there are a thousand sanities worth leaving,

There is a quote, I’m not sure where it comes from and I am not particularly bothered to find, which speaks about ‘the best of all possible worlds’. It leaves you with the question, if the world could take on any form and people could behave in any way, would this world we live in be the best possible way for everything to be?

The immediate instinct is to say no, think of disease and famine and the unequal distribution of resources, tsunamis and hurricanes, oppression and persecutions… This world is not a beautiful world at all.

But then I thought for a moment longer and realised that this must surely be the best of all possible worlds, as depressing as that initially sounds. My logic lies in the belief that for love to exist there needs to be a choice to love. In other words, there needs to be not-love (hate, evil, sin, whatever you want to call it). You need to be able to come from a place of not loving to a place of loving.

This world and its inhabitants are in perpetual transitions from not loving to loving. The media likes to highlight the not loving part and the loving part if very very rarely reported on.

So if we were to live in a world without hatred/evil/sin, then there would be no transformational power of love. Love could not exist. Which is why I believe this must be the best of all possible worlds, because Love is worth suffering for. It is worth dying for. It is worth losing for. And ultimately because we suffered for love to exist, it will envelop us and restore all that was taken or destroyed when Christ heralds in the redemption and recreation of nature.

I am hesitant these days to suggest to anybody what they should believe, but I also think that I have a few answers to offer to those who are trying to understand God when the traditional beliefs fail them.

One tricky topic is suffering. I grew up in a doctrine of ‘God is in control of everything’, which is to say that nothing happens that could could not stop from happening. This is fine if your world is never rocked by massive tragedy. It helps to believe this if you live in relative security and want assurance that your security will not be taken away. But what if it is your mother or brother that dies in an earthquake, or your sister that is run over by a drunk driver? What if it is your child that dies before its 1st birthday? Suddenly this god who is in control doesn’t make sense anymore.

I want to put to you that maybe the problem is in our understanding of God. We are taught that ‘He’ is like us. He probably has a big grey beard. He is sitting on a throne somewhere, somewhere like, above space or something. We start putting human traits onto God. The inverse is indeed true, there are Godly traits in us, but God is not like us.

I understand it like this; God is like the wind. God is like matter. God is in every atom across the universe. So instead of understanding God as the artist making things from clay, rather understand that God is the clay too.

Then you can understand how every time a tsunami rips a village apart, a piece of God is ripped apart. Every time a child dies, a piece of God dies. But that is where it gets interesting, because if you know nature you know that death is only recycling, so you can see how God therefore has power over death… but that is another conversation for another time.

God chose to let life happen. God moulded the clay and let it be, for better or worse, in order to create love. Relationship. Life. To do this God had to sacrifice the most incomprehensible thing: control of God’s very own matter. God put God’s own atoms into human shapes and God let these human shapes manipulate themselves as they please. So when we murder each other, we are murdering a piece of God.

God feels all that we feel.

Yes, God is sovereign. At any moment God could take control from us. God could take our autonomy if God wanted. But it is also God’s sovereign choice to let us be free to carry on manipulating our own existence. God offers guidance and help and comfort and as much as we let in, anything so that we will chose to move in unison with God. God can raise the dead, because God is in those who are dead (God is the clay remember), but we have to ask it. We have to will it.

But like I said, I wouldn’t push this set of beliefs, it is just a thinking that I have adopted in order to try understand God in the midst of my own tragedy. But whatever way you have to relate to Jesus, follow that way. As long as you feel love and unity with Jesus, then your beliefs are working out just fine.

On Good Friday Jesus experienced the final element of human suffering, injustice, loneliness, every kind of physical pain and even death. So that God became so united with God’s creation that we can now know that there is no pain or suffering God has not experienced first hand.

God did not fix the world in the way a mad dictator would, by removing everything that does not conform to his ideals, but instead God chose to commune with us in the suffering. Like a king tearing down his own palace and going to live in the slums with his people.

God gave us the ultimate hope, not a perfect, numb life time, which is fleeting, but a friendship based on mutual understanding that will last eternally. The Lord now cries when we cry, feels life being sucked into darkness when we feel it, God now feels all that we feel, God is our most intimately close friend who promises to stick closer than a brother through the hardest times.

The Lord Jesus is not a genie who just magics away bad things, He is a soul-mate who gets us through the aches of climbing this mountain we call life till we reach the summit and feel the ecstasy of seeing all things as one.

Jesus compared a Publican (basically a tax collector in Roman occupied Israel) to a Pharisee to his disciples. He said how the Pharisee stood at the temple and thanked God that he was not like the bunch of sinners that surrounded him, and he said how the publican just stood there, not even looking to the heavens, beat his chest and said “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner”.
Jesus said that it was the tax collector who walked away in right standing with God.

