Transformative People

(Fresco on the wall of an Armenian Church taken by me in 2015. Bullet holes courtesy of occupying Soviet soldiers)

I don’t know how many people, like me, want to make a difference, to work for good, but find themselves thwarted again and again by stuff. More than a few I suspect.

In my case, the obstacles along the way seem to multiply the harder I try to overcome them. Sometimes its a bit like walking through quicksand. The temptation to give up and climb onto the easier path is a strong one. Fighting injustice, caring for the poor, loving my neighbour and all that sort of thing is all very well and good. It’s just that it’s hard to keep going when the odds seem stacked against you.

Yes, I am feeling a little discouraged, but these things ebb and flow. It’s not all those people out there who don’t share my beliefs who get to me. What discourages me and presses my buttons most are the attitudes of some of my fellow ‘Christians’. I have met some of the most inspiring people in Christian circles, but unfortunately, the opposite is also true.

Some congregations are more like social clubs than anything else. The most animated part of the church experience for them is the coffee and chat afterwards; enthusiasm and engagement rarely rising above the comatose while they sit through the worship. The big interest items in these congregations are social functions, usually fund raisers, and the congregational meetings, at which weighty matters like budgets are discussed. Sitting through experiences like these I amuse myself by imagining one of the early Christian apostles wandering in and being confused by what they see. Seat warmers, hymn singers, response mutterers, but no evidence of people being nourished and equipped to go out into the world and make a difference.

Congregations like this, and there are many of them, are dying, and they deserve to. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, what their purpose is. Making strategic plans that are never followed? Getting the balance of music right? Or being Christ’s followers sent into the world to bring hope, love and acceptance where there is little of any of these?

Anglican theologian, N. T. Wright, is more sanguine than I am when he writes: “No matter what your worldview, your beliefs, or your culture, you will find Jesus haunting, disturbing, and attractive”. Well, you wouldn’t come across such a Jesus at some of the congregations I know.

The great majority of people don’t find Jesus ‘haunting, disturbing and attractive’ because that is nothing like the Jesus they have been introduced to. By and large, if they think of Jesus at all, they envision a caricature easily dismissed for the nonsense it is. It is a great pity that many people have rejected a Jesus who never existed, and has no relationship to the Jesus of the Bible, when the real deal is indeed haunting, disturbing and attractive.

So what of the great mass of people today who wouldn’t walk into a church ever, if they could avoid it? I sometimes find it easy to agree with them.

Wright continues:

“THE WORD God is a heavy, clunky little syllable. It drops like a lead weight into otherwise cheerful conversations.

the popular image of God as a bully in the sky who makes odd demands and becomes dangerously petulant if people ignore him.”

Wright congratulates people who have rejected such a God:

“They are right. That God—the dull, distant, and dangerous one—does not exist.

Is that old bearded figure, waiting on a cloud to receive the recently dead, even remotely like the God of the Bible?” The answer of course, is no.”

Not surprisingly, very many people reject such a misconstrued God. He is filed away, with other childhood tales. Many peoples’ understanding of God is based on childish misconceptions which have never been replaced by grown-up ones. They have never been replaced by grown-up ones because church goers have become comfortable sitting in their Christian ghettos, while the world goes its own way. They have forgotten who they are. No risk taking, imprisonment or crucifixions for them. Ignoring their local community, they hold endless discussions about ‘mission’, always done by someone else, somewhere else.

There ends the rant. If you are still with me, it’s not all bad. There is hope.

Two more Wright quotes follow that contain a vision for what can and should be. I will read them again. Afterwards I will remember who I am, and what I need to be working towards. No time then for discouragement or disillusionment.

“We know what the power of the world looks like. When push comes to shove, as it often does, it is the power of violence, using the threat of pain and death. It is, yes, the power of tanks and bombs, and also of guns and knives and whips and prisons and barbed wire and bulldozers. Weapons to destroy people’s lives; machines to destroy their homes. Cruelty in the home or at work. Malice and manipulation where there should be gentleness, kindness, and wisdom. Jesus’s power is of a totally different sort, as he explained to the Roman governor a few minutes before the governor sent him to his death—thereby proving the point. The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.”

