Continuing on with lessons from this excellent book,
there was a passage in particular that hit me with a thought I'd never had before. The author, wrangling with a friend over her concept of God and questioning her commitment to atheism, has a prayer experiment suggested to her. Before she starts her experiment, a thought occurs to her, triggered by that line, "It's not like he's a tame lion."
Josh’s allusion to Aslan was an abrupt reminder that the subject of my planned ‘experiment’ was a Person. . . and a Person of infinite power, dangerous, unconstrained by what I would prefer ‘God’ to be like.I was reading the book in bed the other night, my wife beside me reading one of her own, when that passage struck me like an enormous fish wielded by John Cleese.
The impact was so great that I wondered if some of the fishy-smelling, salty water had splashed onto my bride. God as a Person, a real Person, that was something I'd never absorbed through all my studies and Mass attendance and Confessions. It's one thing to say that God has a plan for your life or that God shows you opportunities to do His will, but it's another thing entirely to realize that the Person who opens those doors for you is a real person.
In the old days, when my kids would do something stupid or wrong, I'd get mad. In person and in my own way, I would get mad. with yelling and everything. However, when I sin, I never thought of my sin being against a Someone. It was always breaking some impersonal rule, putting up a tally on some score sheet somewhere.
As the miracle I experienced a few years back was extraordinarily personal, one meant solely for me by Someone who knew me and loved me deeply, you'd think I'd have learned. Nope. Blockhead that I was, I needed a converted atheist to show me the light.
It's not like He's a tame lion.
3 comments:
"In the old days, when my kids would do something stupid or wrong, I'd get mad. In person and in my own way, I would get mad. with yelling and everything. However, when I sin, I never thought of my sin being against a Someone. It was always breaking some impersonal rule, putting up a tally on some score sheet somewhere."
One reason sin is so terrible, and the reason that all sin is an offence against God even if it's a "victimless crime" sort of sin, is that *everything* we do involves God; we can't even draw a breath exceot God draw it with us. So, in sinning, we drag not only ourselves through the mud, but we also drag God through the mud; in sinning, we not only commit some injustice or other against a fellow man, but also against God.
When people emote, "Where was God in the Holocaust!?!" the correct answer is: "He was right there: being murdered along with the Jew ... and murdering him along with the Nazi."
You rock.
It was from a Rabbi (though, I don't now recall whom) that I first encountered that thought about "Where was God in the Holocaust?" And, once one understands it, it seems so obvious: how could it be otherwise, since God is the "ground of all being", since all things cohere in him?
And, from there, realizing that God participates in *all* of creation (*) -- that God has given his creatures some limited power over him (**) -- it seems clear that our sin "forces" the Sinless One to participate in the sin, to experience sinfulness. In sinning, we violate Christ as wickedly as did the Roman soldiers who brutalized Jesus before nailing him to that tree.
(*) God isn't watching our lives, as though the world were a movie; he is living our lives with us, each one. He is "closer than a brother" and he "knows us better than we know ourselves" because he is always *right here* living with us.
(**) It wasn't simply in the Passion that the Creator (who is Christ) surrendered himself into the hands of his creatures; it was at the Creation that he first did that.
It isn't merely in the Lord's Supper (hey, I'm a low-chruch Protestant) that we eat Christ, and live thereby ... it is that even to exist, the Creation feeds off the Creator. Thus, ultimately, "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you"; for Christ is the Life of the world.
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