Grace
to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Whither thou
goest I will go.
Thy people
shall be my people,
and thy god;
my god.
Ruth
No passage of Scripture is more central to
the spiritual crisis of our time, the choice we each and all must make, the
heart of our faith.
I.
The horizontal floor beneath the
pillar of faith.
This is the wonky reflection on the Bible as
literature leading into philosophy. So, if you want to get to the point, feel
free to skip to section 2. But if you want to know where I get the point, this
is it.
Ruth did not go on a solitary vision quest,
meet “the God of her own understanding” (necessarily the unique god-image
residing inside each human skull as a result of our neurology and early
childhood experiences), and work out “her own personal relationship” with that
individual idea. Her way was quite the opposite.
I mean no disrespect for individual vision
quests. There is a place for “the hero’s journey.” Ancient cultures enshrined
it. Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Black Elk, and Jesus all went on them. Even I have
gone on a few. But the ancient heroes went out from a community and returned to
a community. At the end of his quest Gilgamesh exclaimed, “Lo, the walls of
Uruk!” and resumed his civic duties. Odysseus found his way home to his family and
the kingdom of Ithaca. Black Elk became heyokah
of the Lakota Sioux. Jesus returned
from the desert because the Spirit of the Lord had anointed him, not “to go his
own way” but to “proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captive,
recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” (Luke 4) It
wasn’t about them. They went out for their people and returned for their people
to serve and sometimes lead their people.
Ruth’s religion began in a human
relationship. Her God was not her own, not “the God of her own understanding”
but the God of someone she loved and the God of a people to whom she had
consented to belong. How utterly and shockingly foreign to the individualism of
our contemporary culture!
Ruth the Moabite loved Naomi the Jew and
chose to be a Jew. To be a Jew was not to make up one’s own idea of God, but to
worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Rebecca,
Rachel, and Leah, the God of Naomi. That understanding of God arose out of an
older, larger horizontal flow of human relationship. There were tribes. There
was a tribe of Ephraim, a tribe of Zebulun, a tribe of Naphtali, a tribe of
Benjamin, a tribe of Judah, 12 tribes in all -- and they each had their god.
Some called their god El, some called their god, YHWH. Then Moses drew them all
together in a covenant law of freedom, justice, and equality. He convened the
12 tribes, calling them all by a single name, “Schema’ Israel. Hear oh Israel.” Then he continued, “Your God is
one. You have the same God. YHWH and El are One. Adonai elohanyu Adonai echad.” They agreed to worship one God, no
longer divided over whether god looked like a bull or winged lion but praying
together to an imageless nameless God whom they worshiped first and foremost
not by sacrifice but by treating each other justly.
A different process produces a different
result. Discovering the unique god-image residing inside our skull reveals one
sort of deity, perhaps one we love, perhaps one we hate, but who he, she, or it
is we can readily know as it is our own god. We own him because we made him up.
The god arising from a network of human caring, on the other hand, is quite
different – most fundamentally in that such a god is not the work of our own
hands (idol) but rather something arising out of a wider, deeper, older
reservoir of human relationship. The “god of our own understanding is smaller
than us, because we created it and we can change it. The God arising out of a
deep and wide sea of relationship is bigger than we are and just might change
us.
What does “God” even mean when it comes about
in such a way?
“God” is the notion that we (not I – we) come
from somewhere and that we are headed somewhere. “The whence and the whither,”
Karl Rahner called it. To combine the “whence and the whither” in the single
notion of “God” is to say that neither is random. They are connected. “My end
is in my beginning.” (T. S. Eliot). “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” (Revelation) There is a pattern and course to
each life and to the history of our world. This all means something, amounts to
something. It is not “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying
nothing” (Shakespeare) but a story with a coherent plot and even, God help us,
a theme, perhaps a moral. The story of life is not assorted words randomly
scattered on a page but a novel worth reading, even living. What that “whence,
whither,” and meaning are is beyond our grasp – but we must believe they exist
albeit mysteriously if we are to have any framework, any structure for our
relationships – a floor on which to dance, a melody we can sing together. So,
we agree there is a meaning of which we can apprehend only “hints and guesses”
(Eliot), and we agree to stammer about it together in poems we have agreed to
recite together. They are at best partly accurate. The importance is not as
much in their accuracy as in the togetherness of our reciting them. The
constraints on inaccuracy are measured by the togetherness. A “God is love” (1st
John) divinity flows naturally from such a relational religion. A god of wrath
and judgment would be quite another matter. Such a god is more apt to be the
“god our own personal understanding” based on unfortunate early childhood
experiences or a life in a traumatized and traumatizing culture.
