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“Because sometimes you need a biologist,

and sometimes you need a poet.

Sometimes you need a scientist,

and sometimes you need a song.”

“You, me, love, quarks, sex, chocolate, the speed of light— it’s all miraculous, and it always has been.”

“It’s one thing to stand there in a lab coat with a clipboard, recording data about lips. It’s another thing to be kissed.”

 

 

 

Did any of that get your attention?

 

I've just spent the morning reading a short book I downloaded from the Amazon Kindle bookstore: “What we talk about when we talk about God” by Rob Bell. You can do that sort of thing when you're retired; one of the reasons I enjoy my life out of the workforce.

 

I'm not usually intererested in books on this subject as they are mostly a big yawn. Neither do I often find myself glued to a book, unwilling to put it down (well, actually I was using an ipad, but you know what I mean). Rob Bell has a special gift. He can articulate spiritual stuff like no one else I remember. I kept saying things to myself like: “yep” and “ah hah” as he painted a picture using common life experiences of a God we might be aware of deep inside ourselves, but whom is rarely spoken of.

 

This is not your standard apologetic book arguing for the existence of God. No way. Not even close. For a start it's not even the slightest bit dogmatic (ok, maybe it's there but I didn't see it).

 

Bell doesn't pretend that he has all the answers. He begins from a place of doubt and acknowledges the power of science, the paradox of human beings, and the incongruity of the miraculous, to present a God I can accept. More than that, he presents a God I recognise.

 

He doesn't avoid or undermine science. He celebrates it, along with the wonder and uncertainty of existence. To paraphrase him, science is a powerful tool, but is no arbiter of reality. He points out that we are all 'people of faith', whether we are religious believers, atheists, believers in the supremacy of science, or in the supernatural. He does not attack atheists. He reminds them, gently, of what they have in common with 'believers':

 

“Sometimes people who believe in God are referred to as “people of faith.” Which isn’t the whole truth, because everybody has faith. To believe in God requires faith. To experience this world and its endless surprise and mystery and depth and then emphatically declare that is has no common source, it is not headed somewhere, and it ultimately has no meaning— that takes faith as well.”

Bell is also no usual defender of the status quo, and I kind of like that. I feel a deep resonance between my faith and his ideas:

 

“you can be very religious and invoke the name of God and be able to quote lots of verses and be well versed in complicated theological systems and yet not be a person who sees . It’s one thing to sing about God and recite quotes about God and invoke God’s name; it’s another be aware of the presence in every taste, touch, sound, and embrace.”

How good is that?

 

I have long been a bit of a rebel, uncomfortable with the pietism of a few church people. It's nice to come across a writer who expresses that better than I can.

 

“So when we talk about God, we’re talking about our brushes with spirit, our awareness of the reverence humming within us, our sense of the nearness and the farness, that which we know and that which is unknown, that which we can talk about and that which eludes the grasp of our words, that which is crystal- clear and that which is more mysterious than ever. And sometimes language helps, and sometimes language fails.”

Absolutely! He's talking about the God I have faith in. How come I never thought to say that myself?

Bell goes on to explain the essence of the Christian Gospel as clearly as anyone, and more so than most:

 

“. . as advanced and intelligent and educated as we are, there are some things about the human condition that have not changed in thousands of years. It’s very important that we are honest about this glaring reality. We have progressed so incredibly far, invented so many things, found an endless array of new ways to process and share and communicate information, and yet the human heart has remained significantly unchanged, in that it still possesses the tremendous capacity to produce extraordinary ignorance, evil, and destruction. We need help.”

“. . the counterintuitive power of gospel: When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.”

So, take it or leave it I guess. Believe that you are in control or understand intuitively, as I do, that you are not. Bell would argue that as long as people believe they are in control, God is inaccessible to them. Pretty harsh stuff, no? Probably not what many want to hear. I must confess I have been a slow learner on this issue, having learned what little I have learned after bitter experience.

 

I loved this:

“We’re all, in one way or another, addicts, aren’t we? Some are addicted to the praise of others, some to working all the time, some to winning, others to worrying, some to perfection, some to being right, strong, beautiful, thin . . . perhaps you are enslaved to your own self- sufficiency, or drugs or alcohol or sex or money or food. “

Sort of puts an interesting spin on things, no? Do you think of yourself as an addict? Or do you (unlike me) have it all under control?

 

And this:

“And so we come to the table exactly as we are, some days on top of the world, other days barely getting by. Some days we feel like a number, like a machine, like a mere cog in a machine, severed and separated from the depth of things, this day feeling like all the others. Other days we come feeling tuned in to the song, fully alive, hyperaware of the God who is all in all. The point of the experience isn’t to create special space where God is, over and against the rest of life where God isn’t. The power is in the striking ability of this experience to open our eyes all over again (and again and again) to the holiness and sacred nature of all of life, from family to friends to neighbors to money and breath and sex and work and play and food and wine.”

This is my life! This is how my life seems to me. I think Bell is on to a sublime truth here (and in so many other places in this book). The good and the bad; the sacred and the mundane; the wrong choices; the repeated disappointments with myself and the insight that tells me that nonetheless I continue to matter and that my life is not futile. This is how God is real to me. Maybe my life is not the same as yours. So be it.

 

I recommend this book warmly to you, whether or not you are call yourself a 'believer'. I found his writing honest, generous, challenging, humble and insightful. I hope you too will find it full of 'ah hah' moments.

It would possibly not be a surprise to learn that not everyone is happy about his work.

 

A quick glance through the comments on the Kindle page shows that Rob Bell is not orthodox enough for some and far too 'loose' and liberal for others. For this particular conservative Christian though, who is also a bit of a rebel, and a bit of a mystic, I was reminded that I am not alone in the way I experience God.

 

I thank him for that.

