Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Spiritual Sunday
I’ve just finished rereading Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth, in which the author targets (among other things) religious believers in love with their own righteousness. We’re seeing a lot of that in America these days, including state legislators like my own (Tennessee’s), who are tumbling all over themselves to pass laws against abortion, the LGBTQ community, and books they contend are leading their children astray, along with the teachers who teach them. As the Gyptian sage Fardar Coram says in Pullman’s book,
The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right.
The passage reminds me of an Anne Lamott observation: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Lamott has also noted that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. With all the judgmental certainty going on these days, I share a poem which I discovered through reading Dan Clendenin’s indispensable website, Journey to Jesus. It was written by the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
The Place Where We Are Right
By Yehuda AmichaiFrom the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
The house could be any number of the world’s established religions. The whisperers are the doubters and the lovers who can help us reconnect with God. Religion is supposed to help us with this but, when it falls down on the job, then we need these doubters and lovers.
Jesus was one of them. Think of him as a mole, a plow.