My religious zealotry may run deep, but I got it honest. My great-grandfather was a founding Elder and pastor of West Nashville Heights Church of Christ. I was his first great-grandchild, born on his birthday. Another great-grandfather, who attended St. John’s United Methodist, preached to the convicts every week at the old Nashville prison. My grandfather told me stories of his aunt, who read the Bible on her knees for an hour every night. I come from an American hodge-podge of Puritans, Quakers, Mennonites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other assorted religious kooks. My interest was inevitable.
When I was a baby, I became very sick with an extremely rare disease. I spent my first two years in Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. It looked like leukemia, but the tests kept coming back negative. I was slowly starving to death. Finally, the doctors came to my parents one day and told them to prepare for my passing within the next 72 hours. “We’re sending off another sample for one last round of tests, but we have no reason to believe the results will be any different than before. She won’t survive for longer than that in her present condition.” I was their first and only child, and of course my mother did not take it well. My father called his father to come to the hospital, but before my grandfather left, he called his Methodist preacher to meet him there, too.
When my grandfather explained the situation to his preacher in the lobby of the hospital before they went up to my room, the preacher asked if I’d been baptized. My grandfather told him I had not, because my mother went to Church of Christ and they didn’t believe in infant baptism. “We need to baptize the child,” the preacher told my grandfather, “or we’re condemning her soul to hell.” My grandfather was a religious man. He’d been saved at St. John’s during high school, around the same time he fell in love with my grandmother there. He prayed, he read his Bible every day, and every visitor to his home was subjected to some sort of religious discussion. That day, he literally hauled the preacher out of the lobby by his collar, and never returned to church again.
That night, my grandfather never stopped praying beside me. In the very early morning, the doctors rushed back into my room. “We finally know what she has!,” they told my family, “But there’s a problem. Nobody manufactures the medicine necessary to treat it. She’ll need three pills a day for the rest of her life, but it will cost $300 a pill to manufacture it.” My grandfather took out his checkbook. “Give me a figure,” he told them.
It turns out that night, in a medical lab in Buffaloe, New York, a medical student working nights as a lab technician had processed the tests the doctors had ordered. They came up negative, as expected. He went back to reading a medical journal. I don’t know why he decided to read that particular journal, but in it was an article about a pancreatic enzyme difficiency that was usually found in twins. There were five recorded cases of the disease, and only one of the patients had ever survived. She’d been born twenty years ago in Switzerland. Something in his head must have clicked. He looked at my file. He looked back at the article. He ran the test. It was positive.
The doctors figured out a less expensive way to get the medication I needed, and at the age of two years I quickly went from weighing a little over eight pounds, to being a normal, thriving kid. I hated taking that medicine, but I hated even more how sick I would become when I avoided taking it. The medicine was some serious stuff and had some dangerous side effects, but it kept me alive, so there wasn’t much choice.
A year or so after I left the hospital, my parents split up. My mother consulted her pastor at length about the decision. Finally, he advised her there was nothing left she could do to save her marriage. She felt like she had made the right decision, until the preacher proceeded to give a sermon on the sanctity of marriage every Sunday for the next six months. She left Church of Christ, but made sure I still attended with our extended family.
Just before my seventh birthday, Mom was struggling with her faith. She prayed to God to send her some reassurance that He was really there. The very next day, Mormon missionaries knocked on her door. After she visited the church and heard the Prophet speak she converted, and I decided to go to church with her. When my aunts sat me down on their sofa and asked me, “Amber, why do you want to join that church, don’t you love Jesus anymore?,” I replied, “Of course I love Jesus! I’m joining his church!”
The day before my baptism at age eight, the missionaries sat me down for another talk. They told me I would receive a special priesthood blessing for my confirmation that day. It would give me the Gift of the Holy Ghost. “You can receive other gifts in the blessing, too,” one Elder told me, “and if there’s anything at all you want to ask God, if you need something special, or you have a special question you want to ask him, pray about it tonight and ask him to give it to you in the blessing. Don’t tell anybody else about it, just ask God, that way if he gives it to you in the blessing, you’ll know it’s from Him.”
I thought about it. I didn’t really have any questions for God. I felt pretty sure I understood the universe at that point. However, there was one thing I really wanted, and that was to not have to take my medicine anymore. So, I said my private prayer, and I waited for the next day. Patriarch Blair laid his hands on my head, pronounced my name and his priesthood authority, conveyed the Gift of the Holy Ghost to me, and said, “the Lord has heard your sincere and righteous prayer, Amber. He wants you to know that when you rise from this blessing, your body will be restored to its full and complete form, and He wants you to always remember this as a witness of how much he loves you and all his children.”
