Obama08

I heard this is a text message that is going around and I really liked it...


Rosa sat so that Martin could walk.

Martin walked so that Obama could run.

Obama is running so our children can fly.

A Question of Faith (cont'd)

Following up on my previous post, I wanted to put a response to my question about God and suffering from Pete (the pastor). Also, the comment from Papasan to my previous post triggered an expansion of the discussion of faith which I paraphrase below:

Understandably, Pete answered by first of all saying, that it is not something that he can really answer in the context of one sermon, but that in his view, when we suffer, God suffers along with us.

I know for some people, that answer would be totally inadequate. Even for me, at another moment in time it might have been. Actually, I am not sure that it was an answer to the question I had even asked (which was more of a why), but it may have been the one I meant to ask (which was more of a what). And at that moment, it rang so completely honest and true that I had a very emotional, almost visceral reaction. I have spent the last several days trying to analyze why I had that reaction. So far, the best I can come up with is that it is something I have always known somewhere deep inside. Also, he did not try to manufacture some sort of justification of God being somehow outside of us, separate and paternal and omnipotent, either not caring for us, not aware, or unable to intervene. The resulting feeling was of being re-introduced to my true self and of God's presense. Regardless of what caused my reaction, I know that there is truth in what he said, what I felt, and where that is leading me, so I am continuing down this path.

Defining Faith

I am quite sure that I do not believe in a God living up in the clouds with a white flowing beard. However, I am also quite sure that questioning faith itself is completely valid. As Papasan said, faith is a belief in something for which there is no proof, but that does not mean that one can not examine one’s own faith, or examine the difficulty in reaching it without collapsing the entire notion of faith. Faith for me is not static. It can expand and collapse, become more important and less important, and otherwise cycle just as any other idea can. Faith is dynamic. One minute I can have faith that my next breath will fill my lungs with oxygen and my heart will pump that newly oxygenated blood through my system, allowing my life to continue for a moment more, and another minute I can be reminded of the randomness of life and death and question my faith in life altogether. Being a mother has brought these questions to the fore for me. I have a theory of relativity when it comes to faith: That the closer one is to the heart of the soul, the stronger the power of faith. My son lives in my very heart, so my faith relative to him is enormously important and the two are inextricably linked. But relative to say, my job, my faith is relatively unimportant. If I were to lose my job, that would be a blow to my faith for sure, but since my job is relatively far away from my emotional and spiritual core, it might only bruise my faith, it certainly wouldn't obliterate it. If I were a person with no real connections to other human beings, such as a character in some existentialist novel, faith would be relatively unimportant, or nonexistent. The more abstract the connection to life and love, the less faith exists. Does this mean that faith for me is an invalid concept? I don’t think so. I feel very comfortable with asking myself, do I have faith? and answering, sometimes.

Expressing Faith

Love of self is a natural pairing with faith. Love in general is the result. In this week’s sermon, they talked about the one law of Christian doctrine being Love of God, Love of neighbor, and Love of self. According to the pastor, these three loves are actually one, and fear does not exist within this Higher Love. People use the term self respect to mean an inner goodness. If someone acts in a way that is hurtful we ask, don’t they have any self respect? This meaning is very telling. It means that inherent within self respect is the notion that we behave lovingly in the world. There is no room for judgment in this in my opinion. The one thing that gets reinforced over and over in the bible is the fact that Jesus teaches us to not judge others. In story after story, Jesus broke with Jewish tradition and went out of his way to include those least desirable in society, the outsiders whom others judged not to be worthy of God’s love.

Defining God

On the back of our weekly programs for the church services, there is always a quote that is somehow related to the teaching of that week. Last week it was a quote from Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, “Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” Perhaps there is a nuanced difference between the traditional definition of God being omnipotent and a definition of God being omnipotent and yet lacking all will to power.

A Question of Faith

The pastors of the church we attend semi-regularly sent out an email requesting questions from the community to be answered during the sermon this coming Sunday. Below is the question I sent in, and I would love to hear everyone else's thoughts, cohesive or not on the below:

Hi Pete and Jenn,

Thank you so much for offering the opportunity for us to ask you questions! I learn so much from listening to your sermons, but I have often felt there were some things that I just don’t get, not having had the benefit of growing up with any religion as part of my life. I have always tried very hard to believe and have faith, not because I feel it is the “right” thing to do, but because I want so desperately to have that as a source of comfort, and because there have been periods where I didn’t question quite as much, and found it helped me find peace in many ways.