Our central Christian sacraments are Baptism
and Communion. To be baptized is to be claimed, to belong, to be born anew into
a family of faith. It is to say, “Thy people shall be my people; and thy God,
my God.” Communion is to live into that bond. It is to place ourselves on a
single altar, giving ourselves to one God, to receive our life back from that
one God, eating from one loaf, drinking from one cup.” Those rites are not
symbolic expressions of something each of us has individually experienced. They
are rather an experience of one-ness with each other, out of which our faith in
the One-ness (Coherence) of Reality is formed. With that bond to each other and
that sense of our common source and common destiny, we say “Whither thou goest,
I will go.”
2. I
Believe In One Reality
There are good reasons things are the way
they are in our time. By “the way things are” I mean we are radically
rebellious, passionately individualistic. We deify our own wills and worship
them by asserting our wills against those of others. The result is loneliness,
alienation, meaninglessness, cynicism, and despair – not to mention injustice
and violence both random and systemic. But there are good reason things are the
way they are in our time.
For centuries, we lived with rigid
hierarchies constructed for the hoarding by elites of political power and
economic wealth, and buttressed by religions corrupted by their political and
economic context. (Karen Armstrong, Fields
of Blood). We began pushing off the weight of those hierarchical traditions
in the 18th Century, only to have horrifically totalitarian regimes
take their place in the 20th and 21st. “It is right,
good, and a joyful thing” that we fight back against such oppression. The
Abrahamic religions were born in just such a rebellion when YHWH said, “I have heard
my people cry. Go tell Pharaoh, ‘let my people go.’” Jesus said the Spirit of
the Lord was on him “to proclaim release to the captive . . . to let the
oppressed go free.” Paul said, “For freedom, Christ has set us free.”
The tragedy is that in rebelling against
oppression, we have turned against one another. We have set our face against
our neighbor. We have gone our own way. I know of a priest who died recently
and wanted at his funeral, not “For all the saints who from their labors rest”
– not a song of sweet reunion with “those angel faces . . . whom I have loved
long since, and lost awhile” – but “I did it my way.” Your god is not my god.
My god is my god. In truth if “god” is my highest value, my guiding principle,
then I am my god as you are your god, which makes each of us an infidel to the
other’s religion.
In those days,
there was no king in Israel and each man did what was right in his own eyes. (Judges)
Hey, hey, you,
you,
Get off of my
cloud! (The Rolling Stones)
Your god is
not my god; nor your people, my people.
Whither thou
goest, I shalt not go.
We will each
go our own way – alone!
How would we expect such a cultural irreligiosity
to play out politically? Obviously, in
rancorous division and hostility. In the 19th Century, the French
social scientist Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, exploring the question of whether our American
experiment could possibly survive. He said, the worm in the American apple was
individualism but the project might yet be saved by one thing – our churches!
Worshiping together forged our bonds as a people. He did not mean that we all
worshiped in the same way. It is not an agreement about theology. But it is
that we come together, forge faith together, practice religion as a team sport
that makes democracy possible. It is not the content of the beliefs but the
network of relationship and the quality of character it forms.
Today, three forces – each arising out of
individualism -- sow the seeds of chaos: atheism, apathism, and privatized
spirituality. Many new atheists treat Christians with contempt attributing all
sorts of silly notions to us – chiefly that we think there is a Super Being
dwelling on a distant planet from which he magically manipulates events here. I
will not disrespect atheism in kind by saying it simply a denies that Super
Being. Proper atheism (Hume, Nietzsche, Mackie, and Hecht) being heroic examples)
denies that there is any coherent connection between our whence and our
whither, that there is any meaning to this whole adventure. It is in fact “a
tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” There is no
right and wrong (Kant equated God with the Moral Order so to be an atheist one
denies that there such a thing as right and wrong), only personal preference.
There is no Beauty, only what suits my fancy. And here’s the kicker, there is
no Truth. I have heard for years, “That may be true for you but that doesn’t
make it true for me.” Truth is just what I make up in my head. In our time,
that subjectivism has come to a solipsistic crescendo.
