Benedicite

Somebody's found a "confessed atheist" in the House of Representatives. The same story says a poll shows 95% of us would vote for a Roman Catholic for president, and 45% would vote for an atheist. Jews came in second. Episcopalians didn't make the cut.

Considering Deists were rather prevalent among our founding fathers, I'm surprised they weren't mentioned. I wonder if even the question was asked, and if not, why not. I find it rather refreshing that an atheist showed up in the House and in the poll. Of course, I'm never quite sure just what is an atheist or whether the name, itself, is not a one-word oxymoron. I always want to ask what Jim Pike, one of my favorite bishops, used to ask. "Tell me about the God you don't believe in."

The famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says there's all kinds of evidence for a God-by-whatever-name, but precious little that this GBWN cares one way or another. That comes close to Deism as I understand it.

On the other hand, the late Bennett Sims, one-time bishop of Atlanta, wrote in his book on servant leadership that some quantum theorists are certain there is a caring pulse of energy that animates and interconnects all the entities in the cosmos. It's not unlike Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, outraging his time when he said that the "molecules make love." This, of course, got his books banned. The notion of "making love" -- who or what does it with whom and how -- never seems then or now to sit all that well with the book-banning types.

In Jesus's time, it was common knowledge and experience that the created order in all its facets always knew and recognized in him in its own way who and what was present among us. The daemons, the bread and fishes, the storms, the winds and waves, the human maladies, the fig trees, Satan itself in the wilderness, all across the universe were well savvy to the major bend in cosmic history that happened when the Word became flesh.

No wonder Jesus could say on that first Palm Sunday that if the crowds turned silent, the very stones, themselves, the seemingly most inert and mute of all creation, would burst forth in adulation. Maybe it's what we now call atomic energy, but by whatever name, it remains Benedicite, omnia opera Domini -- "O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord."

[The Covenant Journal, Number 24, March 2007]

Originally published on Out of Nowhere, March 16, 2007. Reprinted with permission.