God is an ideal. Pure good, no faults. Eternal, unchanging. That is beyond any human reality. Maybe by focusing love on a perfect God, we actually make it more difficult to accept imperfect reality, to love imperfect people (including ourselves).

Can God be both light and dark? How do we understand the world of light and dark, the people — the real, flawed people — we are called to love, as the beloved creation of a God of all light, of steadfast love?

How do we learn to love the imperfect through the adoration of the perfect?

Is this why the psalmist so often has God changing, growing angry or simply forgetting him? Is it easier to love people if we don’t hold too closely to an image of God as unchanging perfection, always worthy of love?

Perhaps the proper focus of words is this world. God cannot be approached in words. My thoughts, my words neither contain nor define God.

Words are bricks and mortar. We can use words to build strong and true and needed houses to live in. Houses of ritual and dogma. But we cannot use words to feed us, to sustain us. Not through words do we grow, not usually and not easily. Even as bricks and mortar, words become more prison than home if we are not careful.

Thoughts and words are our homes, our shelter.
God is our earth and sky, our food and water.

In a voice barely above a whisper, one of my third grade boys asked, “Will there be tests?”

“There are never any tests in Sunday School,” I reassured them all. “And here’s why: Teachers care if we pass or fail tests; God doesn’t care if we pass or fail; God only cares that we try.”

And so, once again, Lady Wisdom blessed my teaching and used it to lighten my own darkest doubts with a spotlight on the essential. It’s enough that I keep trying. Success is optional (and by no means guaranteed).

And so, once again, the Paraclete teaches through me and to me.

A few days ago I read this quote from Carl McColman’s Joy Unspeakable: “The problem is not that privileged people are drawn to contemplation. The problem, as I see it, is that the contemplative community has not yet found a way to step beyond its privileged pedigree and become a more truly multi-cultural and diverse community of contemplatives.”

I’ve thought about it for days because something about it bugs me. And here’s the closest I was able to get in words: I think there is power and necessity to this point of view, but I also think there is power and necessity to the opposite point of view: “meditation”, “contemplation” (in the sense it is used here) and “mindfulness” are, perhaps, not privileges that need to be shared but correctives. Correctives that God graciously offers to those of us too much dependent upon words and thoughts, too little skilled in approaching God in the immediate exigencies of NOW (which, as C.S. Lewis says, is where time touches eternity). So maybe the practice of meditation is not a privilege but a corrective. Maybe those of us who use it are not uniquely privileged but rather impoverished. And maybe, with a little luck and a lot of Divine assistance, we can learn how to hold both of those views simultaneously.

Then, in a coincidence that I choose to see as something of a Divine affirmation, today in a transcript of Maria Kalman’s interview with Krista Tibbett for On Being, I read this:

It’s taken me these many years to understand that a human being can encompass very contradictory ideas and feelings at the exact same time. They’re not separate; they don’t even follow each other so much. They just live in you. And for me, to clarify what I love, to do what’s amazing, to understand my confusion or my sorrow and to still continue to — I mean the thing about it is that you persevere. And so I do follow my nose, and I do have many rituals that I love following; and I love breaking the rituals, so I’m not a prisoner of the construct of my day.

Sometimes, I’m spending too much time wandering around when I actually have work to do, but I always say that’s — “Oh, well, this must be the work that I need to do right now, before I do that other work.” And really, I think, the more that I work and the more that I see what my life is, the more simple it becomes and very elemental. I mean it’s really — it’s very boring, actually, for probably — if most people had to live it, they would go, “Oh, that’s it?”

Namaste

Forgiveness is just another word for loving the real person rather than our idealised image.

Humility is accepting that both evil and an omnipotent, loving, good God are real.

It has taken my working through over a hundred psalms to truly understand that God is not changeable – it is our perceptions of God and our feelings about God that are changeable. The psalmists live through storms of despair and doubt and feeling that God is angry and has abandoned them but return again and again to the calm climate of joy and praise.

OK, folks, maybe you better sit down because I’m about to disagree with Jesus. (Not that I’m full of myself or anything; after all, He’s just a human being like me — except for that part about Him also being God.)