I refused to keep taking my medicine after that, and since my mother was a believer, she let me do it. I didn’t get sick. When my pediatrician heard about this at my next checkup, he herded us over to Vanderbilt. The doctors ran their tests. Not only was there no sign of the disease, but there was no sign I’d ever been on the medication. They were dumbfounded, and wanted to keep me for more tests. My pediatrician, who wasn’t quite so dumbfounded, told us to go home, with the instruction that at the first sign I was getting sick again, we were to come see him immediately.
No one else in my family was very impressed with this healing, other than my grandfather. When I explained to him why I wasn’t taking my medicine anymore, he read me a passage out of the Old Testament, 1 Kings 17:21-24, where Elijah heals the son of a widow. She tells him after her son is healed, “Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth.” After he read me the scripture, my grandfather added, “I was worried when your mother started taking you to that church, but now I know it’s where God wants you to be.” I never once questioned my grandfather’s words until my early twenties. I read my scriptures and kept the commandments when my friends were doing everything they could to violate them. I was zealous in not just my devotion, but in my hunger to experience more of my faith. God was not just an idea for me, He was a real person, a present Father and a friend. “You’re going to marry a prophet one day,” my friends would tell me.
Of course, it was not to last. If nagging doubts won’t get you, the behavior of other believers will. Some of us manage to go through life without giving them both serious consideration, but I could never fully embrace dogmatism. For my crises of faith, it eventually came down to covenants. “Wickedness never was happiness,” promises the Book of Mormon, and we were encouraged to memorize the passage in high school seminary classes. God uses a system of negative and positive reinforcement, as a parent often does with a child. If we are bad and break the commandments, we are punished. If we are good and keep the commandments, we are rewarded.
The problems multiply exponentially. Mass murderers, rapists, and child pornographers not only get away with their crimes, they profit from them, while the good and righteous folks struggle to feed their children. ”I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7, KJV). God as an omnipotent judge must be responsible for the suffering of the innocent as well as the punishment of the wicked, and sometimes the dispensation of disease and destruction blurs the lines for who is in which category.
The apologists point out that we are all sinners, that we cannot know The Plan, that the suffering of the righteous is redemptive, that it will all be made right in the end. However, any parent will tell you that a reward system which is inconsistent and cannot be anticipated is meaningless to the disciplined. No wonder God’s earthly children abandon their chores and mock His capriciousness to their friends. We could attribute the good to God and leave the bad to the devil, but that does nothing for the omnipotence of God, nor does it really solve the problem.
For those of us who’ve experienced God as something more than a sadistic taskmaster, it’s still not easy to dismiss the idea as a farce. There is clearly something both transcendent and immanent that is better than that, but what is it? A special gene in our DNA that makes us hallucinate? An imbalance of chemicals in our brain? A psychosis of some combination or variety? Could it be that we have some desire or capacity that is unique to a percentage of our species, and if that is the case, is it something that is even desirable in evolutionary terms?
The intellectual masturbation involved in those questions is extraordinarily entertaining, but ultimately the insights we might reach from it still leave us unwilling to doubt our own sanity or deny our own experiences. If sanity is a willingness to admit you might be crazy, it’s also a willingness to trust your own senses, thoughts, emotions, and instincts. To do otherwise would be completely debilitating. If that paradox is to work we must be honest, even more with ourselves than with other people. God turns into something very ugly without that truth.
So what does a beautiful God look like? Omnipresence is a popular quality, but not necessarily in an intelligent sense. I find nothing comforting about the idea of always being watched. It’s a necessary trait for a Taskmaster, but I tend to envision omnipresence as a natural extension of, “ye are gods, and children of the Most High.” Some creation myths suggest that God created the universe because He was lonely, and maybe a little bored. He was limited insofar as existence was limited in its variety. Extending himself into all of creation provides a marvelously wide range of experience for God to play in. Judaism’s first definition of a monotheistic God was “I AM THAT I AM.” Definitions of God ultimately fail, because there is nothing in existence that is excluded from divinity.