__________________________

 

 

“The peace we are offered is not a peace that is free from tragedy, illness, bankruptcy, divorce, depression, or heartache. It is peace rooted in the trust that the life Jesus gives us is deeper, wider, stronger, and more enduring than whatever our current circumstances are, because all we see is not all there is and the last word about us and our struggle has not yet been spoken. There is great mystery in these realities, the one in which we are strong when we are weak, the one in which we come to the end of ourselves, only to discover that God has been there the whole time, the God who is for us.”

 

 

 

 

 

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It’s all Greek to me

A few years ago I studied a semester of Classical Greek and realised quickly that I was never going to be an expert. A beautiful language, its grammar has been more than a match for smarter people than me. I read somewhere that in the days of the British Empire, civil servants were selected on the basis of their success in Greek at school and university. The theory must have been that if they could handle Greek grammar, they could handle anything.

So, I ask myself, doesn’t that mean at least some ancient Greeks must have been pretty smart? Especially since, early on, Greek sentences were written without spaces between words. Howeasyisthissentencetoreadwithoutspaces? Oh, and I should add, that the Greeks used to jumble up sentence word order (as we know it) at the same time. For example: sentenceeasyspacesreadtowithoutthishowis. Phew!

I’m told those early Greeks were no slouches in Philosophy and Mathematics either. One of them, Eratosthenes, worked out a method of measuring the diameter of the Earth – not bad without electricity, a telescope, or even a GPS!

But wait a minute! We’re talking about 2500 years ago. Aren’t we supposed to be more advanced these days? They didn’t even have flushing toilets. We have laser guided ordnance. Haven’t humans evolved to be smarter over the generations? Well, hold that thought.

I think it was Isaac Newton, the renowned English Physicist and Mathematician in the seventeenth century, who said that all he had done was to “stand on the shoulders of giants”; his predecessors. He was very aware of the genius of those who had gone before him.

Could it be, the idea that we are more intelligent, more civilized, even more moral, than people in earlier times, might be just a comforting myth? Granted we do have more toys and gadgets. Some of us live in more stable societies under the rule of law. But how different from our ancestors are we really?

A peasant farmer living in medieval Europe would have had to manage the environment with consumate skill; growing, harvesting and storing food, making tools and clothing, and defending family from all sorts of threats. One thing is certain: In such a challenging environment there would have been no place for stupidity, and much call for intelligence, craftiness and innovation. (By the way, have you ever read any Old English? Another beautiful and complex language; much more so than modern English. Granted that not too many peasants would have been acquainted with the finer points of the grammar though).

OK, life in earlier times may have been ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, but does that mean we would have done things any better if we had been alive then? Today we live longer and have human rights legislation, but have we abolished bullies and victims? Eliminated crime? What about poverty? Disease? Is injustice still a problem? War? Violence? Selfishness? Greed? How are we doing with all these? Are our toys and gadgets helping out? Do the stories we tell ourselves about our superiority convince us?

The way I see things, the common thread in the human condition has always been humans – us; ourselves; we; you and I. “I’m only human!” has been pretty much flogged to death as an excuse down the ages. I can imagine a Greek slave muttering something like it under his breath as his master berated him, just as I can also clearly imagine Michelangelo swearing after dropping a paint brush onto the floor.

If then, we’re only human, what does that mean?

There seem to be two main ways to look at that question. One is to see our flawed humanity as a problem; an embarassing problem; and to keep on trying to eliminate undesirable traits in people for their own and the greater good. More laws, more regulations, more supervision, more moralising: Don’t drink or smoke too much! Reduce your sugar and salt intake! Look after the planet! Respect Human Rights! Vote for policies to reduce discrimination! The list is long, and growing. The underlying assumption is that it is possible for humans to be made perfect, or at least morally superior to how they are now.

Another, quite different way to look at it is not to see it as ‘a problem’ at all, but rather as a given, a constant. From this perspective, all attempts at moralising and improving society will always stumble over the very nature of humans themselves. This nature has always been what it is: While we humans are capable of great achievement and noble selflessness, we are inevitably also wracked with annoying and often unpleasant and downright destructive characteristics that continue to poke their heads up however much we try to hide them. Seen this way, human nature cannot be fixed by decree or by moral striving.

If there are any humans on Earth who do not live the reality of this basic tension between goodness and moral failings I have not heard about them and have certainly not met them; although my wife, Sue, comes close to avoiding moral failings, naturally.

Self help books and Pop Psych gurus will all promise to unlock our human potential, but if they neglect our primary inbuilt tendency to stuff up serially, they are talking hot air. There are no perfect human beings. There are no ‘almost’ perfect human beings. To believe otherwise is to shut our eyes to human experience. The Mother Theresas and the Martin Luther Kings soar above us yet they all have clay feet. Every single one of them, no matter how much we might prefer to pretend otherwise.

We humans are exquisite contradictions. We are smart, but even the smartest of us does really stupid things now and then. We revere beauty yet wallow in ugliness. We grow wise yet do stuff we shake our heads over. We yearn for community yet fight our neighbours over petty things. We set out with grand plans, but find ourseves mugged by reality.

The term ‘Original Sin’ has fallen out of favour in our world. We don’t need ancient superstition. Still less do we need to hear we are flawed deep within our natures in ways we cannot begin to fix. Despite the unbroken trail of evidence, we believe we can do it ourselves thanks! We like to be told we are the masters of our destiny. Talk of ‘Original Sin’ makes us uncomfortable because it doesn’t fit with what we want to hear.

Our ancestors mostly thought otherwise. They trusted in their abilities and were not stupid, but they also realised they were vulnerable and weak before their creator, whatever they believed their creator to be. Which group would you say had a better grasp on reality?

That’s a question worth asking, isn’t it?