Tag Archives: God

A Mirror Darkly?

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After working the voting precinct last week, I’m still processing. But one thing that’s coming up over and over again, is how much people around me espouse a God who looks like them. Acts like them. Believes what they believe.

Not that they believe what God believes. Their God believes what they do. Their God has opinions on weaknesses, in particular, that don’t align with the New Testament Jesus. You only have to read the New Testament once to understand, God has been redesigned. And to my, well, frightened eyes, he sounds in their mouths like an angry white guy.

This freaks me out, because at first it made me feel superior; I was on the right side of God! Our God is an Awesome God, a Mighty God, a God we seek to know. To Know God and make God known -I am doing it correctly!

And then I started to drill down in my own life, what I believed about God, what God wanted from me, what I was meant to be doing…..

….and it sure looked a lot like what I wanted to do. Like what made me comfortable. Like what benefited me. Like everyone else should think like me, understand God with the depth that I do.

My God is ethnocentric? Help us, Jesus. God in the hands of angry sinners is a terrible thing to contemplate.

So these days my prayer is, Jesus, help me interpret what I’m seeing in front of me the way you want me to. You gave us all personalities, you say in the Bible that some are hands and some are ears (and that means at least one of us has to be the liver). So okay, we have to be who you formed us to be and we see the world through the eyes you gave us.

But dear Jesus, please don’t let me reform you into who I decided I needed you to be, rather than who you are. That’s going to be way more important soon. This is going to get ugly. Don’t let me believe in the angry white guy God, and please don’t let me redesign God into a tree hugger who thinks everyone could benefit from a warm chocolate chip cookie, either. I’m listening, carefully, and with a lot more humility now. Help, please. Thank you.

A Lovely Balance

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NYC Day 3 013 Yesterday Jack and I did a pre-event interview, said hello to the team at St Martin’s Press, and then wandered up Fifth Avenue people-watching for the afternoon. The Diamond District (hello, Kimberley Process); the Flower District; the “every fast food known to humanity” District; up we walked.

For those unfamiliar with NYC, it is organized in numbered streets so you can always tell which way you want to go… supposedly. Somewhere around the 50s we passed St. Thomas Church, which advertised an Evensong for 5:30 pm. It was 5, so we went in and sat down. All the cell phone people and sirens and other street sounds faded. The boys were practicing. Sweet voices, high ceilings.

Evensong included a song from Thomas Tallis, and the usual collects and psalms and a hymn. We loved the quiet, reverent worship. High church is not our usual thing, being Quakers, but it’s nice to know that God has so many people worshiping Him in so many ways.

From the church we left, calmer than we’d entered, and went downtown to watch the Times Square lights coming on in the dark. Big, beautiful buildings full of power and amusements. They were pretty. And tall.

But their ostentatious display seemed somehow vapid after that lovely Evensong. Like an overdressed woman standing next to a tulip garden. There’s beauty, and there’s beautiful reality.NYC Day 2 047

NYC is pretty to look at come nightfall. God loves humanity and wants to help us.

It’s good to know there’s balance in the world.