Real

Real is a pretty deep concept for me.  My friend Mark pointed out once that people like he and I (and many of our friends) have "trouble" with groups of people, for instance in government or churches or committees, because we are in endless pursuit of something we can recognize as "real."  Real in the sense of "This exists.  No one is making it up.  You can hope in this, or at least look forward to it continuing on in future, with an existance and a life of its own."  And groups of people always seem to be imagining things.

   I work in a school.  Most years, there's some guest speaker with what we teachers call a "magic bullet" with will supposedly turn everything about our jobs around in a great way.  The police take bullets more seriously, and when it comes to people who want to revolutionize police work, they call these little pet projects of inanely grinning, jargon-spouting fantasists "bandaid solutions."
   Every year these well turned out keeners are paid to visit.  Different people each time.  We must go sit and listen to them, and are encouraged to go to seminars and retreats and things to hear about all this stuff.  And if we do go, when we are green, it's very easy to drink the Koolaid.  To get wrapped up in the group movement.  To believe it's real.
   But the reality is, you see thing after thing after thing presented as The Next, Last, Big Thing to End All Things, and six months later no one remembers that thing ever was, nothing has been implemented fully, that person seems to have headed for the hills, and there's a new thing you can't do without not doing the old thing.  And there's always a next person with the next thing.  With a big white smile.  If said grinning someone has been appointed the new Head of Something Or Other, poised to implement a magic bullet, well a year later, that position isn't merely vacant, it frequently no longer exists.  The continual renaming of everything makes this shell game very hard to follow.  People come and go, and the first thing they do is rename everything they can, to mark their territory, and the next thing they do is present their magic bullet.

   The reality is, you can imagine fixing everyone and everything.  But you can't really do it.  Not by trusting people to be smart, after you've tried to inform them, share research, present your vision.  And not by trying to force them, Hitler-like, to follow your will.  You can't fix people.  And you really can't fix their systems.  The stuff you imagine isn't real.  You can just barely, embrace growth and do good stuff yourself. And that's good.  But you can't fix everything.  And any one-size-fixes-everything system is pretend.

Made Up?

As a child, I was continually made to fear things that didn't seem to really come to pass, or bring danger.  Star Wars does not seem to have made me worship the devil or (worse!) follow Buddhism.  And the Rapture has not happened, and so I have had to live a life I was taught I did not need to worry about. (I have had to live past the year 2000, for instance.)  And I have had to go into middle age.  Because believe in it as real or not, the Rapture has not happened in the time and way I was taught it would, as a real thing.  And my belief in it formed the person I became.  And not always in ways that have made me deep, spiritual, effective, empathetic, forward thinking, prepared, or any of that.  The danger of Star Wars and Ghostbusters and Star Trek does not seem to have been real, any more than was the hope of an imminent Rapture (occurring, it was promised, first in 1984, then 1986, then 1992, then 2000, then 2001, then 2011 and so on...)

   The response of the average secular humanist is simple, as to this: nothing about Christianity is real.  It's all made up.

   So is it?  Do we do whatever we decide to do, and then tell ourselves God told us to do that?  Because if someone observed and listened to us, and then ended up concluding exactly that, they really ought to be forgiven it.

   All this has made me think a great deal, my whole life, about what's real.  And today it leaves me always asking "Can I experience a real God, and one who is seeking me as I am seeking Him, and who doesn't need me to make Him up?"  And in all Christian doings and endeavours, I'm always sorting things into two baskets: the big basket is for stuff that can be made up.  Stuff that Moonies and Tony Robbins and countless self-help gurus and performers have done already.  The groupthink, the "comfort" in following along with a a group, following leaders who claim to be able to answer any question you can think of (or which you can't avoid tripping over), the excitement of being part of a group of excited people, wrought up on purpose, buying into being wrought up, with people there who are paid to work them up.  That kind of stuff.  Are we worshipping hype?

   What I do, is I put all of that into a basket, to place to one side.  To "screen out" while looking for something I can trust.  I don't trust stuff anyone could make up.  I don't trust stuff you can make people imagine, as a massive group catharsis, playing off their psychological problems.  I don't trust group stuff.  We've all seen footage of fresh-faced Nazi Youth, feeling humbled and honoured and ecstatic and a thousand other good, uplifted feelings, all because they got to listen to and follow Adolph Hitler.
  The other basket is for stuff that we couldn't make up.  It's a very small basket. Usually it's empty.  And it's pretty much always about meeting Christians one or two at a time.

