is great enough to love us despite the enormity of Creation.
We post–Pearl Harbor kids needed to know that amazing love in our dark world of war, full of terrible bombings and the rumor of concentration camps. One evening a week I was one of many volunteers who taught English to refugees—intellectuals and artists—who had to leave Europe and Hitler’s persecution because of their Jewishness.
Jesus was a Jew.
* * *
—
The U.S. dropped an atom bomb on a densely populated city.
Dropped a second bomb, equally, unparallelly horrible.
And the next year I got married and the world changed, inner and outer, and questions deepened. Into what kind of a world were we going to bring our babies?
The opening of the atom and the world of particle physics changed everything we thought we had understood as radically as had Galileo.
If we do not live in a predestined world, does that take away from God’s omnipotent power? No, no, it makes it all the more extraordinary! When God gave us free will, the Maker did indeed throw away power. When Christ came to us as Jesus, that was an even more radical throwing away of power. But that’s what our loving God does! God throws away power over and over again, while we greedily grab for it. A lover wants to love the beloved, not to wield power, but to love, hoping that the love will be returned in the same way. When we are caught up in power we are not free, but in bondage to the power we have grasped. God is completely free because power has been laughingly thrown away in order that love may reign. The throwing away of power requires enormous power.
The all-powerful God who manipulates every event is like that Oriental potentate. When Lord Acton wrote that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, was he thinking only of human power? God’s rejection of power makes me wonder.
And of course this is glorious paradox and I am barely beginning to understand it. Why are we human creatures so certain that our current religious or scientific theory is the right and only and correct one? When we look at our human history we have replaced theory after theory with new and more plausible ones. Many accepted theories at the time of my marriage have moved and changed. We, too, moved and changed, going from New York to northwest Connecticut and a small village; we had children. The USSR put Sputnik in orbit and the U.S.A. put men on the moon and the world shivered with the chill of the cold war.
We took our children to Sunday school and they were taught that God loved them and they were to be kind to one another because that would please Jesus. We loved our little church.
During the week in the village school the children were taught to hide under their little wooden desks with their hands over their heads in case an atom bomb fell on them. People spent more time hating the communists than loving God.
At night after the children had been put to bed I would take the dogs and go outdoors and look at the stars and suspect that we human beings were as far from knowing the truth of the manner of Creation as we ever were, and that there were many more extraordinary revelations to come. How exciting it was to see our beautiful planet as viewed from the moon! I stood bathed in starlight and love-light and I prayed for Jesus to come into my heart.
* * *
—
On Sundays after church we would read the Bible to the children. They were bored with the glorious organ music of the language of the King James translation, but responded immediately to J. B. Phillips. Today I would read to them from Eugene Peterson’s The Message. In his version of John’s Gospel I was startled to read of Jesus’ appearance to the disciples after the Resurrection. He blesses them with his peace. Then he tells them that when they forgive people’s sins they are gone forever. And then, instead of the familiar, “Whosoever sins you retain on earth, they are retained in heaven,” which has always bothered me, Eugene Peterson’s version says, “If you don’t forgive the sins, what will you do with them?”
I had the opportunity to ask, “Gene, how do you justify that?”
He replied calmly, “The Greek can go either way. I chose that way.”
Thank you, Eugene!
Thank you, Jesus, for your unlimited forgiveness.
* * *
—
Thank you, Jesus, for being born for me.
The beautiful colonial Congregational church in the center of the village was also the center of our lives. There I knew for the first time truly Christian community. We really did love one another, with all our faults and flaws. That was the pearl beyond price.
But I missed the observance of the church year, beginning with Advent, and moving through the birth of Jesus, with all its wonderful stories; following the flight into Egypt and the return to Nazareth; the lost years of Jesus’ story after his time in the temple with the elders, and his reappearance when he came to John for baptism. I missed hearing the parables in context, when he told them, and to whom; they change considerably as the first enthusiasm with which he was greeted changed to incomprehension and then antagonism. I missed the long thoughtfulness of Lent, and the dark of Good Friday, and then the glory of Easter. And finally the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit. At that time in the Congregational church (now that we are United Church of Christ it has changed), we celebrated Christmas and Easter and that was that. There was no sense of the chronological movement of Jesus’ story, from birth to Resurrection. I missed that. When I directed the choir we sang the church year; I just didn’t tell anybody. We had Communion four times a year, and it was merely a memorial service. Once I asked the choir what it meant to them, and the response was nothing. For me it was far more than that. If we are all made from the same stuff as stars, then we are partaking of that original substance which Christ called into being.
