Tales from the Inner Ring

How God Made himself Less than God.

If God will let us get involved in all the horrors of the nightly news, does it make any sense for us to thank a higher power for a bird, a few green lights when we’re late to work, a chance meeting with an old friend we needed to see?

Hmm . . .

“The first person who gets drafted in any war,” the teacher said, answering is own question, “is God.”  Lincoln’s meditation on the civil war:  Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other . . . one must be, and both might be, wrong“. did stretch our junior high grammar.  And in 1970, schools were trying to stretch our minds rather than our grammar.  The questions was good--if there is a benevolent God, why did he allows us to get involved in someone else’s civil war all these years later, when the work of our own wasn’t even finished? 

The problem with the 60s was that we got questions, but not answers.  A step in the right direction, actually.  Beyond blind faith in a father figure, vulnerable to the disappointments, disillusions, resentments, passive aggression, and anger to which all disappointed children are vulnerable.  ”If God didn’t make enough oil he wouldn’t have given us cars.“ said a resentful woman--really.  I feel for her; it’s easier to live with questions that the disappointment she will probably suffer.

After all, God--by definition--is infinite; we’re finite.  Someone knowing His mind is about as possible as a cat knowing Einstein's mind.  But we’ve still got to ask the questions.

With my own History students, ”The Rule of Law“ usually starts with the Magna Carta.  (Duh).  But there’s something else as well:  remember the petty Greek and Roman gods, who were really just super-powerful people.  Get a god jealous, you’ll get turned into an animal, killed in a war . . . The only real moral code was power--call it Emperor worship, personality cult, fuherprinzip. 

The only place where people could actually challenge God, under law, was the Old Testament.  ”Yo, God, you said this . . . see, you have to do it.“  So . . even God has to follow God’s own law.

Where God really screwed himself is giving people free will.  So he can’t be the old man with the beard, even the bull with the lightning bolts.

If God will let us get involved in all the horrors of the nightly news, does it make any sense for us to thank a higher power for a bird, a few green lights when we’re late to work, a chance meeting with an old friend we needed to see?

Yes.  That’s all God or spiritual energy or karma can do.  If we’ve got to anthroporphasize him, Christ’s dad might be more Coyote than King.  He’s got to figure out ways to beat his own system, in the little ways he can. 

When ”The Godfather“ first came out, the logo was a hand holding the puppet master’s strings.  God cut those strings himself, and after he sees what people do he’s probably angry enough at himself to work through all those little things.  Maybe, like Don Corleone, he needs a Michael to do the work he swore not to do--to help us transcend our own nature.  If he can’t--by his own law--enforce a grand plan, he can send the bodisatvahs--Christ, Buddah, Lincoln, & Co--to get us going where He wants.

Later