God, Christ, Holy Spirit, and Church

Holy Week in Christendom is a period when the world comes to a stand still. The sacredness of time and the sanctity of space are enjoined and profoundly celebrated.

I use here the devotional language of the faithful. Familiarity with metaphysics and its queen discipline, theology, were once the mark of a scholar and a learned person. In recent times, metaphysics has become the currency of the squawk box along the backwoods and the backwaters of our sanity, and theology the pretentious handmaiden of the obscurantist and the antagonist of the open mind.

And yet the four words in the title are code words that clamor for understanding. Of late, they have become benignly and justifiably ignored by a world immersed in historical awareness and sociological wisdom, where the common mind is a liberated creature of unflinching science and neutral technology. Is it possible to understand them without falling into the circuitous appeal of biblical metaphors, or the self-serving allure of devotional piety?

We give it a try. After all, the honorific word ‘God’ used to be a prominent icon in serious discourse, and in the solemn recitation of the oath of public office. With the collapse of Wall Street before the bailout and the stimulus package, pundits suggested that the phrase “In God We Trust” be replaced by the more accurate phrase, “In Greed we Thrust.”

This week’s series explores what sense these words might mean in sociological terms, and what reality they are pointing to that is recognizable in any clime and culture in the human realm.
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We recall the comic incident when Time magazine printed for its cover in bold red-on-black the question, “Is God Dead?” The furor that followed saw cardinals and bishops up in arms in defense of their suddenly threatened theological underpinnings—as if God needed defending!

The word “God” is a recently coined European word that refers to a supreme or mighty power, appropriate in the medieval context of the feudal liege. It is the word used to translate the Semitic “el” as the primal force. YAH (YHWH) is the biblical term for the mysterious power that undergirds and defines all of life.

Now, before we quickly fall into the trap of abstraction, imagine a herder driving a camel in the desert, momentarily unmindful and temporarily oblivious of the immediate environment, and in receding into the recesses of his mind, the camel suddenly flops a cake of fresh do-do into his face. The primordial cry of “YAH!” naturally comes out as the outburst of surprise and rude awakening.

Demythologizing the word back to this kind of earthiness gives one the existential flavor of the experience of awe and wonder, of the profound mystery of the ever-present unknown.

We all run into the limits of our existence. In the ’60s, the youth phrased a query fraught with deep meaning: What are you up-against? It is in this up-against-ness that the significance of the word “God” made sense. The God who is rightfully dead in Christian atheism is the grandfather figure in the sky that monitors and assesses the state of human moral rectitude and civil order.

The overt and quiet railing against the heavens over the demise of the garment industry’s golden goose came as an assault on revered ideology for some, and the comfort of well-padded pocketbooks for others. It is no surprise that one had called it the judgment of God!

When the authenticity of life awakens humans to the reality of finitude, of limits and untrustworthy dependencies, then the utterance of “YAH” might be painfully but liberatingly appropriate. Everyone longs for truth and knowledge but “more” only leads to added confusion and uncertainty; everyone clamors for an eternity of peace which only accents our experience of an eternity of struggle; everyone senses the demand of conscience but we resign to the ease of expediency or the haze of moral ambiguity. For all our yearnings comes a terminus of fulfillment. We are in our experience never satisfied.

When confronted by the awesome and the awe-full, humans had been known to flee from the threat of the unknown into the comfort of the unexamined commonplaces and familiar; or humans have been known to go into a defensive frenzy of fear-filled rhetoric and stoic belligerency, inventing ogres and monsters as enemies, as well as prop-up someone/something to blame for our miseries.

Religious understandings that remain accountable to the assessment of reality and not default into the authority of a person or the legal dictates of calcified writings, stand the chance of making an authentic relational choice to that mysterious power in the midst of life that frustrates every vestige of our human assertions and aggressions.

In a sense, Jew and gentile, religious and secular, believer and agnostic, we stand at every moment between what is no-longer and what is not-yet, between memory and anticipation, and in the language of this week, at the borders of faith and hope.

Sometime somewhere, a group of people made a conscious choice that for the unknown Unknown that called every morsel of the past into being, the proper stance is gratitude; that for all the uncertainty of a future careening into our existence unannounced and in a manner like the bull in the proverbial china parlor, the desired response is hopeful anticipation; and that which sustains the bottomless pit of the abyss that accompanies any serious affirmation of what-just-IS, the gracious response is more than just to let it be! That reality in fact is our parent (in the cultural myopia of Mesopotamia, they called it “Abba,” father)!

It is then that the word “God” might begin to make any sense, not as something among other things that one can believe in, but as a word pointing to an inescapable reality one is compelled to relate to, in which case, one can understand that since the life that gives, and life that takes away is our eternal up-against-ness, then blessed, indeed, be its name!