I Haven’t A Clue
blog april 27
This seems a good time for this subject and I preface saying I am in way over my head. No scholar am I.
If you look at a circle, you cannot see where it begins or ends; a circle has no beginning and no end. It just goes round and round and round and round and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.
That’s how I look at God, as an unending circle that can’t be figured out. I believe that God and the circle had to start somewhere. That’s about as far as I get.
As far as the reason for the circle or God, I haven’t a clue. Which strikes me as perverse as it is the only question really worth asking and I’m certain I’ll be dead and buried and will still be asking the question from six feet under.
Last weekend a friend said that after 70 years I probably have a pretty good grasp on God and my beliefs. Well, no, I’m no more certain now than I was 60 years ago when I had to go to Jewish services and hear people mumble in a strange tongue while claiming to understand him or her or it.
That’s not a dig on people who have strong beliefs in God. I envy people who have survived life’s tragedies because of a strong faith. It just doesn’t make sense to me to put all my eggs in an imaginary basket of faith.
I know that the ranks of the faithful include some of the smartest people ever to walk the planet. Like Michelangelo. I’m sure he would not have spent so many years of agony and ecstasy painting the Sistine Chapel if he didn’t have a lock on his beliefs.
It’s just that things keep changing. A few thousand years ago, there were the Roman gods and goddesses. Then the druids worshipped trees and nature. And people worship animals and other people. It has always been so confusing because people have forever used God for personal gain or to impose their political will.
Get ready. If I had to be pinned down and couldn’t get up until I answered, I would say that God is another word for the force that created everything. He or she or it started it all. How and why are questions for people smarter than me.
And as for answers to the great questions, like why would God allow a Holocaust and the murder of 6 million Jews, I would say I haven’t a clue. Maybe he or she or it was on vacation at the time.
One common answer to such unanswerable questions is that we’re not smart enough to understand the reasons. That helps.
So it all comes down to faith and faith is the great cop out word. I don’t know why a tornado ripped through town and killed 200. Have faith that there is a reason. Why are little children killed by bombs in Syria when their only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Tell the children to have faith in their God.
Others have said that God created it all and pretty much left us to our own devices. Interesting. He or she or it can make a universe but he can’t manufacture humanity to do the right things. Doesn’t sound that hard for him or her or it, if he or she or it wanted to.
And why doesn’t he or she or it want to make it all good? One answer is that he or she or it gave us the structure and left it to people to find the answers. Now that really makes me feel better. Not.
More likely, I believe that the universe is its own reason for existing. Whatever that means. And that people have evolved over the eons and have brains to reason and the choice to kill each other or to make love.
I googled “who is god.” I found words from Apostle Paul in 1 Timothy 6:15–16. He described God as “the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen.”
As for God’s plan, King Nebuchadnezzar wrote to everyone in his empire: “He [the Lord] does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth. No one can hold back his hand or say to him: ‘What have you done?’” (Daniel 4:35).
I don’t know but those words sound like the all-powerful parent who says he does things “because he can.”
More salient are quotes from the theologian and novelist, C.S. Lewis. Here are a few:
“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
“God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.”
“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
“[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop.”
“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously — no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”
“He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.”
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”