Perspective

It seems that the older I get, the more challenging life becomes. Maybe it's because I'm increasingly aware of the suffering of those around me, and my own. Maybe it's too much coverage of bad politicians and bad news from around the globe. I know that the climate crisis gets me down now and again (especially when I find a Roll-Up-The-Rim-To-Win single use coffee cup in the snow not five feet from a garbage can -- like I did this morning).

But then I sit in my meditation corner, and images similar to what you find in the video below come to me. Life is so much bigger than we realize, and our struggles are but a tiny part of it all. I prefer to think about my problems as tiny, and about God's presence in everything going on in the universe as huge. Videos like this help me to remember that the Source of All Being is in charge... and to relax because I am enough and I do what I can to make a difference. What do you do to keep a sense of perspective?

Guest Moodler: Sermon on Images of God

This sermon makes more sense if you've read The Taskmaster from last week. Another good sermon  from my one and only guest moodler. I think I'll try reciting Hafiz's prayer when I wake up in the mornings from now on...

Images of God

Cathy Coulter

July 14, 2013

Last Sunday I read a story I had written many years ago that was a light -hearted look at how my image of God had expanded from the rather distant, judging male God the Father to the more intimate, relaxed and fun-loving female God the Mother. I now will give a disclaimer that these characters of God are not based on my actual mother or father but I did have some experiences in mind when I wrote them.  The church of my childhood, my time with born-again Christians in my teens and my rejection of all that in my twenties was based on a God that I had let down in some way but who forgave me despite the fact that I didn’t measure up. I was apparently a sinner and Jesus had to die for my sins. That was the God who sat up in the sky and kept a record of right and wrong and tested us. God was male and as the only girl in a family of boys in a farming society where boys did the important, valuable work of farming, I had the unspoken, unconscious message that females were less valuable. In my thirties, exploring why I felt like I didn’t measure up, I came across the phrase “the original sin of being born female” and a light bulb came on. At the same time I met a wonderful group of women through the local United Church who introduced me to the idea of a feminine God. It was those women on whom I based my story’s character of God the Mother. The idea of a feminine God blew my mind. For the first time, I knew what it meant that I was created in the image of God. My spiritual life was kick-started and I became so thirsty to learn more, more, more.  That hasn’t stopped. I still feel like there is so much to learn and understand.

So I thank God for the United Church and its openness to different images of God and its inclusive language. I believe including the feminine is important for everyone, but I think it’s absolutely critical for girls if they are to have a deep sense of their own value and worth.

I needed the pendulum to swing from a male to a female image of God for quite some time but it has swung back to a more balanced place. I can be ambidextrous (for lack of a better word) with God the Father and God the Mother. They’re all kind of mixed up now, like in my story at the end when they were at the barbecue together, flirting.

Many people say that they don’t imagine God as either male or female and that’s fine too. I don’t know that I can really do that. We seem to be hard-wired for relationship. There is something about seeing a loving face delighting in us that is necessary for our wholeness. Arms wrapped around us. The touch of a kiss. That’s how I like to imagine God. Christians don’t have the monopoly on the image of God as a loving person. Hafiz, a Sufi poet in the 1300’s wrote a poem that would be a good poem to recite every morning upon waking:

          In the morning

          When I began to awake

          It happened again –

          That feeling

          That you, Beloved,

          Had stood over me all night

          Keeping watch,

          That feeling

          That as soon as I began to stir

          You put Your lips on my forehead

          And lit a Holy Lamp

          Inside my heart.

When I read that for the first time, I had the picture of exactly that. God keeping watch over me at night and planting a kiss on my forehead when I first stirred. Is that a beautiful image, or what? I love how it makes me feel so cherished.

          The image of God as Beloved is a rich image that we find a precedent for among the Christian mystics as well as the Sufi poets. It seems fitting that as we mature spiritually we expand our image of God beyond a parental image. When we have the experience of falling in love with God, only the language of the Beloved will do.

