I attended a meeting yesterday of Vestry members---a kind of lay council of leadership in local churches---from Episcopal churches in the southern part of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona. The topic was doing a better job of stewardship among the Episcopal church. It was an interesting meeting but the assumption of the meeting was that we need to work harder in "selling" the Episcopal church to our members and others by treating "pledging" or financial support, as a way of "strengthening our relationship with Jesus."
Having grown up in the South that way of putting things really turns me off.
I kept my mouth shut but frankly I felt out of touch with most of the discussion even though many of the ideas, like making the point of stewardship as a way of supporting mission of the local church, were very sound. In truth, I have heard similar discussions in the United Church of Christ and in the Methodist church. Carole and I have been members in both denominations when we moved from place to place. This is faith in a particular denominational expression of a belief in God and in a particular way of thinking about Jesus as divinity, a kind of docetism that Carlyle Marney, a wonderful Baptist preacher warned against, in his book, The Carpenter's Son, many years ago.
I actually don't like the to use the term "belief" in discussing the idea of God. I like the term trust, or the elemental trust in life itself as a reality, an experience, not a belief in what happened long ago. I think this is the path for churches if they are to survive in an increasingly secular world.
The secular world has its own pantheon of Gods---war, profits, riches, or status which are truly false gods. So that stewardship, or encouraging a wider participation in a church, including financial support, is a way of celebrating our trust in life itself as life together, and our struggle together to resist putting our ultimate trust in false gods. I think that a lot of folks in Bisbee are engaged in that struggle. And thinking this through prompts me to post again something I wrote about this approach to God and life itself, several years back.
From time to time I write about James Carse's book, The Silence of God, as a modern spiritual classic. Carse offers a powerful argument that God's silence is a kind of presence that is waiting for us to speak and act. Here is still another way of looking at Carse's ideas.
Those who do no accept the idea of God will find this puzzling or wrong. Those who believe that God is constantly speaking will also find it simply wrong.
For me, Schubert Ogden, in his essay, "The Reality of God," in his book by the same name, offers another and interesting way to think about the silence of God.
Ogden argues that non-belief and non-faith may be seriously misunderstood. We all sense the presence of God expressed as a fundamental trust or assurance.
This may take many forms including a fleeting sense that no matter what happens to us we are "utterly safe," to use Wittgenstein's phrase.
Or we may think of God as the ultimate reality (or Tillich's "ultimate concern") that lies at the heart of everything, a reality that we don't go up to but rather journey out to, even as it reaches out to us.
This reality affirms the connectedness of all, a connectedness that reassures us that we are not lost but "saved."
This is getting very close to why I continue in the life of faith, a faith and trust in the intimate, interconnectedness that I sense, a connectedness that is behind the immensity we call the universe, a connectedness that beckons and reassures, a connectedness that feels embracing and waiting.
In Mary Oliver's poem "The Wild Geese" she writes:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting---
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Thus the problem is not whether we believe in God or what God we are to believe in but how we go about believing in God, God as a sense of elemental trust.
For this reason, the real issue of faith at the deepest, existential level is never whether we are to believe in God, or even, as it is sometimes said, what God we are to believe in; the issue, instead, is how we are to believe in the only God in whom anyone can believe and in whom each of us somehow must believe."(Ogden, 24)
In this view a pure atheism is not truly possible although "a-theism," or an argument against certain forms in which God is presented is entirely possible and even responsible. As our associate pastor puts it, "How to talk about faith when you don't believe in God."
We cannot not believe in God, in this view, and instead believe in mammon; we can only take mammon as the token and sign of the God we believe in.
The idolater manifestly believes in God because he or she embraces some form of ultimate trust.
Thus atheism or non-belief stands to belief not as 1 stands to 0 but as plus 1 stands to -1, or as error stands to the life of reason. (Ogden, 23, here citing H. Richard Niebuhr)
Ogden says that we have rationalized, conceptualized beliefs in our heads, and at a more basic or first level, we have a fundamental, element sense of God's presence, an assurance and a re-assurance.
At this level, and perhaps always, God is silent but present.
Here we are in touch with a more elemental reality, one which the more intellectualized sense of God can cloud over.
Indeed, we can have people who confess an absolute faith in God at the intellectual level but at the root level of God be faithless. The bishop of the church in the funny hat can present a towering symbol for God and faith but also may carry in his heart a faith that is more truly attached to his hat and his eminence.
Looked at this way, the silence of God signifies that we have reached the truer level where we find the silent presence of God.
James Carse's ideas about receiving the world and silence, in his The Silence of God, may be the attempt to get to this more fundamental level and this purer sense of assurance, an assurance that waits for us, beckons us, and bids us to speak.
Comments