This quality naturally leads to omnipotence and omniscience, but not necessarily in the way we typically think of them. Traditionally we discuss these qualities in terms of the exertion of will. Again, the Taskmaster makes his appearance. God has stated in scripture that He wants things on Earth as they are in Heaven, so clearly he has an agenda. If He is all-knowing and all-powerful, it would seem that achieving this agenda would be a simple thing. Why stack the deck against yourself by creating rules in opposition to your plans? Was he so bored he wanted a challenge? Is He so callous to suffering he didn’t care what costs came at his amusement?
I think of omnipotence and omniscience as secondary and subsequent to omnipresence. You must be all-knowing and all-powerful if you are composed of all that exists, but it doesn’t require that your power extends beyond the limitations of existence to a supernatural force that can play outside the lines of a natural order. Perhaps people want a supernatural God because it’s reassuring. Life on our little planet can be terribly cruel, and it helps to think you’ve got an ally who can make it all better. It’s certainly not reassuring, however, when that ally doesn’t come through with any help. Maybe I don’t need a pony for Christmas, but I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of why God wouldn’t use divine intercession to prevent the Holocaust. We are responsible for creating the world we live in, not God, but a God who is capable but unwilling to help is certainly not the God that Jesus worshipped.
What sort of Deity worthy of the designation falls within this definition? It’s certainly not Biblical. I appreciate liberal scriptural interpretation as much as the next Presbyterian, but I’ve studied the scriptures enough to understand that they do not communicate a twenty-first century viewpoint on theology. We can quibble all we want on how literally or seriously we should take the Bible, but there’s no question that as a document it’s not representative of my understanding of the nature of God.
Faith, according to Tillich, is a choosing. Far from being merely “the furniture of the mind,” by definition a belief in God necessitates action. The experience of God is not just the stuff of faith, but the life of faith. Only the truly miserly can long sustain their dogmatism without it. It necessitates a love of God so profound that you are willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of that Beloved. It’s this love that’s always attracted me to God, particularly as expressed through Jesus Christ. That is probably true of most believers, and of all mystics and gnostics.
I’m fully aware that this might be a coping mechanism. I’ve never had a man in my life, not a father, not a husband, not even a serious boyfriend to depend on for affection. There was my grandfather, but in some ways he was so close to God in my perception and so fully absent most of the time that I may have identified them together on some level, especially in my experience of God as my Father. Human beings have a need not just to receive love, but to give it, too. The Catholic nuns who speak of their relationship with God in terms of a passionate marriage are openly mocked for their chastity. The common wisdom is that those who can’t find a husband and don’t have the courage to face their loneliness turn to the convent for consolation. If they are undesireable in the marketplace of desire, God provides a necessary outlet to sublimate their sexual frustration.
God-love demands an absolute loyalty and obedience to His dictates – “if you love me, keep my commandments.” That’s not to say I celebrate a divine origin for all the ancient commandments, or that I’m always perfect at keeping them. I have problems with slavery, stoning, and the condemnation of homosexuals, for instance. There are times when I absolutely despise my neighbors. “Charity never faileth,” but I do. One of the reasons I like Jesus so much is that he seemed to get the God-love right. Even if his story is a complete fabrication, it’s generally a great example of how God should be lived.
The interesting thing about God-as-love is that you step outside the bounds of textual analysis and the repetition of creeds to get to know God for yourself. This is a dangerous thing for churches, because it tends to melt away the accumulated bullshit and eliminate intermediaries. You can’t truly love someone by reading their blog and following their Facebook updates (ahem). It might serve to feed an infatuation, but it’s certainly not a relationship. Unfortunately, most of us have more of a stalking relationship with God than a loving relationship. I actually enjoy studying the Bible a lot, but it does not provide the basis for my faith, because that is called idolatry. The Bible itself is very insistent that’s something we should avoid.
I think it’s obvious at this point that I am not an atheist. Then again, that might be unfair. Perhaps I’ve just moved the goalposts of faith so far out that I’ve rendered atheism moot. After all, atheists love and give and receive. They are often better Christians than the believers. When Christ spoke of Judgment Day, he indicated that many of the people who went about spreading religion in his name wouldn’t be recognized as his true disciples, because they didn’t “do the will of God,” which of course is love. The inverse of this statement suggests that those who have lived godly lives without ever professing a belief in Jesus Christ might yet be greeted warmly at the pearly gates. A belief in God as mere “insurance” might not get the believers as far, as the lives of the unfaithful will deliver them.