Musings before Sunday dinner

"He floated back down 'cause he wanted to share/this key to the locks on the chains he saw everywhere/but first he was stripped, then he was stabbed/by faceless men, well fuck 'em/he still stands...

and he still gives his love, he just gives it away/and the love he receives is the love that is saved/and sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky/a human being that was given to fly"

                                                                                         Pearl Jam, "Given to Fly"


Sonia's been pretty strict about getting us to church lately, and if you show up enough, even if you try not to, you end up thinking about what God is or isn't.  When I was a kid we were at church every goddamn week (no pun intended), the Catholic version, and I remember, particularly as a younger child, being pretty goddamn aware that God was everywhere; God was like a bigger, more abstract version of my parents. He was keeping a constant eye on me, which of course was both good and bad. It was good because someone was always looking out for my well-being, but not so good because I could never be bad. I actually remember once, in second grade, asking for permission to use the bathroom even though I didn't have to go, I just wanted to get out of class, and when I got back I felt bad because I had lied to the teacher. I confessed and apologized to God right then and there.

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Among the (mostly) politically liberal Christians I attend church with, Reinhold Niebuhr is sort of the big shit of theologians. He is serious about his theology and also the responsibility of said theology to the world writ large. For example, Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes" fame described Niebuhr as 

"a man of God, but a man of the world as well. Dr. Niebuhr would seem to be saying that if a nation would survive and remain free, its citizens must use religion as a source of self-criticism, not as a source of self-righteousness."

Obviously, as a theologian, Niebuhr said a lot of things about the nature of God, but here's one, for flavor:

"I do not believe that ontological categories can do justice to the freedom either of the divine or the human person, or to . . . the forgiveness by God of man’s sin . . . . If it is “supernaturalistic” to affirm that faith discerns the key to specific meaning above the categories of philosophy, ontological or epistemological, then I must plead guilty of being a supernaturalist. The whole of the Bible is an exposition of this kind of supernaturalism. If we are embarrassed by this and try to interpret biblical religion in other terms, we end in changing the very character of Christian faith"

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A few years back, I was sort of spiritually searching. An older guy, factory worker, long white beard, skinny as a rail, camouflage baseball cap on, asked me, "Do you believe that you are the highest power?"  

"No," I responded.  

"So it follows that there is a higher power," he said. "Right?"  

I said, "Yeah, that makes sense."  

"And it follows," he said, "that if this power is higher than you, it is beyond your intellectual capacity. Right?"  

I thought a second and said, "Yeah, I guess so. Yes, absolutely." 

And he said, "So accept your higher power and move on. If you keep trying to intellectualize it, you'll just fuck it all up."

Yeah. Like that.

--Mark


--Mark