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In Finding God in All Things William Barry quotes John MacMurray as follows:
I am always disturbed by the "my Higher Power got me a parking place so I could get to this meeting on time" type of spirituality. If you have chosen your Fairy Godmother as your Higher Power you are headed for trouble. When tragedy, or even just some really crumby, depressing stuff strikes, you will be faced with a crisis of faith. Santa Claus didn't deliver. And it's a LOT more wrenching to fire a Higher Power than a demanding sponsor.
A true (as in effective) spirituality does not pretend to protect you from life but rather to give you perspective and comfort in facing it. It is true that "things will always work out". The catch is that they may work out in a very, very bad way for you. Natural disasters, crimes, genocide, economic crashes, terrorism - all these and more do happen. A spirituality that pretends they don't is insane. A spirituality that claims to guarantee that they will only happen to other people is horrifyingly egocentric and as such deeply immoral.
All religion...is concerned to overcome fear. We can distinguish real religion from unreal by contrasting their formulae for dealing with negative motivation. The maxim of illusory religion runs: "Fear not; trust in God and he will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you"; that of real religion, on the contrary, is "Fear not; the things that you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of."I think this is a brilliant distinction and one that applies to some of the types of spiritualities we hear people express in meetings.
I am always disturbed by the "my Higher Power got me a parking place so I could get to this meeting on time" type of spirituality. If you have chosen your Fairy Godmother as your Higher Power you are headed for trouble. When tragedy, or even just some really crumby, depressing stuff strikes, you will be faced with a crisis of faith. Santa Claus didn't deliver. And it's a LOT more wrenching to fire a Higher Power than a demanding sponsor.
A true (as in effective) spirituality does not pretend to protect you from life but rather to give you perspective and comfort in facing it. It is true that "things will always work out". The catch is that they may work out in a very, very bad way for you. Natural disasters, crimes, genocide, economic crashes, terrorism - all these and more do happen. A spirituality that pretends they don't is insane. A spirituality that claims to guarantee that they will only happen to other people is horrifyingly egocentric and as such deeply immoral.
Sometime in late September 2001 I had this very conversation with a guy I was sponsoring at the time. His question was really based on the "How could God let something this horrible happen?"
ReplyDeleteI explained my point of view which was based on my working belief of God, which was vastly different than his. My belief is this:
God is. God transcends the fields of opposites that we live in and experience. Our experience is a field of opposites. Male and female. Up and down. Black and white. Day and night. Good and bad. God transcends that. God is day and God is night. God is male and God is female. Not separate from them.
Therefore God is good and God is bad, only God is neither. The "judgment" of what is "good" and what is "bad" is where we "play God" and where, ultimately, we fall from grace. By sitting in judgment we decide what should or shouldn't happen, or what is just or unjust.
We rarely think that many times what seems good to us has likely been bad for someone else. Think of getting that great job offer, then think of the other 150 candidates who did not get it. Yet somehow we minimize their loss in order to feel that our gained was somehow ordained by God. When all along maybe it was our ego special mention. Life only seems to make sense if we can see our place in the universe. And while we may not realize it, this is still that child in us positioning itself in the center of the universe, just like our mother's told us we were acting like.
I have always felt a certain affinity for the definition I was given of "faith" by recovering alcoholics:
ReplyDelete"Faith is not the lack of fear. Faith is the ability to walk through the things that used to paralyze me, despite the fear."
I agree completely, Dave. I especially like
ReplyDelete"The "judgment" of what is "good" and what is "bad" is where we "play God" and where, ultimately, we fall from grace. By sitting in judgment we decide what should or shouldn't happen, or what is just or unjust."
That really reminds me of the Garden of Eden and the Fall myth.
I heard a guy say once at a meeting that, "God doesn't interfere with nature." This has always stuck with me and helps me accept "bad things" happening to "good people" as far as sickness and natural disasters go. It enables me to draw closer to God when I am in pain due to natural causes (death of a loved one, clinical depression, illness of a child) rather than get angry at God for "allowing" these things to happen and cut myself off from Him -like I used to do before coming to the program.
ReplyDelete