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Re: strike me anywhere



Good words Fred. Thanks for posting them.
 I'm just hitting my 15 year mark as a Christian and it's only been the last 
few of those that I'm coming to realize (still processing) that most of the 
thoughts I've had about God were much too small. Which is ironic considering 
that I spent around 10 years as either an atheist or agnostic with no 
metaphysic, or seeking truth through a counterfeit drug/meditation/alternate 
reality sorta induced mysticism (mostly reading - Lilly, Casteneda, Dunne, 
etc. -  and courting the idea rather than doing, at least the drug part) 
then, after becoming a Christian, I realized that all my thinking about the 
universe was... much too small. As a Christian, I started studying 
apologetics and cults and argued that all the idea's THESE people had about 
God were , you got it... much too small.  In an attempt to fully understand 
him they had milked the mystery right out of Him.  But, in my studies, I came 
to realize that even this doctrinally correct God I was reading about in all 
the *right* books -- yes, even He... was much too small. So here I am, this 
side of authors like Buechner and Tillich, this side of a more open reading 
of scripture, more baffled and confused than ever about this God I worship 
but somehow feeling, at the same time, that I might be just closer than I've 
ever been to bursting through those walls of illusion, smashing apart those 
man made processors that would squeeze the orchards of God down into one tiny 
easy  to swallow paper cup and finally take the to jump headfirst into that 
ocean of shadow and mystery that is the God BEYOND my understanding.
  By the way, have you ever read Donald McCullough's book *The Trivialization 
of God*? Your words do a pretty good job of distilling one of his main points 
-- see especially the chapters *a pantheon of deities* and *temple of idols* 
where he talks about the God of our cause, understanding, experience, 
comfort, success, and nation.  He ends the temple chapter with:
"To know the holy God, we must acknowledge what we do not know; to see the 
light of God, we must pass through the dark night of the soul; to gain faith, 
we must begin with doubt.  Knowledge of God is born from the womb of reverent 
agnosticism."

  <<Some people have a death grip on God.  Yeah. 
 Good.  Death grip.  And that's what allowed Ol' Man Nietzsche (yes, from
 Scooby Doo) to anounce that, as far as the affections of Euro-American
 culture go, God is dead.  Because to the Euro-American culture God was this
 thing that they had held in their hands so, so tight, and then God was this
 dead thing lying in their hands, and God didn't do the things they wanted or
 act the ways they wanted and, in fact, didn't do anything, so God was dead. 
 But God can't be grasped that way.  Holding on to God is impossible, because
 getting your (metaphysical) hands (read: mind) around God is impossible. 
 Too much.  Can't recognize the shape.  Like that.  And so when philosophers
 businessmen housewives children rockstars or other folk make their top ten
 lists about what God is and then try to hold onto the God of the top ten
 lost, they all find themselves holding onto an illusion.  But if we loosen
 our grip on God, if we allow that we can't even get a tight grip on God,
 then we allow ourselves into a world with a whole lot less clarity.  But a
 whole lot more God.  I read the Bible.  I think the thoughts of a Christian
 (and sometimes those of a devil).  I work the problems.  ("I am raising the
 arguments, writing the installments.")  And I think I can say this without
 being heretical: that God is not something I understand or am meant to
 understand.  That I may know some things, and I may be obedient in some ways
 when I don't understand why exactly, and I may have a multi-faceted,
 unfaltering core faith based on the experiences of my intellect and of my
 soul and of my body.  But I do not understand God, and the God I do not
 understand is more free to work in my life than was the God of my
 adolescence, for whom I had built a gilded cage.
  >>
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