   Because I trust people one or two at a time.  So, you're a Christian.  Can I experience and hear about that and what it is for you without you telling me stuff you mainly imagine and are making up to comfort yourself?  Oh, you need me to come to your church for that...  Why?  No, I'm being quite serious.  I'm not trying to be funny.  Why can't we talk in twos or threes?  About real stuff.  About what's actually happening, and not just what we want to imagine might be imminent.  What's with the scared face?  Wait, where are you going?

   This is all very suspicious.

   Can you be a Christian by yourself?  Can you be a Christian around me without your pastor and your church peeps hovering?  Why the hell not? I need to know.

   I try to meet Christians to get a sense of who they are, and what they've got going on that's both Christian, and perhaps something I can believe in.  And what I get it an unceasing facefull of a veritable firehose of happy "MY church..." babble.
  You're praising.  You're planting.  You're missioning.  You're mentoring. You're imaginizing. You're visioning.  You're verbing nouns like the Rapture's tomorrow.  It all sounds a bit desperate to me.  It reminds me of what extremely ADD kids do when I give them a small thing to read.  A simple, real task.  Quantifiable.  But suddenly they explode into all manner of distracting, random, desperate diversionary tactics to avoid, avoid, avoid.  It sounds to me like you live in a world of claims rather than results.  It sounds to me like you're avoiding reality.

   And this matters to me.  I need to believe in stuff that's real.  Not stuff we're making up.

Worshipping the Work of Our Own Emotional Delusions

The Old Testament, when I read it, seems to me to be about how God was real and everything, but every time He reached out to people, they demonstrated clearly that what they really wanted to do was invent their own gods, religions, rituals, sacred places, sayings, teachers, prophets and everything.  No doubt these theological inventions were unchanging, predictable and cooperative.  No doubt they provided a clear, direct connection between what you expected, and what the thing you made "did."  One sacrificed child always guaranteed a rich harvest.
  If you make a god, or a religion, you make yourself its bitch exactly how you wish to.  And you expect it to act how you've planned it will.  Many of us are suffering today because our made up stuff isn't treating us how we imagined it would. Our psychology is written all over it.  We have self-defeat, self-punishment and self-destruction running right down the middle of us.  Is God "in" that, or trying to fix that?  Is He predictable, like invented gods?  Sacrifice = favour?

   Because the God that I believe is really real doesn't work like that, I haven't found.  My parents and their church have sacrificed most of the children, in one way or other.  And there has been no harvest, for most of them, in the autumn of their lives.  There has been a spiritual drought, and an emptiness of life in which they seem befuddled but resigned to be living out their last years.  After all, their psychology tells them they deserve nothing better. 

   It's not easy to believe in a real God, for me.  I was raised that He was shame, doubt and fear.  An unattainable standard.  Judgment.  That was about it.
  (Now, how could that god have created almost anything I see out my window?)

Isaiah

I'm very used to people reading the bible, which is set in a very specific, obvious cultural and historical context, and shamelessly "making" it all about them.  Showing how Jeremiah was preaching the Calvinist gospel, or Jesus was teaching people how to be good Christian testimonies in modern America, what with Obama wrecking everything.  Explaining how what Mark wrote was really about our young people's fellowship weekend, after all.
   Today I was reading in Isaiah, and seeing how much of a "private conversation" it was between God and Israel, with Isaiah acting as intermediary. Often, these kinds of messages are not even to Israel as a whole, but only to the remaining "Judah" bit of the nation/religion/race.  So I am very conscious that it seems pretty made up for us to pretend that all of this was REALLY written aforetime so we 21st century Christians could make it all about us, who couldn't be further from the original audience in most important ways.  But we do that anyway.  It's not just "written for our learning," we don't think.  It's really written all about us.  Written directly to us, in fact.  We read it like that.  That's like reading Romeo and Juliet, believing that William Shakespeare had written it solely to seduce us, here, reading it today.