But, I always come back to logic and reason, and find there are so many doubts that it is hard for me to sustain my faith. So, it is difficult for me to choose just one question! However, I think the most important question is the very one that you may not be able to answer, as many generations of people have asked it through the ages: if God is benevolent and well, ‘God’, why is there so much suffering in the world? No offense, but please don’t say that God gave us free will. For one thing, there is plenty of suffering that is not caused by people: famine, drought, disasters, and other so called “Acts of God”. For another thing, what about the whole omnipotence thing? If we say free will is the cause, isn’t that saying that God either: doesn’t care (benevolence?), can’t intervene (omnipotence?), or isn’t aware? Then why do we pray?

In discussing this question with my husband last night, he suggested that God exists because, as human beings we are self aware, and therefore need the concept of God to explain things that are beyond our understanding. For him, God is real because he believes in Him. But this does not resolve my problem. As much as I am a news junkie, each day I hesitate when I go to look at CNN.com or turn on the TV or radio. Will there be a story of an innocent child suffering at the hands of his or her own parent? Will there be a PSA spot showing orphaned children, slowly starving due to widespread drought? Where was God during the Holocaust or in Darfur, or even in the Gulf Coast during the hurricanes and their aftermath? And why, for God’s sake, did we have to have George W. Bush as president for eight excruciatingly long years? KIDDING! (Sort of.)

Just a few weeks ago, our cat was run over and killed right in front of our house. My son was there. We were all there, though we did not see the actual incident, it occurred only moments before our neighbor came to tell us he was lying in the road, not moving. My son is five years old now, and at an age where he still thinks his parents have all the answers, just as questions about death, God, and the ways of the Universe are coming in to his awareness. I assume I am not the only parent who feels totally inadequate to explain such things to my child, which is one of the reasons we come to church. I hope he can pick up what I so desperately wish I had: A foundation of faith and a sense of peace with questions such as these.

If you can’t answer the question of why bad things happen to good people (and animals), at least can you help me with a narrative to start my son on the path of faith in the face of such questions? After all, it’s an age old question, and I know there is a certain time constraint here (just a bit daunting!), but maybe the process of helping him come to an understanding will help me find a source of comfort and peace with these questions as well.

Thank you for your consideration, and as always, thank you for your service.

I, Indian

Mo's family has a summer house in Cooperstown, NY called "The Wigwam"where the whole family gathers for Labor Day weekend each summer. (It's worth mentioning that the area is famous for being the setting for the historical fiction of James Fennimore Cooper, such as "The Last of the Mohicans". And the area is rich in archeological remnants of the First Americans that actually DID inhabit the land before Europeans destroyed thier way of life.) Thus, the name, "The Wigwam" has always struck me as a bit ironic, however, recently, the relative inappropriateness of that name became comedically apparent.

I bought a "Play & Discover First Words" game at TJ Maxx for $2. It has a word for every letter in the alphabet, and for the letter “I”, the word is “Indian”. Oh yes, I do mean THAT Indian. The picture of a cartoonish little man with a huge round red nose, huge red lips, a feather, who appears to be in some sort of dancing position with one hand up and one leg up, pow-wow style could not possibly be more politically incorrect.

Unfortunately, it was too late to take the “I” away when we were playing the game and of course, Little J was very puzzled by the picture. I wasn’t sure what to do because I do want him to learn the letter “I”, so I tried my “less is more” question answering technique and simply said “Indian” when he asked me what it was. But NOOOOOO this is the one time when Little J decides that’s not quite a satisfactory answer. “What is an Indian?” he asks. Seeing the picture for the letter “W” I quickly said, “It’s someone who lives in that.”

"A TENT?”

“No”, I said, “a wigwam”… Needless to say, Little J is was still confused. However, enjoying the reversal in the irony of that name, I chose not to try to correct the only logical conclusion: that somehow Mo’s side of the family is related to cartoon "Indians".

More Little J Quotes

Upon walking in to the room where CNN was returning to air after the commercial:

Mommy, did you see that? It's the news and they're BREAKING IT!

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While driving home from the library the other day:

That's a stop sign. They put stop signs there so people can stop sometimes, right?? Only when they need to save gas, right??

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