I started thinking about this idea of the images of God this spring when I learned more about St. Francis of Assisi through an on-line course of Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest in New Mexico. I like Richard Rohr’s teachings and this particular course gave me so much to think about. The course was not a study of St. Francis’s life as much as a study about the theology that emerged from his life.

We know St. Francis of Assisi from his prayer:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

St. Francis was not born a saint. He was born in 1181 or 1182 to a wealthy family, and spent his youth drinking and partying. During a local war he fought in, he was imprisoned for ransom for a year. It was in prison that he received a vision to follow Jesus and live a life among the poor, forsaking his wealth and comforts.

Francis is perhaps best known for loving the birds and animals and is often seen in pictures  surrounded by little creatures.

In his love of Jesus and of nature, Francis saw how God revealed God’s self in everything. Francis was able to step out of seeing himself as the centre of the universe, perhaps by stepping out of his comfort zone and living a life of poverty. He began to see everything for itself. When we take a break from seeing everything in the world in terms of how it affects us, when we look at something for what it is, we see that by being itself, a thing is good and true and beautiful.

By being ourselves, we are good and true and beautiful. We can see that in ourselves and in others.

Francis saw God as a part of everything and that included each person that walked down the street. He would walk through the streets of Assisi, greeting all the people he met, saying, “Good morning, good people. Good morning, good people.” When he reached the edge of town he would say, “I have preached my sermon.” We can only wish that all sermons were that simple and that short.

Francis saw the goodness of people because he saw God in them and he knew God is good. Francis also knew that God is totally humble. Humble is not an image of God that usually springs to mind. “God is humble.” Let’s think about that. When I think about the words for God that we grew up with, ones that come to mind include almighty, all powerful,  Lord, King. Michael W. Smith’s popular and catchy Christian song has a refrain that goes,

Our God is an awesome God

He reigns from heaven above

With wisdom, power and love

our God is an awesome God.

That’s a God that we bow down to but is it a humble God? Francis spent his life finding God in the world around him, not in heaven above. He let the smallest creature, the smallest flower or weed or stone speak to him of God. The outcast, the drunk, the poverty stricken, the infirm…Francis saw the face of God in these humble people. And his model was, of course, Jesus, who did as well. Our Christian faith teaches us that God chose to be revealed in Jesus. As our Creed says, God “came in Jesus, Word made flesh”, not as a king but as a baby born to a poor, humble couple. Jesus lived his life in humility. Jesus didn’t take the side of the powerful or the “in crowd”. Consider story of the Good Samaritan that we heard this morning. Think about that story again, this time considering the Good Samaritan as an image of God, who does not pass us by, who binds up our wounds and pays for all our expenses. If Jesus is the face of God, then our God is a humble God.

We also grew up with a theology that because we were born sinners, we weren’t good enough for God so He sent His son Jesus to make amends on our behalf through a violent death. St. Francis and the Franciscan theology that grew out of his life, did not teach that. St. Francis recognized our original blessedness and believed that God came in Jesus to show us that God is totally good and totally humble. Richard Rohr, the teacher of the course that I took about Franciscan theology says that “Christ didn't come to change God's mind about us, but to change our minds about God.”

During the course we were asked to reflect on what is our real, operative, de facto image of God? And that got me thinking about the story that I wrote a dozen or so years ago, the one that I read last week. I thought about my God the Father figure, the one I didn’t measure up to, who saw me as hopeless, who had an enormous rule book and set up tests that I surely couldn’t figure out. With my God the Mother figure, I could be myself and I was liked for who I was. I could relax and play and trust my own inner voice. I realize now that those two versions of God weren’t as much about gender as about how I saw God generally. But which image of God is operating in my life now? I’m still a bit of a rule freak, find myself judging others too often when they don’t follow the rules, worry if I measure up, if I’m doing things right, still have a voice telling me I have to be productive to be worth anything. I think that image of God is still hanging around.  