I’m not happy with the Big Bang theory being called the big bang, because these words seem to feed into our world of violence, where the good guys are the most po
werful and win with their force. I like to think of that beginning as the time when Christ quietly called all things into being, and although there is undoubtedly a great deal of violence in the formation of galaxies—like the violence of childbirth—it is not a matter of power and winning but of creating and rejoicing.
I was grateful that our new young minister at the Congregational church affirmed a God of love, that no matter what, God loves us, and that love was what gave birth to the universe, and, in due time, to Jesus, and our own small Christian community.
Our young minister told us that God counts the hairs of our head. God knows the names of all the stars, and our names, too. We were all, every one of us, even at our most difficult, worth the love of Jesus, who was born for us.
Is that a fact? we might have asked. It’s beyond fact.
It’s not that I can’t be bothered about facts, or that I think they don’t matter. My study is full of encyclopedias, all the reference books I collected in college, dictionaries, books of word origins, concordances, Oxford Companions; but when I have acquired all the facts possible I am still left with dozens of unanswered questions.
So were the rest of us.
“Why do the wicked flourish and the innocent suffer?”
“Will there be atomic warfare?”
“Why hasn’t Jesus’ coming made more difference?’’
We sat in that minister’s little study and listened as he smiled and told us that in spite of pain and unfairness, and all the horrors done in the name of Christ, he still rejoiced in God’s goodness. He assured us that the Incarnation, the scandal of the particular, makes sense of all the seeming senselessness with which we are surrounded. He pointed to the Bible, open in his lap. The Bible tells, but it does not answer.
One of the older members of the group said, “Thank you, Jesus, for dying for me.”
As the newest member of the group that day, I said nothing, but thought, yes, that too, there’s no end to our thanks. But it’s God being born, living a human life, who gets me through my days; it’s the Jesus of the every day who leads me through the trials and tribulations that come to us all and that sometimes seem more than we can bear. It was the wonder of Jesus’ being born for us that got my husband and me through the terrifying Christmas week when we thought our little daughter had leukemia.
If we concentrate on Jesus’ dying only, it’s like listening to the last bars of a Beethoven symphony and missing all the great music that leads up to it. It’s like telling the choir to sing Amen without bothering with the anthem.
The Jesus who was talked about in church, in the minister’s study, in our prayer group, often seemed to be dead.
Who are you? I don’t think I know you.
The problem was that all my education taught me not to believe in the impossible. It was all right when I was a child, and believed in wonders and marvels and wee folk and talking animals, and trolls and witches (for I knew there was evil, too), and so it was not difficult for me to believe in God’s love, God’s love coming to us in person.
But as soon as I came to the age of reason and was taught to believe only in reasonable and provable things, the Incarnation was too much: it was impossible, and I could no longer believe in the impossible. I wanted to believe. I knew that if Jesus was nothing but a good rabbi (and there have been many good rabbis), then he did not enter my heart and guide my life. I celebrated Easter, of course, but I did not understand it. I was told that Jesus was God and Jesus was human and it did not make sense; it was a contradiction. I believed in God, who made the heavens and the earth and called them good. It was Jesus who gave me trouble. The Jesus I wanted to believe in was not possible. I could accept the miracles; ordinary human beings have on occasion done miracles. But Jesus, the Son of God? Jesus as God? Part of God?
I was stimulated and sometimes excited by conversations about God, but they were theoretical. They did not explain death. They did not explain sin and evil. They did not explain Jesus or why the world kept right on being full of sin and evil even after he had come. The Jesus described for me did not live in my heart, because he did not seem strong enough to pick up hammer and saw and do a good day’s work. I looked at pictures of a pretty man with curly blond hair and blue eyes, rather watery, and a weak, self-pitying mouth, and thought that the artist had forgotten that Jesus was born in the Middle East, that he was a Jew, that the Scriptures of the Old Testament meant a great deal to him.