“the power behind the cosmos is not blind chance, nor yet brute force, but love. It is a delighted love that celebrates the goodness and specialness of every part of creation and of the extraordinary, brilliant, pulsating entirety of it. A love that cares for and cares about the smallest creature and the farthest star. A love that made one creature in particular, humans, to share uniquely in the capacity to receive and to give love, and so to share uniquely in the vocation to work with the grain of the Creator’s intention, to bring his work to its wonderful intended fulfillment. There are many things in the world as it now is that conspire to make us forget this great truth. The good news of Jesus is there not only to remind us of it but to transform us with it so that we in turn may become transformative people.”

A Life of Dreams

(Image of the Carina Nebula – Wikicommons)

 

 

I'm the first to admit it. I'm a nerd. A dreamy nerd, but a nerd.

Have been, on and off, right through my life. Now in my sixties I'm more adept at reading social cues than I used to be, and have learned to temper the hard angles of my nerdishness, but looking back at the nerdish boy-man of yesteryear I see a pattern.

 

As a boy I liked to read much more than to play sport. Still do, but that's more of a physical imperative now, with aches and pains and such. I lived in my mind then, designing intricate palaces, imagining great adventures in this world and out of it. I would spend hours inventing board games and playing them by myself. When encyclopedias were books, I revered them, leafing through and vacuuming up information about everything and nothing.

 

As I said, I was a little different . . . to say the least. A nerd.

 

Gadgets fascinated me; not so much fixing them, but using and understanding them. I was pretty much clueless when it came to repairs. The only workshop I felt comfortable in, was the one inside my mind.

 

And then I discovered astronomy. With a school friend who shared my passion, we would spend nights in the back yard gazing through small telescopes, entranced by what we saw and developing an encyclopedic knowledge of the night sky.

 

Yeah, I know . . . risk takers we were . . . adventurers. When other young teen males were dreaming of their sporting heroes, pop music, cars they would like to own, or girls, our dreams were extraterrestrial.

 

Astronomy was the first of a series of interests to grab me and inspire me to dream. As it turned out my mathematics scores did not let me realise my dreams of becoming an astronomer, and in hindsight that was no bad thing. You see, although I didn't know it, I was barking up the wrong tree as they say. Along with the wonder and physical beauty of the universe, which I love to this day, I had absorbed a trusting belief that the answer to my dreams was out there somewhere waiting for me to discover it. Sort of like Douglas Adams' boffins in his book “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” when they asked the great god-like super computer for the answer to 'life, the universe and everything'. The answer they got was 42.

 

Just as I did eventually, those boffins walked away glumly, disillusioned, except it took me a good few years, a physics degree, wrong turns and blind alleys to realise I'd been sold a pup. Ever slow to see the really important things in life, it was only in the fullness of years that I began to appreciate that although there might be exciting dreams aplenty in science and technology, my dreams were now to be found in an entirely different direction.

 

Mind you, I admit I remain prone to bouts of nerdish indulgence. I'm more excited about the latest toy drone I'm flying in the lounge room than is my grandson who has just received it as a birthday present. I'm interested in reference material of all types: Data tables of vehicle performance; Google Maps; Google Earth; optical devices; wiring diagrams of all types. These are but a few of my remaining guilty pleasures. Furthermore I read books on byzantine history, political analysis, German and Italian language learning, and I am learning to play classical guitar. There, I've said it! What a weight off my conscience. Us nerds carry a lot of guilt about being different.

 

But, where was I? Yes, my dreams. Nerds have them no less than most people, you know.

 

I used to dream about gadgets. It seems to me that gadgets are gadgets, and as fascinating and addictive as they may be, they remain gadgets. Computers, wireless devices, CAT scanners, GPS modules, hadron colliders, telescopes. Some of them produce data and information. Some of that is meaningful to me. None of it is the stuff of my dreams now.

 

Which begs the question: What does a nerdish old man dream?

 

My old school friend reminded me this morning via email of our shared interest in astronomy as boys and it inspired me to write this blog entry. Not surprisingly, my dreams have evolved along with me in the decades since those evenings in the back yard with a telescope. Dreams of what I would do with my life are no longer relevant. Such dreams have been rendered obsolete by the passage of time. I know what I am doing with my life now, and I am content.