Richard Rohr says that if we want to grow spiritually, "we must first deal with the often faulty, inadequate, and even toxic images of God that most people are dealing with .... Jesus as the image of the invisible God reveals a God quite different and much better than the Santa Claus god who is making a list, checking it twice, going to find out who's naughty or nice... We must be honest and admit that this is the god that most people are still praying to." 

Somebody is knocking at your door. Is that somebody calling you to explore your own images of God? Where is the mysterious image of God beckoning you to expand?

The poem that I taught the children this morning about the squirrel was written by St. Francis and I would like to end with another of his poems:

Such love does

the sky now pour,

that whenever I stand in a field,

I have to wring out the light

when I get

home.

May all our hearts open to such love.

Amen          

Guest Moodler: Sermon on the Taskmaster

Once again, my dearest friend is giving the sermon at her church this weekend. I always enjoy her sermons, and ask her permission to share them. Here, for your enjoyment once again, is my one and only guest moodler.

The Taskmaster

Cathy Coulter

July 7, 2013

A line from the Galatians passage of this morning reads, “When God decided to reveal God’s son to me…I did not go to anyone for advice.” In the reading from Luke, Jesus tells us, “Listen! I have given you authority.” (Luke 10: 19) God has given us the ability to know God directly, especially through Jesus.

When we’re young we need to be given spiritual training wheels. We need to be given ways to think about God, and when I was young; I was given a certain image of God that melded with my experiences in the world. A turning point in my spiritual journey and in my choosing to stay on a Christian path came in my thirties when my eyes were opened to a new way of imagining God. Today I want to read a story that I wrote at that time. So today, it’s story time. I call the story “The Taskmaster.”

It was early morning and the late spring sun was pouring around the edges of my cheap vinyl blind. I woke up but was desperate to go back to sleep. I rolled over and pressed my face more deeply into my pillow. But I knew it was too late as I heard a cough from the foot of the bed. It was not a polite cough. It was an irritated one. He’d been waiting for a while, it seemed.

I rolled over again as I knew I must. There he was, as he was most mornings. The Taskmaster. Standing at the end of the bed in his immaculate blue velvet doublet over peach satin pantaloons and pale yellow stockings. The white curls of his periwig danced slightly as he pulled out the scroll from under his arm, unrolled it and began to read the list of things I needed to do that day. The list was always longer than the time I had, as the Taskmaster always pointed out. By the time he was done, I was not only fully awake but my stomach was clenched. Finally, after I had heard too much to take  in, the Taskmaster rolled up his scroll, tucked it under his arm, straightened to attention with the slightest of bows and marched on out of the room. My head was spinning and I leapt out of bed to begin running around in activity. Maybe if I moved really fast I could get a lot of things done.

Sometimes the Taskmaster would be waiting for me as I left work. He’d be waiting in the back seat of my car. As subservient as he seemed in the getup of an aide to Queen Elizabeth the First, I was no queen. I knew who held the reigns despite appearances that the Taskmaster was there to serve me and my interests. Always, there would be that scroll. I hated that scroll. Written on it were the long lists of tasks which became blurrier near the bottom. I’d watch happily when a task would vanish from the top of the list after I’d completed it, only to watch in horror as two or three more emerged from the blurriness at the bottom. I’d always thought that a list was a tool for time management. Sometimes, it seemed more like an instrument of the devil. If that were so, what did that make the Taskmaster? But I needed him. How else would I stay productive, worthy, earn my right to exist?

* * * * * *

The Taskmaster first came after the session I’d had with God the Father. God the grumpy, intellectual bachelor Middle-School God the Father. I’d been called up to God’s office. I was about eleven.

            “Come in,” He barked when I knocked. Maybe I shouldn’t have knocked. Just gone in. I went in. I hesitated. Should I close the door?

            “Sit down,” He barked again, making me jump. I rushed to the chair in front of His desk.

            “The door,” He wailed. It was clear He already found me hopeless. I scurried back to close the door, then returned to the chair. I perched on the edge of the seat. I felt sick.

            “Have you studied your lessons?” He asked.

