onward

I have been gradually bringing a little balance to my previous post regarding God's control over the world, or rather, lack thereof. It would be easy to take that idea and run myself into a cesspool of despair and anxiety. Indeed, there was a time when that would have been exactly what I'd do. But these days my trust in the divine is tempered with a healthy dose of personal responsibility.

This came home to me when I was talking with a friend, who was saying something about confusion and chaos permeating every aspect of our world. I responded, instinctively, "not in my house!"

I mean, I have a say in who or what enters my home, just as I have a say in what enters my mind, my body, my car, what plays on my stereo. In my home, I am Queen!

Now lets just suppose that every day I try to cultivate the surrendering of control to the divine, whatever that means. Gradually, God regains control because it is given.

This is a bit like pacifism, I think, when you come down to it. The objection that people have with non-violence is that if you are committed to nonviolence people can just walk up and beat the shit out of you for no good reason, and then suffer no consequence, and it would seem that you are stripped of the ability to protect yourself. I had a strip torn off of me by a complete stranger once, for stating anti-war sentiments. She felt that if my child were being tortured or raped in front of me, my pacifism wouldn't be worth much. That may be true.

But it's like so many things that require the collaboration of humanity. Violence can never stop until someone decides not to retaliate. Pollution will not stop until vast quantities of people commit to stop tossing mcdicks bags out of their cars. God could be in control of this world if only the world would give it up.

These are three things that I wish would happen, but don't hold much hope for. Nevertheless, I can name one place where there is peace, and God is in control.

"Advancing the Kingdom of God" used to be about winning souls for religion, and I suppose that the militant overtones work for the right wing evangelicals out there, but the idea has changed dramatically for me. A certainty is growing within me that Love and God are the same thing, and that there's good news in that. Advancing the kingdom of God seems to me more like spreading the territory over which God may regain control, and that's a good reason to help people find love, and peace, and divinity.

That is not to say that I think it's a good idea to make sure people understand God the way I do, or bring them under a brand new law that reflects my values, but rather to help people to value themselves enough to find what God means to them.

This is where I think Jesus hit the nail on the head. His was a campaign of unconditional, radical, selfless love, and what better way to repair the planet. If God is love, then loving people is like saying "here, this is what God is like" not rules and guilt and distance but validation and compassion and safety. In doing so you spread that kingdom just a little bit further.

*Please note that when I say God is love, I do not include codependency, desperation, manipulation, sex, or any other unhealthy or selfishly motivated perversions of the twisted word that we in our culture call 'love.' I only use the word love for lack of a purer term denoting selflessness and compassion, amongst other good, healthy and beautiful qualities.*