Through the tenures of several ministers who followed that first young one who taught us about love, I was told of a Jesus who was even worse than the self-pitying one. Jesus had been separated from the Father at the Incarnation, so far that he saw the Father only as a tyrant who wanted to wipe out his creation, one minister informed us, and he would have done so, because of our wickedness, if Jesus had not begged the Father to forgive us and then been crucified for our wickedness. I did not understand. Jesus called his Father Abba, the intimate name of love.
I was told gently but firmly that I would have to learn about God planning to crucify his only Son because we human beings had become so wicked that only Jesus’ death on the cross would pacify God’s anger. I understood the wickedness. Surely we are all sinners. But I didn’t understand the anger. I thought God loved us, despite all the things we did wrong. From the pulpit I heard about the Good News, but I didn’t understand the Good News, because although it was good, I did not see it shining in our hearts and lives.
In my search for Jesus who would set fire to my life, I kept getting stuck on old literalisms. From the pulpit I heard that all those who had been born before the Resurrection would be excluded from heaven. They had been born before Jesus’ resurrection redeemed all things, and so they would have to be left out. Certainly I was hearing theologically skewed concepts, and reading similarly bizarre teachings in books recommended by current magazines.
Didn’t God make time? I wondered. Would God really leave Abraham, Moses, Isaiah outside the gates of heaven, never to enter because they had been born before Resurrection time? It did not make sense to me because it was not love, and God is love.
Having been excluded in many ways during my own life, excluded by my fellow human beings, I could not bear to think that God would be like some of my mean-minded teachers and schoolmates!
Much has changed since the early fifties, changed in seminaries as well as in pulpits. Some younger friends have found it difficult to understand that Christians really were taught some of the strange things I heard from various pulpits in those dark years after we had dropped the atom bomb and moved into the frightening world of the cold war. Seminarians were taught that God is impassible and cannot suffer. God is perfect, and perfection cannot feel pain. Seminarians were taught that they must never be personal in their sermons, must keep themselves out of their words, and never tell stories of what had happened to them and how it affected faith and actions.
In my heart I knew that God’s promise was that our loving Creator would always be with us, all of us, caring about us and everything that happened to us. We were God’s precious children, known by God (as the psalmist affirms in Psalm 139) before we were formed in the womb. So how could God possibly exclude Daniel and his three friends who had refused to worship a pagan image but remained true to God? How could David be excluded, a man after God’s own heart even in the midst of his wrongdoings? Or the woman who had been ill for so many years with the issue of blood and whom Jesus had healed when she touched the hem of his garment? What about the exclusion of those people who had been an early part of the story and had no choice? The widow of Zarephath, Esther, Gideon? Wasn’t what I was hearing from the pulpit a human interpretation of something known only by the Maker? Weren’t people trying to make decisions for God instead of listening? Weren’t they trying to make the unexplainable explainable?
I don’t think this chilly theology is taught anymore, but once upon a time in an o
dd interpretation of arithmetic and time, it was. And I wrestled with it and walked under the stars at night, and I called out to God to love us, to be with us in our pain and joy.
Perhaps some people might choose to be excluded, though it seems an incomprehensible choice, but there may be some who are so sunk into sin that they don’t even want to get out.
Many decades have passed. Seminaries have changed. Theology has changed and is, I believe, much healthier and more loving than it was in those strange years after we had been unwilling or unable to come to terms with the human horror of a war which included concentration camps and atom bombs.
Too many explanations don’t explain, nor does focusing on God’s anger at our terrible deeds instead of God’s love and forgiveness when we repent and beg to be brought back into the loving community of all of God’s children. Are not Christians the community of the Resurrection?
* * *
—
I try to think of the Resurrection as it would affect my father, as it would affect my grandmother, as it would ultimately affect my mother, my husband, myself. It seems that there has been a line drawn between heaven and hell, and the decision has largely been made as to who is going to be on each side. Who made the decision? Various theologians? Doctors of law? It was too cut and dried. It took us away from being the image of God into being potential discards.
And were we looking for an inner image of God in ourselves or an outer one?
I thought about my children and how much I love them. Surely God loves us even more than we love our children, and that’s a love so great it can’t be measured.
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