Apathism does not take the ultimate question
of what matters in life seriously enough to pose an answer yay or nay. It is to
say I am not sufficiently interested in other people to care about their deepest
value. Privatized spirituality – the “spiritual but not religious” -- gives
free reign to each of the gods “of our own personal understanding(s).” It is to
sing, “I did it my way” as a Gospel hymn. All three reject shared faith per se regardless of its content. We
choose to sing only solos, to live in private worlds.
The result is: each of us creates our own set
of facts. We each dwell in our own separate reality. Your sun may rise in the
East if you like, but if I prefer to believe the sun rises in the North, then
by (my) god, that’s where it rises.
Whither thou goest, I shalt not go.
I have in recent years heard people seriously
arguing that the earth is flat and that the round earth is propaganda used to
manipulate us. I have likewise heard that the heliocentric solar system is a
hoax. The overwhelming evidence that global warming is happening and that
carbon emissions contribute to it is dismissed not just by random nutcases but
by people to whom we have entrusted real power. I hear people believe the FBI
bugged the President because he says so, but when the FBI explains that they
were bugging a Russian gambling ring in Trump tower, that cannot be believed
because the source is “the government.” People believe wild memes on social
media if those memes fit the reality in which they chose to live, but refuse to
believe news from reputable journalistic sources because they “don’t trust the
press.”
Political leaders confronted with “facts”
that belie their claims do not argue the evidence but appeal to “alternative
facts.” We believe reports that suit our agenda but regard all else as “fake
news.” Reality is not a given to deal with. It is a fantasy we each construct
in our own imaginations.
This flows from an implicit theological
premise: If God is the ground of Reality, and if we each get to construct our
own god, it follows as the night the day, we can each make up whatever facts we
choose to believe.
No less skeptical a philosopher than Jacques
Derrida says the very project of science itself rests on the faith that there
is a coherence to be discovered through observation and experimentation. (Believing In Order To See) The
post-modern repudiation of God leads inexorably to the repudiation of science
and the disbelief in any objective reality where we might live together.
3. So What’s The Question?
The question is secondarily about God.
Primarily it’s about our relationship with each other. Is it still possible,
are we still capable of saying one frail fallible mortal human being to another,
Whither thou
goest I will go,
and thy people
shall be my people;
and thy god;
my god?
I can construct a pretty good rational
argument for God – not a proof but an argument that shows belief on God
(Rahner’s “whence and whither” – not the Super Being on a distant planet) is a
reasonable and desirable conviction to hold. Much brighter people than I –
philosophers, theologians, and yes, some scientists -- have made more
convincing cases than I could ever attempt. But none of that does any good on
the front end.
On the front end, faith is a matter of the
heart. Credo – “I give my heart.” And
the first movement of the heart is between people. It isn’t between me and a
sunset. It’s between us, you and me. It is the horizontal human relationship
which constitutes the floor on which the vertical pillar, our relationship with
God, must rest.
Social, political, and economic systems have
oft-times been disillusioning. They have also sustained the human race through
the millennia. I do not say that to defend them as good – only to say that some
sort of system is essential to our survival. How are we to deal wi†h our
natural ambivalence about the fact (if we are willing †o concede there are
facts) that we are all in this together. We need each other. Is there a way we can live together, not just
materially but spiritually, can we discern meaning together? I do not mean
utopian harmony. I just mean the mixed and muddled business of being a body
politic instead of the dystopian chaos into which we seem to be sinking.
We often bandy about the term “social
construct.” It applies to a norm, a custom, a way of doing things, or a belief
that things are a certain way. A social construct means people have
collectively made it up. We don’t usually mean anything good when we say such
and such is “just a social construct” since it is neither scientifically proven
(now even science is not being called “a social construct”) nor an expression
of our individual creativity.
But the things humankind has made together
can be impressive – languages, architecture, technology, democratic
institutions. If we socially construct our ways of living and loving, our ways
of sensing and expressing meaning, perhaps we might find a kinder way to regard
what we have done together. Things we might call a social construct today have
in years past been called such things as “the Mayflower Compact,” “the Magna
Carta,” “the Covenant of Israel.”
Do we dare risk our individual selves in the
hope that we might find ourselves larger, deeper, kinder, lovelier, better in
relationship with one another. Might we dare to inhabit a world not of our own
making, even pray to a God we did not invent in our own solitary laboratory?
If we choose to do so, we might swim in a
very large sea of humanity. We might join with humanity around the world, in
ages past, and in ages yet to come. What is the question? It is a question of
courage. Ruth is the model of such courage. The courage to love.
Whither thou
goest I will go.
Thy people
shall be my people,
and thy god;
my god.