 

Possibilities of meeting alien life forms or communicating with them via sophisticated gadgetry no longer seem quite so likely. The answer may be out there somewhere, but I didn't ever find it, and my questions, and dreams, are different now.

 

Now I dream of being accepted and valued for who I am: an old guy with nerdy tendencies, some of which he has learned to temper.

I dream of letting go of self importance and of embracing humility.

I dream of letting go of the need to know and to be in control.

I dream my wife, children and grandchildren will know I love them unreservedly.

I dream of being a good and true friend.

I dream of bringing smiles to people who need them.

I dream of being as one with my creator.

 

(Image of the Crab Nebula – Wikicommons)

 

 

 

So, the dreams change, bringing with them different questions that have different answers.

 

 

I guess life is about people, not gadgets. If you knew that all along, why didn't you sit me down and explain it to me when I was young?

 

(Image – Wikicommons)

 

 

In a life of dreams, I have indeed been a slow learner.

 

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An Easter Reflection from the other side of the Mirror.

(A thousand year old image of the risen Christ in the Republic of Georgia, damaged by bullet impacts, courtesy of the soldiers of Comrade Stalin. Photo taken October 2015)

I’ve been thinking.

“He is risen!”

The words announced in countless churches each Easter Sunday. The response “He is risen indeed!” following naturally from legions of lips. Spoken with conviction, it is comforting to hear it and to respond, surrounded by people of shared beliefs and a common faith. They are not just words. They’re a statement of trust and, to me anyway, a profound mystery.

Now it has to be said that not everyone shares Christian faith or beliefs. Certainly not the Russian soldiers who expressed their contempt in a tangible way on the above image. Others prefer their bullets metaphorical. Not that they are any less contemptuous.

Faith can be a fragile, tricky thing. Ask anyone who claims to have it. While we erect our defences to repel boarders, if we are honest (and that’s a big ‘if’), having faith of any sort can be a messy, risky business. And not just for the supernatural variety! My secular agnostic and atheist friends, who sometimes disparage my faith, do not always acknowledge their own faiths. It may be in other, non supernatural, areas, but they have it, along with the fragilities and risks that go with all faiths.

Be it faith in science, human logic, rationalism, personal relationships, material possessions. . . or our own ability to manage things . . . even in our own ability to cross the road safely . . . I just can’t imagine any person lives entirely without faith of some sort, in something.

Nevertheless I am tempted to feel sorry for myself now and then. My faith is challenged in all sorts of ways and I don’t always like it when I see how fragile it is. Things are not going the way I would like them to. The rule book doesn’t apply the way I think it should. People can be unkind.

I can feel the temptation to pull up the drawbridges; to separate and protect myself from those who do not think as I do.

On this Easter Sunday, and in the midst of all these thoughts, the image of the bullet impacted risen Christ above speaks to me. I become aware of a profound and transcendent mystery that makes the fragility and vulnerability of my tiny faith seem superfluous.

The Christ in that image does not conform to my expectations. He does not reassure me or exhort me to shore up my faith and to paper over the cracks. My certainty is not important to him. He does not promise a strong faith to me. Instead he offers me a vision of damage inflicted by contemptuous Russian soldiers maybe 70 or so years ago. Bullets that completely missed their mark, then, now and always.

The Christ in that image speaks a message that transcends my expectations and my need to be in charge. He speaks of a truth that matters more than differences of opinion, the categories we create for each other, and the walls we build around ourselves. That truth does not depend on the strength of my faith or the certainty of my convictions. It is, and will always be, stronger than bullets and will outlast hate and contempt.

The Christ in that image suggests a direction quite different from what I see myself sometimes taking at present: To try to build bridges rather than walls; to try not to fear contempt and ridicule of my ideas and my faith, as some things just don’t matter; and to try not to be discouraged by the fragility of my own faith and abilities.

The risen Christ is still amongst us despite the bullets, and countless other attempts to destroy him and his message. The risen Christ transcends bullets, and even manages to thrive despite my own fragile faith.

What a mystery!

Glory be to God!

On those insights, on this Easter Sunday, my faith can relax a little.

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Heaven on a Beach

 

Just returned from a drive to Fingal Headland in New South Wales. There was no particular reason to go, other than to get out of the house for a while. It was a good opportunity to do some photography, so why not?

