A Uniformly Lousy Idea

If I had unlimited resources, I would, by definition, be God–which is a uniformly lousy idea. This, I fear, would not be a desirable state of affairs, inasmuch as I’m much choosier about my associations than God. God has repeatedly demonstrated a deplorable lack of discretion, an unfortunate leniency forsworn by the more sophisticated among us.

Were I God, karma would operate with greater precision, for instance. People who dumped 140 million barrels of bleak darkness into the Gulf of Mexico would wake up to find that certain organs had fallen off in the bleak darkness of the night. God is much too lax in the retributive justice department for my tastes.

If had a hammer . . . health industry executives who get fat on the forage of the sick and the poor would find their pastures re-zoned somewhere in the Gobi. And the politicians who’ve had their own fields watered by these bloated and self-interested bureaucrats would be re-purposed, put in charge of the management and quality control of natural fertilizer.

Put me in charge and the folks at the top would find themselves uncomfortably transitioned to new positions of vassalage. No more bonuses, no more corporate jets, no more toothsome morsels served on bone china while folks outside the walls root through the teeth and bones to find leftover cartons of Chinese.

If I had unlimited resources, I would create a world more to my liking. Unfortunately, I suppose, since by most accounts I’m at the top of the heap, I’d be banished too.

Like I said, making me God would be bad for everybody–perhaps, most of all me.

God, Tree Climbing, and Infinite Surprise

“It pleased him to imagine God as someone like his mother, someone beleaguered by too many responsibilities, too dog-tired to monitor an energetic boy every minute of the day, but who, out of love and fear for his safety, checked in on him whenever she could. Was this so crazy? Surely God must have other projects besides Man [sic], just as his parents had responsibilities other than raising their children? Miles liked the idea of a God who, when He at last had the opportunity to return His attention to His children, might shake His head with wonder and mutter, “Jesus. Look what they’re up to now.” A distractible God, perhaps, one who’d be startled to discover so many of His children way up in trees since the last time He looked. A God whose hand would go rushing to His mouth in fear in that instant of recognition that–good God!–that kid’s going to hurt himself. A God who could be surprised by unanticipated pride–glory be, that boy is a climber!” (Richard Russo, Empire Falls).

I love this quote from Richard Russo. God as a distracted mother, responsible for so much, but ferociously attached to her children. I like that. Being married to a mother ferociously attached to her children, but responsible for much else, I’m partial to this image of God. Notwithstanding the questions of orthodoxy (the impassibility and omnicompetence of God), I still like to think of God as much less overbearing than we’re traditionally given to believe. I know of and agree with Karl Barth’s rather imperious sounding dictum that “God is not human being said in a loud voice!” Still, a surprised and delighted God is a comforting notion in a world filled with pinch-faced people certain that God’s highest vocation revolves around abstemiously policing human indiscretion and rooting out joy from among possible human achievement. Surely God must find some joy in human achievement, even (perhaps especially) at its most outrageously indiscreet.

If God had a hand in creating us, God must take some delight in us–and not just when we’re wearing our Sunday best either. Human life, as messy and venal as it sometime seems, offers up moments of true grace and rapture–often squarely deposited in the midst of the messiness and venality, rather than despite it. My delight in my children, when I can subdue my own pinch-faced abstemiousness long enough, often comes in realizing the amazing extent to which they are infinitely capable and amazingly clever at goofing up. How, for example, sophisticated electronic gadgets when in my children’s hands acquire the properties of divining rods, sniffing out water (toilets, the dog’s water bowl, etc.) with alarming precision, is an object of true wonderment to me. Why should God be any less amazed at my own stunning penchant for dropping delicate stuff in the toilet?

The clear temptation that accompanies an image of God as slightly harried parent is that it lets me off the hook with respect to my messes–as if to say, I can do whatever I want because God’s busy minding gravity. This would, of course, constitute a singularly self-serving picture of God as undiscerning and ceaselessly approving. But the positive thing this image of God offers, I think, is an opportunity to hold on a little less tightly to myself and to my own need to get everything exactly right–to view my own children, not so much as a project to be perfected but a gift to be enjoyed, to be wondered over, and shared with the rest of the world.

A God surprised by and unanticipatedly proud of tree climbers (and their parents)–that sounds like grace to me.