            “Yes, Lord,” I said. I’d studied and studied. So much was riding on this. More than anything, I wanted to get into the Lord’s favour, into His club.

            “Alright. We will soon begin. But first, let Us play a little game.”

            He smiled as He pulled out a piece of paper from a drawer and laid it on top of the desk. I could not read that smile. It did not feel reassuring.

            “Come closer,” He said. I inched my chair forward. On the paper were three rows of three dots.

            “This,” He said, “is a simple little game. All you have to do is join all the dots with this pencil.” He pulled a yellow pencil out of His sleeve with a flourish. “The only thing is, you can’t pass through a dot more than once. You can only use one line and you can only change the direction of the line three times.” He smiled again and handed me the pencil.

            I looked down at the dots and poised the pencil. I was worried. This kind of thing was not up my alley. I imagined drawing one line, then another but that would leave that dot free. How about this way? Or that way? My heart sank further. This kind of puzzle had always stumped me. I bowed my head and closed my eyes.

            “Dear Lord,” I said. “Thank you for showing me this game. I know you love me and want what is best for me. But Lord, I ask You to take this puzzle from me. If that is Your will, Lord, please take this puzzle away. I ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.”

            I kept my eyes closed. I heard God sigh and - was that a little snort? I looked up again.

            “Alright,” he said, picking up the paper and slipping it back in the drawer. “Let’s get on with the test. Are you ready?”

            He pulled out a chess board and began setting up the pieces. The test was a chess game?  I knew how to move the chess pieces but I was a terrible chess player. I couldn’t think four steps in advance and anticipate the other player’s moves. I couldn’t employ any strategy at all. I was not logical enough. I was not smart enough. I was done for.

            Ten minutes later my king lay tipped over on the board. All but my rook and two pawns were captured. At least it had been a rapid humiliation. God was trying not to smile as He packed up the pieces and put away the board. He composed His features, and then frowned at me. He didn’t need to tell me. I knew I had failed. I felt overwhelmed with sadness. Now I’d never get in.

            “Well, what are We to do with you?” God said. I hung my head to hide the fat tears welling up in my eyes. “It seems you won’t be able to manage on your own with what you’ve got, will you?”

            I shook my head. One tear dropped into my lap.

            “Hmmm,” He said. The yellow pencil was still lying on the desk. He picked it up and began to tap-tap it.

            “We have decided that We will send you a Helper. Yes, that is what We will do for you. This Helper will show you the Way. For you do not know what to do. Wait for the Helper. He will come to you.”

            “Thank you, Lord,” I whispered.

            “Go,” He said.

            I got up and backed out of His office. It seemed that I had been saved, given a second chance. All I had to do was do what I was told. I could do that.       

* * * * * *

I first met God the Mother playing in a park with a bunch of women. The menopausal gray-haired feminist activist God the Mother. I didn’t know who she was at first. The women were playing Frisbee. One of them had invited me to come and hang out. I was thirty-three.

            “Hi,” they all called out in welcome as I crossed the lush green grass. The Frisbee went sailing over my head. They all laughed.

            “That’s Norma’s Frisbee Blessing,” said one and they all hooted and howled again. I ran to get the Frisbee and threw it back. It floated over the grass and was plucked out of the air by some nimble fingers.

            “Good one. Come and play.”

            We had fun and played for over an hour until it was time for the potluck picnic. It was an abundant feast. I was filling my plate with seconds when one of the women came up beside me to start into the cheesecake.

            “You’re Cathy, aren’t you?” she said, as she popped a large red strawberry into her mouth. I confirmed that I was.

            “I’m God,” she mumbled with her mouth full.

            “Oooh,” I said, impressed.

            “Did you make this cheesecake? It’s heavenly. I must get the recipe from you. How did you make this crust?”

            On the way home that night I felt happy and relaxed. I felt like I had made some new friends. They invited me to go out with them again. Godde said she would pop over for a visit and to get the cheesecake recipe. I hoped she would come soon.

