This is the last chapter. I can’t promise a happy Hollywood ending but maybe there’s something better.
Thanks to Andrew Faiz and the unsuspecting staff of Presbyterian Record for offering this opportunity and to friends, ordained and otherwise, for their patient, gentle guidance. I don’t know if this stuff has touched anyone or reflected anything more than my own wondering wanderings through the fields of faith. It has been a journey both intense and prayerful.
Shortly after I joined the church late in the 20th century, the Record accepted my first tentative venture into theological thickets. It might be useful to see how far I have come in the intervening decade-plus. I used the third person, something I’m happy that Mr. Faiz talked me out of for this series.
He proclaimed belief in an unfathomable capital-M Mystery. He understood immortality through art that moves us to tears or joy, or through memories of departed loved ones. He was not without moments in which it seemed he stared into universal beauty, listening to Beethoven’s thunder, flying small airplanes through still evening skies, loving his children.
Today I understand that capital-M Mystery as God. He remains mysterious, beyond defining, beyond measuring, beyond even naming. My senses confirm the beauty, harmony and grace of His creation. It is in my heart, my spirit, my joy, my pain, and in my silence that I feel Him most near. I still seek those moments of universal beauty and am, perhaps, more open to them.
Immortality? I believe today that the sense of universal beauty, of love and compassion, touches the eternal grace of God and that is my faith. It doesn’t mean that I expect an early starting time at the Heavenly Links Golf and Country Club; my faith rests on the foundation of a loving God as confirmed by Jesus Christ. “We don’t know who Jesus believed himself to be,” German theologian Jurgen Moltmann writes plaintively. A great teacher? One of many wandering preachers of the day? God himself walking among us? All I know is that the gospels force me to see and know myself anew.
Is faith enough? It was a big issue for Martin Luther and all those guys, but surely faith, love and compassion must lead to works on earth. But, oh Lord, some days that’s really tough, and I’m a long way from selling everything and following Jesus’ footsteps through the mean streets of Port-au-Prince, Kabul or even Montreal. Now and then, though, I surprise myself with a soft answer to a harsh question or a little effort to lend a hand to someone I’d never have thought to help before. Keith, is that you?
With Mort Sahl, he believed that we overstate man’s status when we claim creation by God in His image. Did we poll the dolphins or eagles or tigers? No other species has despoiled the planet and destroyed so much. Poor puzzled Mankind has spent millennia wondering: “Why are we here? What is a good life? What is right and what is wrong? Should I make love or make war?” Every other species on the planet seems to know the answer: “To produce little dolphins or eagles or tigers, to eat, to grow, to die, to keep on keeping on.”
If, as the ancients wrote, we are created in God’s image He quite clearly was dissatisfied with the beta version. His gift of Jesus Christ may have resolved some of the glitches but we clearly haven’t made much progress in establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth. My attempt at answering all those questions has changed from “who knows?” to “love.” I wish I could display it more often. If all the other species over which we have dominion–that is, for which we are appointed guardians–are content to keep on keeping on, let me try to do the same.
He had conceived a vague theory that we’re really here, spreading over this fragile planet like a virus, with an evolution-driven purpose. It explained, he conjectured, why we seem the most neurotic of creatures. For all his monumental failures, only man has created poetry and music and science that imagine infinity. Only man, Mark Twain said, laughs, or needs to. We will destroy all or reach the stars.
If it were possible for us to see a macro-view of the universe, that is, if we could see as God sees, would we find life elsewhere? The scientific odds makers would bet on it. It is almost more troubling to think that Earth is the only site of life because then we are either a Darwinian accident or, like the children of Moses, destined to seek a promised land beyond the stars. I’d give odds that we’ll reach the stars.
I am always awed by the certainty of the preachers I hear and often uncomfortable plowing through the conflicting theories and projections of the learned theologians. I’ve learned a little about seeing God’s work through the text as I read the Bible. I’m sure my faith will waver but I promise to keep on trying, and pray again as I did in a darkened Christmas Eve church a decade and more ago: “If that’s good enough for you, Lord, it’s good enough for me.”
Amen.
