Where This Christian Stands

So where do I stand? As a Christian, at a time when Governor Palin has brought the issue of Christianity as a belief system that affects political life to the forefront, that’s a valid question. So I’ll risk being a bore by trying to answer it.
I was raised to go to church twice on Sunday, given a ten year course in catechism, and made aware that certain behaviors were simply “not Christian”, whether you did them or not. Perpetual guilt plays a formidable role in this sort of belief system. One’s inability to forgive one’s self translates all too quickly into an inability to forgive others.
When I was about twenty, I went to my pastor and asked, “Doesn’t God do anything?” -- beyond taking you to heaven or sending you to hell after death. Does he intervene in any way in this life? At first the man failed to understand me at all. When he finally caught on, he became outraged.
I was, in his estimation, nothing more than a mystic and, to him, the very word was a curse. He all but threw me out of his office. In my twenties, I simply stopped attending church at all – talking to a God who does nothing and never responds seemed a waste of a nice Sunday morning.
But one biblical verse stuck with me. It was a verse I learned from listening to Handel’s Messiah. It was a verse that fit so perfectly with what was going on in America at the time that I found it hard not to believe in the God it spoke of.
The late 1960s spawned a wave of self-destructive behavior in this nation not seen before or since. Cities were burning, kids were raging at any and all authority, the civil rights movement had spun out into anarchy and violence on both sides. Those who weren’t rioting were numbing themselves with an incredible array of narcotics.
The music of the era was heavily ironic – note the Rolling Stones or Simon and Garfunkel. “Trust no one over thirty” – don’t look past thirty. Life beyond that point seemed almost intolerable to contemplate. (What’s the motto now? Don’t trust anyone over seventy?}
The verse kept running through my head. Psalm Two – a Hebrew hymn from 3,000 years ago. “He that sitteth in Heaven shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.” What other attitude could a sane God have toward a planet that behaved itself as ours did then?
It began to dawn on me. This is a God who loves people, who created a beautiful world for them to live on – but who gave them a free will. People could act in ways that benefited themselves – and that were in accordance with the way he made them and their environment. Or – they had the freedom to choose to act destructively, as he never meant them to act.
If they insisted on not listening, not acting according to their own best interests, then finally all he could do was sit back and laugh at their “rage, … [and] the vain things” they imagined (the recital that comes just before my verse in the Messiah).
What could be a more vain imagination than narcotics that could coat your lungs with plastic, with bombs that could obliterate whole megalopolises, with a war in which we bombed our oldest friend in Asia unceasingly as he fought for the free election we had promised him, with blacks destroying their own neighborhoods to protest injustice from far outside those neighborhoods?
What else could I do? What else could the God in whose image I was made do? We both laughed – in horror, but helpless to do anything but see the absurdity.
Over the years, I began to talk to God. The first rule in talking to God is one they didn’t teach me in catechism: Shut Up and Listen.
He is not a fishwife. He will not scream to be heard over top of your own jabbering and foolish behavior. His is the “still small voice” that finally spoke to Elijah after the chaos and noise stopped. If you have any desire to hear him, you must wait for that.
When you become sensitive to someone’s voice, you can pick out that voice through the cacophony of a noisy room. You can become equally sensitive to the Spirit of God and his quiet voice. But you have to take the time to listen. Ask him. Wait. He will answer.
Yes, he does act. Through all the missteps and near collisions of the Cold War, the bombs never flew. (He does not leave that sort of destructive power in the hands of anybody’s generals.) Finally, of course, he sent a cleric from Poland who teamed with an American president to end the Cold War. He acts. I have learned to watch for his very subtle hand.
So, I believe in a God who acts, who restrains, who pleads with whatever good sense and better nature we may yet possess. But also in a God who, if ignored long enough, will curse us by leaving us to our own devises. That can be Hell enough.