I want to be a person of God. I want my faith community to aid me in becoming a person of God. I want, in my faith community, to be able to use the word “God” without someone immediately following up with a comment about how uncomfortable they are with that word. I do not like listing our testimonies as a way of defining ourselves. I don’t like the SPICE acronym. And I don’t like suggesting that what we strive for is personal integrity rather than Truth.
If we are called to love our enemies, isn’t this how we are called to act? If God is love, then this is the nature of God. Isn’t this the way God works with us, wearying out all in us that is of a nature contrary to God? Faithfulness requires that we proceed in in the manner of love. If I am to be faithful it means I have to do more listening and less talking. It means I have to listen deeply and not just so that I can formulate the perfect response.
"Terrific energy is expended—civilizations are built up-excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks."
I am convinced that God’s true blessings are meant for everyone. When the Bible says the sun shines on the good and the evil alike, it points to the paradox of rewards but it also describes how God gives. God rains down blessings on us in great abundance. Indiscriminately. Not just on the “deserving.” The forces of evil would try to hoard those blessings for the few. But at the point, they get turned into something spoiled, like the manna from heaven the wandering Israelites tried to hoard.
I have found myself wondering how much of Meeting for Worship has become an idol. Do we come to meeting because of the silence, or because of our encounter with God? Are we silent because we are giving control to God, or because “that is what we do in meeting”? Is it most important that a message is Spirit-led, or that it is not too long, doesn’t use icky words, and comes from a speaker who doesn’t speak every week?
Especially as Friends we should change this behavior. We believe all people are created in the image of God, male and female, Greek and Jew, slave and free. We are all beloved children of God. We can all hear God and respond in faithfulness. Some of us seem to hear God “better” than others, or have a special sense of God that others don’t, but this is not based on gender—it’s based on the way the Spirit works in us as unique individuals.
Nathan Schneider writes in the NYTimes:
Modern arguments and evangelists and New Atheists have duped us into thinking that the interesting question is whether God exists; no, what mattered for Anselm was how we think about God and about one another.
The answer I found in his proof is no answer at all, no truly abstract, autonomous assurance that I can have all to myself. I have to stitch it out of memories, hopes and loved ones, as he did. It is no self-thinking thought; it’s a pleasure built out of language and sharing.