   I was trying to let Isaiah be what it was, this morning.  It's hard.  My training goes against that.  But then I read a bit which had God laying out his plans.  He reassuringly said that His wrath was only for a little time.  I'm often bothered by how much like an abusive husband His prophets present Him as being: "I'm beating you, but you earned it, it's your fault and it's for your own good.  I'm angry.  If you wouldn't make me angry all the time, I wouldn't have to beat you."  Hard to read that.
   And then I realized that I was judging God and deciding that I didn't respect it if He got mad.  Like, ever.  With anything I or anyone else ever did.  Because as a child, I was taught that He was always Puritan; dour and humourless and pinched-facedly disapproving of anything good or fun or nice.  Who could respect Someone who was like that?  No one.  So either we have to learn to respect people like that, or accept that maybe we're imagining God is like that, based mostly on our parents, and maybe we need to quit doing that.  I'm not doing terribly well at leaving all of that behind.

   But while reading Isaiah, I realized that if you have a relationship with people, people get to get mad.  Because they're people.  People need to, and do, have various changing responses to the interplay among us all.  And saying "You don't get to get angry. If you do, I don't like you" is no way to connect or relate.  It's a way of saying "If you're that part of you, then I don't like you.  Be the you I imagine you are, the part that I can like without growing or learning anything about you."

  Now, God doesn't need my permission for anything.  I don't "surrender my whole life into His Hands" Sunday mornings, because I am painfully, sometimes resentfully hyper-aware, that He has always had it in His Hands, since before I was born.  I have no say.  I am not my own and have never been.  I can't surrender to Him what is already His.  And He's not waiting for me to surrender in that imaginary way.  He's been underway with His "efforts" since absolutely forever.  He's not waiting.  And I am, Heaven help me, as much in His clutches now as I have always been.
   Often I want more freedom than that.  But God doesn't need my "permission" to get angry.  Yet this afternoon I felt this outpouring of rightness and goodness and worth in accepting the reality of what He's already doing, which is feeling however He wants to.  In not making Him up. In recognizing His personhood. 

   If He's real, and I'm not making Him up, I neither get to make up what His ideal emotional responses would be, nor what His actual emotional responses are.  And I have to live with not knowing what they even are, most of the time.  Because He's not localized to One Place, nor is He explicable and a peer of mine.  (actually, I can't really figure out any of my closest friends either, now that I'm being honest.)
   If I made God's emotional responses up, of course I could know them all the livelong day.  "God was fairly pleased when I first woke up, started to disapprove of the flow of my thoughts toward noon, lost interest around 2:30, liked something I thought at 3:05, but by 4:15 was getting downright huffy with what I was thinking."  That's not real.

   So I accepted the reality that if God's real, He will feel what He wants.  Mostly I won't know it, and I am a fool to make a lot of assumptions about how He "should" feel.  It used to be simpler.  I grew up with Him always being angry.  It was easy.  How does God feel?  Disappointed, furious and lovingly not destroying us.  Always. You could set the church clock by that.
   And I got quite tired of that "person," as time went by.  So long as I recognize that maybe this isn't real, maybe it'll work out.

   And then I read the next bit of Isaiah, and it was to foreigners.  Not Jews.  Foreigners.  Like me.  And to eunuchs.  Which I might as well be, in Brethren terms.  And there was rather a promise there: if they keep his Sabbath (stopping doing one's own business, and resting) and keep his covenant (that's a more complex idea for a modern Christian gentile), He will recognize it.  He says (through Isaiah) that He will set up a monument and give the faithful person a name/reputation/title for it.  A monument and name that are better than sons and daughters.  The eunuch is tempted to say "I am a dry branch.  There will be no new life, no off-growth or further branchings from me."  The foreigner is tempted to say "I'm not a Jew.  I don't fit.  I'm outside the loop.  God's just for Jews. He talks to them."  And God is saying that He will honour these foreigners and eunuchs, for being faithful.
  Now, maybe one has to believe in an afterlife to believe in that honouring ever happening.  Because I'm not sure I can believe that the right people always get the right honour and recognition in the span of their life on earth.  I don't think that normally happens.  So I need to try to believe in an afterlife.  I think I do, but I don't allow myself to indulge in imagining it, in order to comfort myself when it sucks right now.  I'm looking for comfort and fellowship, commiseration and ideas to try, now.  I'm looking for a God who's interested in something other than catching wrong-doing.  I'm looking for a God who gets involved and is behind actual good happening for actual people, now.