Church can make us like the Pharisee. We can be so egotistic about our behaviour, about our holiness. We are proud of ourselves when we can say how good we are. How sexually pure we are, how we tithe, how we do not steal or murder. We stand there in meetings and subconsciously believe that we are holier than the gays, the druggies, the thieves, the murderers, the “heathen”.

But somewhere there is a broken soul on the side of the road, stoned out of his mind after a desperate night of drugs, alcohol, violence and thieving to survive another day, closing his eyes and muttering “God save me, God forgive me.”

This person is the one Jesus turns to. Not us with our self-righteous perfectionism.

We should completely forget this idea that behaviour has anything to do with our unity with God. How many years are wasted trying to separate ourselves from the “bad people”, trying to achieve an unattainable holiness? Lets just relax, live, love and accept one other. If Jesus does not care who is “good” or “bad” then why do we?

I have been reading daily meditations from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar. He puts his strong views so gently and well. Here is a link to the one I read today: http://conta.cc/xRIhfS 

Basically, what I have believed for a while and what he is saying is that, the Bible should not be seen as the very hand writing of God, but rather as the interpretation of the communication of God to humans by humans. And as Paul writes in 1 Cor 13:12:, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”

We try so hard to think of clever words to match up the humility and peacefulness of Jesus with the fire spewing nature of the God represented in the Old Testament, but we always will fail. I came to the conclusion that the Old Testament, specifically the early campaigns of the Hebrew people in the “Promised Land”, is filled with nationalistic propaganda by a small kingdom of people trying to root themselves in a hostile land.

Just as today you get Muslims who murder in the name of God, saying that God ordained the killings. Its easy to commit violent atrocities and then say it was Gods will. The truth is that Israel were always far from God. The whole bible is story after story of Israel turning from God to their own greedy prideful ways, momentarily asking for forgiveness, out of misplaced sense of fear, then returning to their pride and greed and bloodlust.  Hardly a reliable group to tell us the mysteries of God.

Not to discount any of it as useful in our spiritual journey, all the stories fit together if we remember to see them as stories that lead us to the Truth of God revealed in Jesus. I do not doubt the events recorded in the scriptures really happened, I just doubt the parts where God sanctions genocide. The genocides happened, but they were Israel straying for the peaceful and loving ways of the Truth.

Understand Jesus, through scripture, through prayer, through serving the poor and those in need, and once you have a rough idea of who Jesus is, then try imagine Him committing war crimes and genocides… If Jesus would not do it, then YHWH, the God we know from the Old Testament, would not do it. I reckon its as simple as that.

It is not the famous who have the greatest struggle against pride. It is us average folk, known only by our family and friends and faintly remembered by the acquaintances of years gone by, who struggle to control our egos. We who will never be household names, who will never rub shoulders with society’s elite.

We believe that we somehow deserve elevation. We feel abandoned by people who slip from our circles into higher circles, and we resent them for their success and their forgetting of us. This is the ugliest face of pride.

Even telling ourselves that the first shall be last and the last shall be first is a practise of pride, again striving for that top spot.

Lets rather forget about it altogether. Love those “below” you. Be low yourself. Mingle with the folk at the bottom of the mountain. This is where happiness can be found.

Proverbs 16:19 “It is better to be of lowly spirit with the poor than to divide the spoil with the proud”

The good old ‘Message’ translation says “…than to live it up with the rich and famous”.

I have been thinking about where the balance is with this. I feel it is bad to be a drain, we should definitely work. But when the reward for your work comes from crafty business skills, or from taking clients away from others so that you can increase your profits, then perhaps the line has been crossed? Is that when you are dividing the spoil with the proud?

I think previously I decided that if every man did enough work to support his family in a humble lifestyle, then there would be enough for everyone. I think I maintain this thought. If we didn’t take clients from others and then have to employ machines to keep up with the demands of all those extra clients and drop prices to ward off competitors, then perhaps there would be no unemployment. No super poor and super rich.

Jesus was hanging out one day, sharing the love, joking around, talking in parables, as usual, when a rather aggressive man shouted “Jesus, do you pay your taxes?”

Jesus turned from His friends, still smiling from a funny little parable He just thought up and shared and looked at the man. “Peace brother” He said. He then asked a friend to grab a fish from the fisherman they were chatting to. “Look in the fish’s mouth” He said. The friend found a coin there! “Whose face its on the back of that coin?” He asked the shocked angry man as the friend flicked it to him. There was some gasping, some laughing and a sheepish looking angry man said, “Caesar’s”. “Well, Caesar can have what is his” Jesus said, and as He turned back to His friends He added, “the fish is mine.”

-my version of a story you will find in the gospels. I remembered it today and it made me happy. Even though I live in a country where the rich develop systems to keep themselves rich and keep the poor down, where insurance companies use scaremongering to suck as much cash out of you as legally possible, where the wealthy government officials tax the poor more heavily than their rich buddies, I can still know that the Lord is my provider. The Lord will even give me the money to pay the corrupt rich men what they demand. Even from the mouth of a fish if needs be.