August 23, 2006

Pluto

All the current scrap about whether Pluto is a planet or a planet not makes me mindful of Frederick Buechner’s suggestion that a human being is so the universe will have something to talk through, so God will have something to talk with, and so the rest of us will have something to talk about. It is for us, isn’t it, in the final analysis, so much about talk. 

When for God, if I read the story aright, it’s, if not all about, then at least mostly about walk. In our more fanciful theological moments, we call it Incarnation. Our Twelve Step colleagues, as usual, make it simpler and rightly insist that the only way to get ourselves back (aka recover) is to walk the talk.

We are scientists, all of us in one way or another, and we rather get used to the notion that if we say something is enough times, then that must be the the way it is. Maybe we forget that Pluto is also a Disney dog of some considerable repute. We are all theologians, as well, even if only we’ve once had no more than a smidgen of a notion about God or a reasonable facsimile by some other name, like, maybe, Higher Power, the favorite softener. 

We churchers seem very much into this sort of thing these days. Who else might there be for the Gospel to have something to talk through? And so, we write scripture and creeds, covenants and systemats, reports and resolutions, and old time religion, all the better the more who agree the closer it gets to Truth and the more like Truth it must surely be.

All the while, the Gospel was so long ago, and there’ve been so many zillions of human beings since and, God help us, so much talk, so very much talk all trying to make it so, that it is just plain humanly easy to forget that it was never so much about talk as it is about walk. James tried to tell us about faith and works, and his epistle barely made the cut.

Whatever we decide about Pluto, Pluto — or a more or less reasonably similar ball of ice — is still out there wobbling along and not giving us a lot of thought. I hope it’s different about God.

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