   And this is the crux of some of my spiritual wrestling: It's not that I have trouble maintaining a belief in god.  Actually the trouble is that I have real problems avoiding an ingrained belief in a god who:

a) expects us to sacrifice everything fun and good and safe and nice, just cuz,

b) is never satisfied or grateful, because we're imperfect and inconsistent in our sacrificing of ourselves and everything.

   I hate that god by now. I really, really do.  Hate.  And I think there's nothing making him any more real than my hating him.  That kind of god is imagined by people like me.  People with daddy issues.
   The real God, if one is willing to stop making Him up, seems to be wholly different.  He seems to be offering something, and not just demanding sacrifice.  Any sacrifice He needs is more to help Him give to others.  It's not just so we can avoid having fun so we can charge up the Heavenly Fun Battery that inexplicably runs on our misery, emptiness, shame and boredom.  We don't keep the electric bill for Heaven paid in this way at all.  That's not what keeps the lights on and the tunes pumping.  That's not real.
   If the work of Christ is a real thing, and God has really extended it to us, then it ought to really work.  God wouldn't screw up stuff like that.  It should work.  (If we wait for it to work, given time, and let it work because we know we need it, rather than pretending we're fine.)

What Now?

I have to stop imagining God with a sour face.  I have to stop assuming, as per my made up religion, that Something Bad is always going to happen, because God's not into giving good stuff.  I have to start embracing the fact that I don't know what He's going to do, and waiting to see what that is.

   I just can't find God in a church where people sing blissfully about how blissful they can contrive to imagine themselves, in groups, in very special non-real-world conditions.  Taking church shrooms.    I can't find God by singing and talking about myself and my substandard God-feelings in groups.  I can't find God in repeated vows to "just truly, really surrender all to Him :)", as if we had anything at all to surrender. I can't find God in sitting listening to people pray and sing about how much of a disappointment they are and how far they imagine they get from God, and how they imagine He feels, and how they pray to ask Him to help make them love Him (try doing this with a spouse or date sometime and see if it's rude or not) and how much better they imagine their relationship with Him is now, with accompanying visions of imagined heavenly choirs and shafts of imaginary sunbeam spotlights hitting them as they sing about how they feel now, and how far short they imagine it falls of how they imagine they "should" feel, and how they are imagining God is feeling about that.  I can't find God in grovelling and singing about what a worm I am, and how unfaithful and how Jesus' sufferings on the cross are totally my fault, personally, and so I should try to remember every bad thing I ever did, and every horrible thing he suffered, and jolly well work myself up into an ecstasy of misery.  I can't imagine God is my buddy, my Divine Boyfriend, my bass player.  I can't find God in listening to people preach about how great it is, in theory, to have found God, and how important they and all the church stuff really, truly are, in making sure He stays found.  I can't find God in all that noise and narcissism. In what I can't see but as false piety and false modesty.  In what, even if I don't judge it, doesn't help me connect to God even slightly, but has a predictable, consistent, plainly deleterious effect on the attempt to connect with Him, in fact.

   I need a real God.  I need Him outside churches.  I need to meet people who I believe about Him.  People who aren't playing Let's Pretend.  Who aren't mainly imagining Him.  I need Him to not need me to make Him up, including His interest in good things.  And if the bible is Him wanting to be known (I can believe in that, oddly), it is telling me that:

a) He gets frustrated and mad, but always comes back afterward once He's gotten over it a bit (not because we've repented.  Once He's gotten mad it's too late to repent. Like with anyone else.  He comes back when He's done being mad.  Like all real people do.)

b) He wants good things for us, and He wants us to help Him get good things to others.  There is no health and success and meaning that's not coming directly to us from Him. 

c) He's playing a long game. One that we're not seeing.  So we can't make it all up.  Not even with Revelation and Daniel functioning as arcane, obscure screens upon which we can project our own Endtimes Blockbusters, which concocted "interpretations" say far more about our own psychology than anything about His.

Hm.