Reflection on Bishop Hayashi's Sunday post

3-26-2017 Sunday

“…..what he does state is equally problematic for us - “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Taken at face value, God created the man blind from birth in order that years later he could be healed as a show of God’s power!? That, in my opinion, is just as bad as the standard thinking of his time. So let us try it this way instead - The man was born blind not because his parents or he was a sinner. The fact that he was blind, however, was an opportunity to reveal God’s work. In other words, every situation where help is needed is an opportunity to demonstrate, to reveal God’s loving work by Christian people.” From Bishop Hayashi’s Sunday FB post. (My italics)

My thought. God is all-powerful because he only does one thing. He does not meddle in our affairs because doing so would establish limitations. The incarnation reveals that there is only one response to God, and it is the same as the one thing that God does. Love. Affinity. Compassion.

I’m not sure about the thought-train, but I know what triggered it was the phrase, “every situation where help is needed.” The other part of it stemmed from my reaction to a post by a friend on FB who is always railing against religion for touting a God who is “omnipotent” and still doesn’t fix anything, and this same friend also tries to poke holes in Christian theology based on a deep misunderstanding of God as a person who performed a blood sacrifice of his own son to save the very same sinners that he himself condemned. I have given up trying to argue with him, but I have found that his posts often cause me to ponder and reflect in ways that have turned out to be very beneficial to my own understanding.

I recall something Maggie Ross wrote in one of her books about the answer she gave when her mother asked her what she thought happens when we die. She told her mother that she thinks “the universe is made of love, and that when we die we are somehow drawn deeper into that love.”

So anyway, I had a flash of understanding which I am now struggling to put into words. It’s all very paradoxical. Omnipotent love by its very nature is also vulnerable and helpless. All-powerful by definition is to have all power. If God is Love, and Love is all-powerful, then Love is left with no separate thing or condition to exercise its power upon. Love can only exercise its power within the unlimited bounds of itself. God can do nothing but Love. God’s judgment cannot create divisions, as between just and unjust, kind and cruel, spirit and matter, mind and body, which then create categories of worthiness or degrees of Love. The judgment is one we enact on ourselves because we will not abandon distraction; because we refuse to be aware; because we prefer to create God in our own image, instead of allowing ourselves to be stunned by the absolute knowledge that we are created in God’s image. The judgment of Love could be described as God’s patient refusal to do anything other than loving. That is only a judgment in the sense that it makes God vulnerable to our judgment, and if we set conditions and insist that God include us in that love, but exclude others, that gives God no choice but to allow us to reject Love and face the consequences all on our own. This gives me a new understanding of the saying “You shall not put God to the test.”

I remember what I told an atheist friend of mine who recently asked me a serious and not unfriendly question about belief in God. She is a dog person, so I started by commenting on the universal distaste that dog people have for people who sentimentalize and anthropomorphize dogs and thereby violate the dog’s real doggy nature and make the poor dog into an anxious, neurotic mess. I said that I think people anthropomorphize God when they imagine a giant-sized white-bearded patriarch up in the sky. When people create shibboleths on behalf of this imaginary God, and insist that God should play favorites, take sides, or punish those who don’t conform, that is nothing more than a blatant attempt to control God; to make God conform to our wishes. I think that most people worship their own ideas about God, and have no inclination to humbly and reverently wait in hope that they will be granted the grace of beholding God revealed in their innermost lives, or the delight of recognizing God’s immanence in all creation.

Be still before the Lord

    and wait patiently for him;

do not fret when people succeed in their ways,

    when they carry out their wicked schemes. Psalm 37