Faith Basics

(for those unthinkingly accustomed to reading prose on religious subjects that has been aggressively studded with the shards of broken scriptures, or just verse references, in an attempt to endanger anyone who questions the validity of the thinking and add some cheap gravitas to it (how worthwhile is reputability by association?), I must warn you that I do not bother with that, wouldn't expect anyone to look up all the verse references if I were to put a host of them in, and yet I do still maintain that what I have written below comes from my own experience of the actual God, from life and not a little from reading the bible and having it shape my thinking and living.  If you don't believe me, skim through and look for things that came from the bible, and not merely from one verse, but from the whole thing, its structures, characters, and archetypes) 

 If you are going to believe in God, it’s important to do it right, or it will cause all sorts of problems. It is vital that you be spiritually focused upon God as a person, and not on religion as a social service which provides certain moods or frames of mind. 

    "But God's God.  He's not a person" some may object.  Well, He has a personality, doesn't He?  A heart (in the "heart-felt" sense of the term)?  He created people in His own image, didn't He?  You could speak with Elizabeth Windsor as "Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Queen Regnant of the Commonwealth Realms," but if you were her son, it would be appropriate to interact with her on a more personal level, treating her as a person with a heart, rather than merely and solely as a figure, a role, a position, an authority, a title.  This is our privilege when it comes to dealing with God, and approaching Him solely as a figure puts unnecessary distance between Him and us, probably on purpose.  

   Because God's a weird person.  Inscrutable.  Unexpected.  Mischievous.  Mysterious.  Difficult to deal with. The stories of the Old Testament show over and over the heart of God as a person who demands to be known, yet who has repeatedly to deal with a people who would rather invent religions with icons, vestments, music, idols, rules, lifestyle guidelines and rituals than know Him and what He's up to. 

    When we invent a religion, we are in control, and we’re making something that is meant to serve us.  God demands to be known as a person with whom we can have a relationship. Religions tend to be inflexible, inhuman and bureaucratic, and most of the truly evil atrocities that have been performed throughout history (human sacrifice, inquisitions, witch-burning, crusades, genocides, holocausts) were wholly or in part motivated by and perpetuated through religious fervour, rather than being the actions of people who had any connection with God and what He wanted. Today, we have a spiritual smorgasbord of religions and religious groups and activities, with icons, vestments, music, idols, rules, lifestyle guidelines and rituals. 

     In the Old Testament, God consistently objected to the people interposing a religion between Him and the secret focus of their hearts. He wanted a dialogue, and he wanted people to turn to Him for comfort, for challenge, for insight. When the people repeatedly insisted upon turning to human-invented systems of religious activity, He used the word “idolatry” to describe this behaviour, and sent prophet after prophet to voice His dissatisfaction with being replaced by a religious system. Most of the prophets were killed. It isn’t safe to speak out against religious systems. 

   I can speak freely, because I am not a member of a religious system which can threaten to sanction or expel me if I write inconvenient things. I used to be, but was expelled for just such behaviour.  So now I'm free, though I didn't choose to be.  God seemed to need me to be free.  

   The apostles, and Jesus himself, were actually killed for drawing a sharp contrast between dealing with God as a person, and pursuing a religious system in which He is, at best, a distant figure. Children wrestle with treating adults as people, and adults dealing with children (or subordinates) often wrestle with dealing with these charges as people, rather than merely acting as authority figures wielding authority. 

   Adults are often known to give sound bites, or express official positions, rather than speaking their hearts and true, personal thoughts. God, for His part, speaks from His heart. We tend to act like children. When confronted with a teacher, a child will view him as a mechanistic taskmaster with no human feelings, rather than making a personal connection with real mentorship happening. 

    When dealing with parents, children often struggle with remembering that parents are people with the same full, deep range of feelings that they themselves possess, and tend rather to simply deal with them as people to get around in order to be free, and as sources of food, shelter, clothing and money. When dealing with members of the opposite sex, human beings in general can be tempted to deal with them not as people with rich inner lives and feelings, but merely as a means of sexual gratification. It’s not any different with God. The struggle is the same one. God isn't merely an infinite force or an underlying principle.  He isn't just The Source of All Things.  God is a person. He has feelings. He not only understands that different people need to do different things at different times in different situations, He actually expects that. God isn’t one-size-fits-all. Neither should our approaches to Him be.  

   If we won't think of Him as a person, we can't deal with the simple fact that He is, nor will we let Him approach us in that way.  

   We can dehumanize a checkout girl, waitress or bus driver, refusing eye contact, giving orders but rejecting in some tangible way the fact that this is another person occupying the same space as you.  With God, we can likewise rob Him of His personhood.  A waitress.  A bus driver.  A deity.  Names?  Didn't ask.  Personal views on things?  Not interested.  Did you share any of your own self in the interaction?  Of course not. Is there any place for communities of faith? Of course. 

    One thing is certain, though: If the focus or activities of your faith community are in competition with personal dealings with God as a person, and if you are getting drawn into a system, a bureaucratic structure, if things start being unduly about protocols, authority structure (who gets to say and do what and who does not and how it must be done) then you are without a doubt falling into Old Testament style idolatry. Something else is certain: people who speak out against this sort of thing are no safer, welcome and heard than they were in Old Testament times. 

   There is no governing principle to keep faith communities from becoming empty systems, taking more and more time, money and soul. They just naturally seem to turn into that. Why do we deal with other people at all? Because sometimes two are better than one; sometimes two or three people can do things one cannot. It is important, however, to keep track of when one person can move more easily without being tied to 20 or 40 other people. It is also important to ensure that the standards of a faith community are set at achieving good, not just going through the motions of pious-seeming activity. If harm is happening, it’s important that the whole thing not descend into an interminable argument as to whether someone (who did harm) did wrong. If no good is being achieved, it is fruitless to be content to continue doing the same thing forever, and equally important that it not be justified by someone “being right” in some theoretical sense, though they’re doing no good. Right and wrong are quite distinct things from good and harm. 

   A great deal of time in groups is wasted on arguing about the former, to the detriment of correctly navigating the latter. God is a person, we are people, and any other human beings we deal with need to be treated like individual people as well. Whether we’re dealing with God, or someone struggling with alcoholism, it’s never OK on a personal level (when dealing with a person) to resort to gibberish, jargon, official positions, catch-phrases, empty slogans and other substitutes to genuine relating. God is a person; in fact, He is the inventor of the human personality, which is created as a reflection of image of His own. 

   Yet, we don’t want God to be a person. We aren’t able to wrap our heads around Him having “human” things like a sense of humour, a temper, passion, boundless artistic creativity, charm, preferences, whims and personal indulgences. God is a person, and if our religious activity deals in ritual and externals, if it is one-size-fits-all, if it is heavily structured and focused on power and privilege, if it is blindly habitual, then we are idolaters.