The Disguise of Religion

I am reading the book The Sacred Romance by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge. In the chapter I was just reading, they were talking about our our search to fill our longing for Transcendence with lovers who are less wild than God. Let's face it, as C.S. Lewis put it, God is not safe, but He is good. But sometimes this wildness and lack of control scares us and we look for other alternatives. Things we can do that give us glimpses and tastes of Transcendence, but still allow us to maintain control. One favorite seems to be religion itself. We get caught up into trying to find the right beliefs, the right practices, the right everything. Religion becomes an intellectual journey that is divorced from our heart. Because it has the disguise of religion, it appears much more acceptable. But it is just as much adultery as anything else. It is like masturbating to a picture of your wife while refusing to have sex with her. If that idea is uncomfortable and repulsive to you, it should be. That is not at all what the relationship is supposed to be like, but it is how many of us approach our relationship with God. We want the benefits (orgasm) and we want to look like we're doing it right (it's within a marriage relationship), but we are afraid of the risk involved (sex requires much more risk than masturbation).

There is a risk in having a real relationship with God. For one thing, we have to surrender control. This can be really difficult because in our really honest moments, we would admit that the way God has done things is not the way we would have done them. There are always those times when we wish God would have stepped in, but He didn't. The question of how a good God who is all-powerful could allow evil to happen to good people (and vice-versa) is a question that has plagued humanity throughout the ages. And while our heads may find a satisfactory answer and we dismiss the questioning as faithlessness, our hearts still cry from the pain. The natural human reaction of protecting ourselves from pain kicks in, and we try to take more control. We will still "give God control of our lives", but only within certain parameters. And since we can't really trust that He will come through when we want Him to, we avoid putting ourselves in those situations. We try to do the right actions and believe the right doctrine, but since our heart hesitates to trust God, we just separate it from the process. What we're left with is a form of religion that may look like what God wants (after all, we're doing the right things), but there is no life to it. The Bible is explicitly clear that our "right actions" must come from a heart of love (read the Sermon on the Mount). But our heart hesitates to trust Him because it has been burned by His wildness. So we are left to choose between a form of religion that looks good on the outside, but still allows us control so we don't get burned. Or we can surrender the control, embrace God's wildness, and trust His goodness. There's a lot of risk involved, but unless we embrace the wildness of God and relinquish our desire for control, we will never experience the full blessing of a real relationship with God.

Grace for God

I read something last week that I've been chewing on quite a bit. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, but I do think there is something valuable in it. I was reading a pamphlet on being angry with God. It mentioned something from the Jewish tradition where a rabbi prayed that God would forgive him for the things he has done, and in turn he would forgive God for the things He has done. It raised an interesting thought: if we expect God to grant us grace and forgiveness for all the ways we mess up, can we offer the same to God?

The initial problem I have with this concept is that I believe God is perfect, and to say that he needs grace or forgiveness seems to contradict that. But it's not that God needs our grace (after all, who are we to forgive God), it's that we need to grant grace. I may know in my head that God is perfect, but there are still times that I wonder why He did or did not do something. Let's be honest: there is a reason that the question of theodicy is still debated. Theodicy is the theological term for the age-old question of why an all-powerful and good God would allow evil things to happen to good people. If God has the cure for cancer, is He responsible for keeping it from us? Tons of books have been written about the issue, and yet the question persists. We may answer the question in our heads, but when a situation hits our heart with the question, all those answers don't seem to matter. I believe it's one of those things that will never be fully understood until we get to heaven.

So can we offer God grace for the things He does that don't make sense and seem to betray His character? My CPE supervisor commented this week that our relationship with God tends to be so drastically different from any other relationship we have. She said she will never forget the day she realized that her earthly father couldn't protect her from everything. And she will never forget the day she realized her Heavenly Father couldn't protect her from everything either. But she knows He wants to. And He hurts just as much as she does. Why He protects some people from some things, and not others, I may never completely understand. But I am not called to understand everything completely. Faith has to play some role.

If God is truly our friend, and we treat Him that way, should we not offer to Him the same grace we expect from Him? My head may know that He is perfect and does nothing wrong. But my heart wonders sometimes.

Don't write me off as a heretic who's gone off the deep end. I'm not trying to convince you of anything. These are just my theological questionings. It's something I'm chewing on.