Channeling God

I attend Trinity Lutheran Church in Nampa almost every Sunday.  I rely on my wonderful Pastor Meggan Manlove. I perform alongside her as an assistant minister.  I respect and value her counsel.  Just being around her makes me feel better.  Early on at Trinity, five years ago, I had an intense, recurring experience of impostor complex.  I thought I did not really believe in God.  But I did, nevertheless.  I was raised Lutheran and fell away in my twenties, came back 50 years later. What I write about God has only an indirect relationship to the indescribable corpus of my own faith.  I have faith, I believe you have faith as well.  That is enough for me to occasionally channel God for the benefit of someone who really needs God's comfort.  Enough to do the right thing.

I see no objective evidence for God's existence.  I have no personal relationship with Her.  But I detect a sense of humor in the natural world.  I am perfectly willing to have God be so immense and clever that we can never detect Him objectively.  This would also be pretty funny.  I do not believe God sources either evil or good.  Actually, I think the God we approach through religion may exist only as ideas in our heads.  Such an existence can be quite effective and very real.  God may speak to you, counsel you.  I never suspected that until very recently.

The universe is a thing of unparalleled beauty and complexity.  There may even be other self-aware life, but the setup does not allow us to know,  I think if God is the creator, he worked with the available materials.  He cannot violate physics any more than we can.  Consciousness and power at God magnitude may well be real, but way beyond what we can experience.

So, wisdom.  Yes, after 74 years of experience I have learned a great deal.  I know to my satisfaction that education and money does not make people's lives more satisfying.  I know that philosophy has no answers, only more questions.  I know what it feels like to live peacefully, to treat others both badly and well.  Hurting others does not feel good.  I must have people in my life or the rails disappear.  The problem with wisdom is that no one listens, much less believes, anything I say.

I am indebted to my parents and I cannot repay them. I can only clear the debt by treating others as well as they treated me.  I suspect this gift - repayment cycle has been repeated many times by my ancestors.  The repayment is always one or two generations later.  I realize that my birth families had a lot of ability to project me into a similar family through Lutheran social services.  I was not just lucky or fortunate.  I was an inconvenient baby and they mailed me to a forwarding address.  It worked as well as they might have wished and prayed.

So I spend quite a bit of my time in repayment.  I take care of Julie and others around me.  I take care of myself.  I channel God when the opportunity presents itself.  I comfort others at their life's end.  I remind them of the power and promise of their faith.  I help people relax into their ever-after.

The atmosphere I was brought up in worked, the social structure worked.  Not much actually works well in the world on any scale larger than the congregation.  It would be completely stupid to abandon this system simply because I cannot locate God or do not understand her ways.  Bible stories are consistent enough.  They do not need to be freighted with the significance theology piles on them to be both true and useful.  They need no inspiration to serve their function.  They very effectively glue communities of people together who are better for it.

Humans are barely ten thousand years past the widespread adoption of agriculture.  This is nothing, an eye-blink in the 100 million year history of our species.  Agriculture may not have been a good thing, but here we are,  We are far too primitive to live successfully without belief in God.

Some of this from an Email 7/12/16

A Practicing Lutheran, notes

Email 7/11/16

Just figured out why I have become so much dumber as I have moved into Trinity leadership.The only experience I have as an adult Lutheran is what we have shared the last few years.  I seem to be pretty Lutheran, but as a young man visiting the future.  My Lutheran experience did not grow since the sixties.  I missed everything.  So much is not obvious to me. I have trouble with the sequence of the service.  I can do all the parts, but I do not know how they follow each other until I completely diagram it out  I came close to discovering the equivalence of stewardship with generosity, but it never kicked into place.  Now I see why you (PM) wonder who I am addressing and why I write these long flowing bizarre essays revealing the depth to which I do not understand the adult Lutheran mind.

I write these long pieces for myself as a way of understanding "Lutheran"   I perceive that if I think things through very carefully, and writing is how I do that, some kind person will read all this stuff that makes no sense to them and explain the part I am missing.

My adult mind went down different paths and does not know what adult faith feels like.  If my parents had not done such a peachy job of socializing me it would have been much harder to be accepted at Trinity.  I have the look, the voice, know hymns, the creed, the Luther story, lots of theology I treat sort of like serious myth.  I stopped thinking about the disconnect in my mind and floated on autopilot to get this far. 

The adult Lutheran part of me is just missing except from what I have learned recently.  The feeling part of me is like a visitor from the past, whipped 50 years into the future. It is so confusing because I turn out to enjoy theology in retirement.  I will probably become able to describe every heresy that ever was.  For me, the path Latin Christianity followed, the segment we belong to,  was only one out of thousands of other paths that were also traveled by groups of people since Christ.  I see no evidence God ever set anyone straight if they had the wrong idea.  There are no nudges that I can find.  All just people with the usual competency and behavior.

Of course, I feel the creed is absolutely how things are.  God is so much larger we cannot grasp him at all.

You will have to burn only half of me.  :) :)

David

If I had seen "Extravagant Generosity" six months ago we might have been spared my dissection of stewardship from an outsider's perspective.  Thank God for Robert.  Harry G. is one of my faith heroes.

I may be useful at some point ministering to the fallen away, the worn out, those who no longer see any point in church.  I would advise young Christians to take a much longer view of faith through their lives, which is impossible for them, The sacrament has great power. A young member asked me point blank if I believed the Christian story a couple of years ago and I replied in the affirmative,  If people can hold on to some glimmer of faith and keep showing up Sundays, the horrible ways one can be abandoned by life might be tolerable.  Poor, weak faith is some kind of norm for people who write about it.  Faith cannot be so weak that we must believe ourselves accursed hypocrites, that we must stay away forever because we are not genuine enough, because we are impostors,  It is survivable to simultaneously believe and not believe.  Faith is sneaky and can become real while you are not paying close attention,  Practice is the operative concept.  Faith practice.

On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 9:48 PM, David Sheriff <dvdshf@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank God for both of you.  I could never have stayed with church without the two of you.  I am truly where I belong as long as I do  not insult someone's beliefs too aggressively and drive them away.  I now know to stay quiet and bottle up my reforming, problem-solving self on matters of faith, particularly not being able to understand the faith of others.

I have been concerned with the stewardship posting because I do not know how to recreate other's faith.  Empathy requires us to feel what the other feels,to literally re-create their point of view internally, to walk in their shoes.  I have limits there.  I will help as you wish, but I can never steer.  I have faith, even strong faith, but it is not the faith my parents had.  They tried so hard to get me to see as an adult.  I had to exhaust every other possible source of meaning before giving up and returning home spiritually.  I may be big-time internally conflicted for the rest of my life.  I understand love, though, and that may be enough.  I can compartmentalize pretty well and ride herd on my disbelief by doing so.