Killing God

             Michael Christman illustration for Coming Out to God

His five-year-old daughter offered a prayer while burying a sparrow who died flying into a window pane. “Dear God, we have buried this little sparrow. Now you be good to it, or I’ll kill you.” When told by her mother she didn’t need to threaten God, she said, “I just wanted to be sure.”

John Fraser tells this story in a collection of essays entitled, Befriending Life: Encounters with Henri Nouwen, to which I also contributed a chapter. Fascinated by the story, Henri wrote about it in his book, The Road to Daybreak.

I once buried a sparrow who died similarly, trying to fly into what appeared a welcoming space within glass walls of a campus chapel. I wrote about it in my book of prayers, Coming Out to God. It made me think of many who hit invisible barriers trying to enter our churches. Jesus once told his followers not to be afraid, that not one sparrow falls to the ground without God knowing.

What strikes me is that this prayer of a five-year-old is often the prayer of adults. Karen Armstrong says as much in her “Death of God?” chapter in her History of God. When we conceive an all-powerful God, then God is responsible for all that’s wrong with the world—in her word, “a monster.” And I have pastorally and personally witnessed those who suffer or those who suffer loss doubting God’s intentions or God’s existence. An omnipotent God who fails to care must be distrusted or killed.

I believe Christianity is conducive to this way of thinking, as it conceptualizes a God of compassion, willing to be vulnerable to the point of death—all out of love.

We often conceive of God as “the best” at everything. When you consider your “best friend,” do you think of someone who is powerful or someone who is loving? Just as we would classify a best friend as loving, so is our best God. It could be said that love is God’s power.

When we look for love, would we choose a lover who is dogmatic and demanding, or one who is trustworthy and welcoming? Even so with God, for biblically God’s love is steadfast and inclusive.

And when we consider our best leaders or pastors or teachers, do we think of someone who is controlling or one who is persuasive? Just so, our “best God” is persuasive, a good shepherd, one who stands at our door and knocks, one who wants to be invited in to commune with us, one we want to follow.

And lest God become thought of as just another thing or being as “best” implies, it’s better to think of God as the most: the most loving, the most welcoming, the most loyal, the most inclusive, the most persuasive. To borrow a word from comedian John Oliver, that’s the God with the “mostus.”

This line of thinking is how process theology “saved” God for me long before I went to seminary.

Armstrong observes, “Throughout history people have discarded a conception of God when it no longer works for them.” And later, “Those of us who have had a difficult time with religion in the past find it liberating to be rid of the God who terrorized our childhood.”

She suggests that often what “saves” God are poets, artists (of all kinds), visionaries, and mystics who glimpse something through the imagination, through their disciplines, and through silence, something that cannot be known so much as witnessed. In Care of the Soul Thomas Moore noted that imagination is perhaps our most underutilized spiritual gift.  And Saint Ignatius, who gave us his Spiritual Exercises and founded the scholarly Jesuits, believed the spiritual life required imagination.

I would add that too many readers of the Bible refuse to see it as the work of poets, artists, visionaries, and mystics—not an objective record or rulebook—rather, one that invites our own imaginations to play and to pray as we discern God for a new generation.

One of the worst things that can happen to God, Armstrong suggests, is when “the more educated, sober, and responsible element” in a given faith discard religion altogether, instead of re-imagining God, because too many others prefer to worship the manmade* Golden Calf rather than the God hidden on the mountain, or in the sound of sheer silence, or in a newborn’s cry.

Armstrong recounts a story that echoes the accountability required by the five-year-old in my opening story. It is told that in Auschwitz, some Jews put God on trial for cruelty and betrayal. They found God guilty, worthy of death. A rabbi gave the verdict, and announced that now he would lead evening prayers.

The God who inspires human beings to be tenacious in the face of calamity is worthy of reimagining.

*The use of this non-inclusive term is intentional.

Related posts (also linked in the above text):

The Terrible God (Good Shepherd, Psalm 23)

God is Our Shepherd

God is Not a Control Freak

Beware of the God!

