December 19, 2005

Maybe

Those of us who believe in God, such as we are, maybe have faith because certain things have happened to us once and go on happening.

We work and goof off, we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these, and if our faith is not mainly just window dressing or a rabbit’s foot or fire insurance, it is because it grows out of precisely this kind of rich human compost.

The God of biblical faith is the God who is love and who meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most as God imagines us to be, that is, most nearly in God’s image of us, most ourselves. If we lose touch with those moments, if we don’t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with God, too.

Now, one way to make all this work for us might be to try on the counsel of a seven-year old who, when asked What is love, said, love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents long enough to listen.

No Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.