 

I've also just finished reading a second book by Rob Bell, titled “Love Wins”. It left me with lots to think over about the way I understand heaven and hell. You might think this is a strange coupling: Not heaven with hell so much, but beach photography with either of them.

 

Well, I think it's a perfectly natural combination. But first I should explain.

 

Rob Bell has a lot to answer for. He has started me thinking about the heaven and the hell I believe in, and reminded me of the heaven and hell I do not.

 

The heaven I understand and believe in is not a place up in the sky. It is not full of clouds, angels playing harps, or where an old man with a white beard sits at a set of pearly gates deciding whom to allow inside. That, in my humble opinion, is a childish understanding that has no basis in reality. It is a heaven that is very popular mainly with people who do not believe in the idea of a heaven at all. It is a heaven that is easy to poke fun at and dismiss as having any relevance. It is not part of Christian faith or belief and I very much doubt that it is the type of heaven anyone much over nine years of age could believe in.

 

My heaven is nothing like that. Not even close. It is not bound in place or time, yet it can be found anywhere and anytime; especially on a visit to the beach, but really, anytime and anywhere at all. This morning, walking up the sand path through brush and palms, listening to the roar of the surf, I had no doubt at all that I was experiencing heaven. When my wife arrives home, and I've remembered to do all the chores and she is smiling, heaven touches me. When the grandchildren run to me; when I know the love of friends; when I am out walking; heaven is more real to me than I can express. I can touch heaven in the trust of a child, the smile of a passerby, and even sometimes even when I worship in church. Once in a special while I feel God's presence and am in no doubt at all about what heaven feels like.

 

Heaven is a spiritual reality to me. It could not be more real if it were made of concrete and I tripped over it.

Now . . . hell. Will I surprise you be saying that red devils holding pitchforks and tending furnaces are a complete nonsense to me? Hellfire and brimstone might once have been useful for keeping ignorant people in line, stopping them stealing, raping and treating each other badly, but that never was very effective as a deterent and it has nothing to do with reality in my humble opinion. Once again, such a vision is not in any sense one I could imagine many, if any, people over the age of nine believing in. I do not believe in such a hell and I am not worried in the least about going to such a place.

 

The hell I believe in is much worse.

 

Just as I believe heaven is not a place as we know it (but is real), so I understand hell is not a place but is just as real. I believe it is where we find ourselves when we have no hope, no love and where we have lost our connection to our creator. Too airy fairy? Well then I imagine hell is not so hard to believe in when you've been betrayed, abused, bullied or excluded and feel like a worthless piece of shit. I imagine hell is an ever present reality for someone who no longer believes they are worth anything, or for someone who is in the midst of a war, is drug addicted, has a wasting disease, watches their child die, or when for whatever reason beauty, joy, love and happiness have departed.

 

Get the picture?

Hell is real enough.

 

Now, having written this stuff, and I just had to after reading Rob Bell's book, it may be that I have given the impression that I think heaven and hell are really only just concepts for the here and now; this present life. I don't believe that. Yes, I am sure they are real and present here in this life, but that's a long way from the full story.

 

I believe heaven and hell are timeless realities extending beyond death, and I cannot even begin to explain why, except that I know it in the depths of my being. I should say that I agree with Rob Bell when he argues that a loving God does not and can not banish anyone beyond his love and so I guess also that I will make more than a few Christians angry with me when I say this. After all, a whole lot of people have spent a whole lot of time and effort praying earnestly, doing good works, and considering themselves more worthy of heaven than others who do not do these things. If those 'others' do not go to hell when they die, that doesn't sound fair. I understand that.

 

I don't believe there are no consequences for people who reject God. However I believe that no one is beyond God's love, whether alive or dead. To explain why I believe this would take far too much space but I didn't want you to think I was one of those who took delight in the thought of all those nasty non believers, back sliders, sinners and assorted unworthies being shunted off to eternal hell after death. I just can't believe God does that. For a start, if that were to be true then where does a recalcitrant sinner like me stand?

 

Like I said, if I were to try and tidy up all the loose ends I have unravelled, we would be here too long.

 

Sorry, that's the best I can do, but Rob Bell makes a good attempt in his book and it is well worth reading (available on Amazon Kindle).