* * * * * *

            One day, after  God the Mother and I had gotten to know each other, we were sitting on my front step trying to see who could come up with the most names for the colour blue when I said,

             “I’d like to get rid of the Taskmaster.”

             “Who’s the Taskmaster?” God asked.

            “He’s the One who helps me know what I need to do. But he’s really getting on my nerves. I’d like to be free of him. Completely.”

            “Maybe you could suggest he retire?”

            “I thought of that but I’m afraid he would want to come back as a consultant. Even that would be too much for me.”

            “I see,” God said.

            She leaned over to pet the cat who was rubbing up against her legs. “Who’s his boss?” she asked.

            “God the Father.”

            “Why don’t you talk to him?”

            “I haven’t talked to Him in a long time, “I said. “I’d feel pretty nervous about it.”

            “I saw him at a convention recently,” God said. She put her arm around me and gave me a sideways hug. “He’s mellowed quite a bit. I think it would be okay.”

            I leaned my head against her shoulder and sighed. I knew that it was the right thing to do but I was afraid. What if I turned into an eleven year old again and stumbled and stammered my way into an even bigger dilemma? What if God decided I needed even more guidance and sent a second Helper? Could I be strong enough to say what I really wanted? Or would I be turned into stone in His presence?

* * * * * *

            The door to his office looked just as imposing as before, except it seemed quite a bit smaller. I raised my left hand to knock and hesitated. I placed my right hand on the doorknob then knocked and opened the door at the same time. Sticking my head into the room I called out, “Hello, God.”

            There he was, bent over his desk, writing intently on the piles of papers in front of him. He raised his head and peered at me, frowning.

            “It’s…”

            “Yes,” I said.

            “Oh, hello,” God said.

            “Can I come in?”

            “Yes, come in.”

            I looked him over. He too seemed a bit smaller. I sat down in the chair.

            “What can I do for you?” he asked.

            “I’ve come to ask a favour of you…actually, to tell you something. I’m not going to need the services of the Task…I mean my helper anymore. I’ve come to tell you that I’d appreciate it if you took him away from me.” My heart was pounding and I felt a flush rising in my cheeks. I tried to look composed.

            “Oh, I see.” Then a long silence.

            “Will there be a problem with that?”

            God was frowning. “Well, it’s a bit irregular. Not exactly in the Rules. I must look it up.”

            He pulled open a drawer and hefted an enormous black book onto the desk. The word “Rules” was printed on the cover in gold capital letters. God began flipping through the pages. He found the page he was looking for and ran his finger down it as he scanned. He turned a page, and then he turned it back. He flipped to another section and ran his finger down several more pages. His frown deepened.

            “God,” I said.

            “Just wait,” he said. “There must be a rule here somewhere.”

            “God,” I repeated, “I know what to do.”

            God’s finger stopped mid-page and he looked up. “You know what to do?” he echoed.

            “I’ve been thinking. My helper likes to keep very busy. I think if you sent him to Siberia, he would be very happy.”

            “Well…” God began.

            “It’s the right thing to do,” I said. “Trust me.”

* * * * * *

            I never saw the Taskmaster again. Not that I didn’t miss him a little bit. Freedom can be quite overwhelming at times. Still, I sleep better than I ever have. And everything falls into place somehow.

            I asked God the Mother if I could invite God the Father to our next women’s barbeque. She said, “Sure, why not?” So I did. And he came. Looking quite spiffy. I think he was a little nervous. But God the Mother soon put him at ease. Near the end of the evening, I saw her put her hand on his knee as they were both laughing over something. I think they were flirting.

* * * * * *     

               

That’s the end of my story and it’s the beginning of my reflection for next week. I invite you through the week to think about your real, operative image of God. And for your consideration through the week, this question: How does our image of God reflect on how we live our lives? 

Thanks for the most interesting story, Cathy! And some things to consider... If any moodlings followers would like to post a comment, I'm sure she'd be happy to read it...

Stay tuned... I'll be sure to post Cathy's follow-up reflection in a week's time.