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Interrupted Lives

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

My friend, fellow writer, AIDS volunteer and chaplain Pat Hoffman gave me a copy of Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life during the early years of the AIDS crisis in southern California. She thought Etty’s diaries witnessing the Nazi takeover of her native Holland and the deportation of Jews to German death camps might speak to the experience of the prematurely interrupted lives we were beholding.

As I read, Etty also spoke to my sexuality, my writing, and my progressive faith. Unbound by religious trappings, subsequently claimed by both Jews and Christians, this young Jewish woman wrote, “When I pray, I hold a silly, naïve or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for convenience sake I call God.”

As the editor of her letters, G. K. Garlaandt explains in the introduction, “Her mysticism led her not into solitary contemplation but squarely back into the world of action. Her vision had nothing to do with escape or self-deception, and everything to do with a hard-won, steady and whole perception of reality.”

Etty claimed a sense of equilibrium in the face of virulent madness as she wrote, “I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window; there is room for everything in a single life. For belief in God and for a miserable end.”

And, as she anticipated being transported to Germany and its concentration camps, she boldly prayed:

Dear God, these are anxious times. Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. I shall promise You one thing God, just one very small thing: I shall never burden my today with cares about my tomorrow, although that takes some practice. Each day is sufficient unto itself. I shall try to help you, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that you cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well.

Speaking about Etty Hillesum this past Sunday as an example of “Our Lives as Sacred Texts,” I was reminded that today, November 30, is the anniversary of her death at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 29. And this is the eve of World AIDS Day, December 1.

Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen advised against comparing the intensity of one’s suffering with that of others, explaining, “Your suffering is your own.” Yet Etty’s interrupted life shares a continuum with other interrupted lives, just as her words speak to my own vocation of writing:

Such longing to jot down a few words! Such a strong sense of: here on these pages I am spinning my thread. And a thread does run through my life, through my reality, like a continuous line. … It’s not so much the imperfect words on these faint blue lines, as the feeling, time and again, of returning to a place from which one can continue to spin one and the same thread, where one can gradually create a continuum, a continuum which is really one’s life.

Where Is God?

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

I received the news of Osama bin Laden’s death with grim satisfaction, but only after the immediate lump in my throat and tears in my eyes as I recalled once more those trapped in the crashing planes and falling buildings of 9/11. And their loved ones.

In the face of all terrorism that wounds and kills and destroys, we have cause to wonder “Where is God?”

Invited to speak on Holocaust Remembrance Day this past Sunday, I quoted one of the characters in Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s novel Night, who asks this very question. In a concentration camp, a mere child is sentenced to hang, and as the sentence is carried out, the young narrator hears someone behind him asking, “Where is God, where is He?” And when the child does not die right away, but suffers, lingering between life and death, again, “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows…’”

That’s what Jesus’ followers discerned, as they witnessed Jesus on his cross. “For God’s sake, where is God?” they surely wondered. And from within them, they heard a voice answer—perhaps the Holy Spirit?—“Where is God? This is where—hanging from this cross…”

As I wrote in this blog during Holy Week, this is how the crucifixion speaks to me—God identifies with all innocents who suffer violence for who they are, whether hung on a fence post in Wyoming, drug behind a truck in Texas, or last week, beaten in a McDonald’s in Maryland.

Those of us who watched the royal wedding Friday morning were reminded that it was the feast day of Catherine of Siena, who admonished, “Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire!” I might add, if the world doesn’t set you on fire first!

One who did not survive the Holocaust, or Sho’ah, Etty Hillesum, wrote a prayer in her diary [published in English as An Interrupted Life] on July 12, 1942:

Dear God…One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days, and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.

And later she adds, “There will always be a small patch of sky above, and there will always be enough space to fold two hands in prayer.” She died at Auschwitz on November 30, 1943.

“Safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.” “Safeguard”—as in preserve, protect, and treasure. “And perhaps in others as well.” That’s the tough part, thus “perhaps.” Disrespecting God’s dwelling place in others is the root of all terrorism.