Job (pronounced Jobe) is the story of a man who was tormented by God. It's a book from the Old Testament that tries to get near why God would allow bad things to happen.
Phillip Simmons writes about the point in the story of Job where his wife asks him why he doesn't just give up and curse God -
"And here Job makes the most extraordinary answer: "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?"
In these words I find a challenge that shakes me to the core. For those who dismiss traditional religion as offering a simplified and sentimental version of reality, Job offers a darker, more complex vision than those we may remember being taught in Sunday school. For those who think reason has the final say in human affairs, Job reminds us how little reason avails us when we try to understand all that befalls us. For those who are religious yet want to think of God only as the God of goodness and love, for those for whom prayer is always a turning toward the light, for those of us who seek in spiritual experience nothing but sweetness and harmony, Job offers a severer, more inclusive view. "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?" Job now knows that God is the God of good and of evil, light and darkness, sweet and bitter, harmony and discord. Hindus embody this truth in the god Shiva, who both creates and destroys. The Qur'anic phrase, La'illaha il'Allahu, teaches there is nothing that is not from God, that everything, birth and death, joy and suffering, the green spurt of youth and the slow decay of age, bread, and excrement, our sweetest singing and our cries of agony, all of it is from God."
Phillip Simmons continues in this vein to say,
"But maybe we're asking the wrong thing of God. Rhyme and reason, after all, are human values, not divine ones. Wanting human suffering to fit some divine plan is like wanting to fly an airplane above tornado wreckage and see that it spells out song lyrics or a cure for acne. At some point in life, in the face of illness, violence, accident, or injustice, each of us confronts the possibility that rhyme and reason may not be on God's agenda. This, of course, leads many people to dispense with God and religion altogether. In workshops I've led, when people explain their reasons for turning away from religion, most often I've heard them cite some instance of suffering, either global or personal: religion hasn't ended war; it doesn't explain why a boy's sister had to die of leukemia. I'm not sure how to answer such charges except to suggest that perhaps we shouldn't turn to religion for solutions and explanations of this sort. The first of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths is the one that our experience most easily confirms: that to be human is to suffer. God, the power that creates and sustains the universe in each moment and has given us our very lives, doesn't owe us reasons."
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The idea that religion is multi-dimensional has been bouncing around in my head for a few weeks. Religion is multi-dimensional because we are. Religious writings, like people, follow a path towards (and sometimes away from) civilization.
On a more personal note we can be childlike, and thus affirmed and consoled by a childlike faith in a father-figure type deity (for example Buddha, Jesus or God). We can also be adults, questioning, wondering, and challenging until we reach the limits of our logic, ability to think, and declare it to be a mystery and either take a leap of faith and believe something, or in the case of atheists claim to know the unknowable, or be agnostic about it and admit we don't know...it's a big universe out there my friend.
I'd never put down the childlike faith of another person. In fact I think it can be wonderful and wonder filled to be as childlike as we can be.
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Here's a story about childlike faith I heard a minister tell, not too long ago -
She was on call for a local hospital and got a call late at night. She never knew what she would find at the hospital when she entered the room and pulled back the curtain in the emergency room. On this night when she entered the room - a young mother was sitting on a chair, rocking, crying inconsolably, holding a lifeless baby.
She had gone out to buy cocaine and left the baby in the care of the 3 year old brother. In those few minutes the baby drowned in the bathtub. Nothing the minister could say reached the woman.
A priest was called, since the woman was a Catholic. The young priest arrived, with his vestments and book - the trappings - the ritual. He sat with the woman and repeated the Hail Mary - over and over and over - the woman was able to calm herself and let the baby go.
Sometimes a childlike faith is all we have.
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The more you look at the childlike teachings the more you see that some of it isn't childlike at all. Take the doctrine of the holy Trinity which proposes the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one. That's not a simple concept by any means, and very controversial in some circles.
It's not much of a stretch to say that since I'm spirit-filled, I'm part of God and since I'm part of God - I'm not so sure I need the Church to guide my ways. Luckily I'm not living in medieval times because that's a heretical thought. By the way - It's interesting to read in this article on heresy from Kenyon College which says "that the Church never executed anyone for heresy. Rather, the Church turned heretics over to secular governments for execution."
It's also not much of a stretch to go from being agnostic (not knowing) to gnostic (knowing) particularly if you have access to some secret writings.
From Elaine Pagel's From Jesus to Christ: the Story of the Storytellers: the Gnostic Gospels -
"...Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis. Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus, says:
Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, "My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body." Learn the sources of sorrow:, joy, love, hate . . . If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself."
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Where does all this lead to?
Really nowhere we haven't already been. It's a circular sort of thing. Phillip Simmons quotes T.S. Elliot's fourth quartet "Little Gidding" where Elliot writes -
Wishing you a good week, filled with exploration.
Really nowhere we haven't already been. It's a circular sort of thing. Phillip Simmons quotes T.S. Elliot's fourth quartet "Little Gidding" where Elliot writes -
We shall not cease from explorationI love to think, to explore...and thank God, The Father, The Mother, The Holy Spirit, Buddha, Allah, The Big Daddy, The Kid, the Spook, the Source or whatever name we try and give the nameless - for the chance to live a short time on this good earth.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Wishing you a good week, filled with exploration.