 

We can be aware of heaven anywhere and anytime yet our own private hell may be very real too.

 

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Untitled

“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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An Inconvenient Truth

It was a front page banner headline. The family was well known, respected and popular in their small town. Pillars of their community and farm owners. The father a volunteer rural fire fighter. The mother a nurse at the local emergency centre. The children, two girls and a boy, all under 10, looked happy and just a touch mischievous in the family portrait that took up most of my ipad screen.

The picture was beautiful and arresting – pregnant with life. It was as if, after that moment of frozen photographic time, each of them were about to sprung into animation. The sisters teasing their brother; the mother distracted by the antics, and the father smiling at it all.

I have not been able to bring myself to re-publish the family photo here.

The news story said the father had taken a shotgun and blown his wife and children away, then drove away before apparently thinking the better of it, and killing himself.

Nobody had any idea anything was wrong. Their neighbours were stunned. Nobody had a bad word to say about the family. A perfect family one day; utterly obliterated the next. 

(My photograph – Church candles in Hamburg, Germany)

I have silent tears writing this. I find that I cannot bring myself to visualise those last few minutes from which there is no return. Even less can I imagine what the father can have had in his mind. Nevertheless, deeply disturbing images are circulating at the edge of my consciousness. Understanding this act and placing it in the scheme of things is a step too far for me.

I do not mean that I want the father to suffer. No doubt he did, and if the afterlife calls out for a reckoning, he will. That sort of thinking is beyond me as I sit and write. I’m grateful that I can leave that part of it to God. Instead what grips me is a feeling of violation. My comfortable little everyday world which is snug and safe, and in which things are mostly just, mostly predictable, has once again shown beyond doubt that evil is never far away.

“I’m back!” A foul disgusting presence hisses. “Was I out of sight, out of mind? Well, this was just a little reminder for you.”

If I needed any reminder of the reality of evil, this news story provided it afresh.

The news story had a shelf life of maybe 48 hours tops. I suspect the memory of those young children smiling mischievously into the camera will stay with me rather longer than that.

I remember a visit Sue and I made to the Jewish Museum in Berlin a few years ago. In particular I remember one exhibit. It consisted of hundreds of roughly fabricated metal ‘faces’, all with unique expressions, lying strewn across a floor. They represented some the lost persons who had been slaughtered in the holocaust. It would have been very easy to have walked away from that exhibit in despair. Instead it was a stimulus for me to remember that the evil which perpetrated the holocaust has not triumphed, and never will.

 (My photograph – Jewish Museum, Berlin)

Evil, it seems, will always be close by. Those who laugh at the existence of evil are, in my opinion, fools. I take it very seriously. I have seen enough to know it is real, but I believe also that somehow, it is no match for good.

With that belief, I am still shocked and disturbed at things like this family’s fate, but I know with a quiet confidence that such things do not define my existence or yours. Evil is what it is. It is not the answer and it is most definitely not the winner.

Forgive me God, but I just wish you would move a bit more quickly to crush and eliminate evil. But then I realise that would mean you would need to attend to those parts of me that need crushing and eliminating as well.

As I said, forgive me God.

Does God need our permission to exist?

This was published today on a blog site I follow known as ‘Argus’ by AJC Akehurst who writes occasionally for the Quadrant magazine website. I thought it was worth repeating:

THE ONLY QUESTION THAT REALLY MATTERS

Whenever I am confronted with the question of the existence of God – really the only question of any enduring consequence – I ask myself which is the more likely: that everything that exists (and much more that I and everyone else do not know exists) came about by chance or that it was generated by the action of a creative force. I cannot but see that the latter is the greater probability. Probability is not certainty but it gives you something to, as it were, take a punt on, a starting point for faith. Accept it, and all the rest falls into place, philosophically, physically and theologically. This conclusion leads me to consider agnosticism a bit of a cop-out.

20 January 2013
ACJ Akehurst

I would agree and ask why God’s existence needs to be contingent upon human ability to rationalise it. We humans are a self centred lot! Maybe (as I believe) God just is – and maybe he is, whether or not we have the brain power to define or explain him.

Just perhaps, he does not await our permission to exist.
Worth thinking about . . No?