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