The Other Side “Finding The Other Side is like coming home....” progressive @ Christian creative @ prophetic a magazine @ a ministry Let us strengthen you for your journey— in our bimonthly magazine, in our online devotional, SideSteps, through our Travelers Together discussion and reflection guide ag, Visit The Other Side online Or call 800-700-9280 And find yourself again! = | | | | | tig & < oe How We Speak of God Dorothee Sdlle, theologian, feminist, political activist and mystic died on Sunday 27th April, aged 73. Here is reprinted an article by her in which she suggests that our lives testify to belief in one of two Gods: either an omnipotent idol that controls and arranges everything or the God of hope.
Almost forty years ago, I was part of the first delegation to travel from Germany to Israel after World War II.
The highlight of the trip was meeting Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whose writings had transformed my faith. I introduced myself to Buber as a theologian. He met this with a long silence, then asked, "How do you do that? There is no logos, no words, to be said about God. Archaeology, ornithology, many disciplines are areas where knowledge comes in words, phrases, talking. But God is different.” It has taken me forty years to fully respond to Buber's insight—that the ways we tell one another about God are conveyed not in words, but with our lives. In the intervening decades, I have been learning to speak of God—in the language of women, in the language of the disenfranchised and the handicapped, in the language of my tradition. Yet I still often find myself unable to share my hope in God.
I cannot shake one particular instance of this inability. It was 1989, right after the Berlin Wall came down. I was taking a long taxi ride through Berlin. The driver was surly and stubbornly silent until a news story came on the radio about a high-ranking military visitor from NATO. When I asked him whether the opening of the wall meant he would have to enlist in the military, he exploded. Never again, he said, would he serve governmental powers that way. His wife had lost her job, there was no room in any kindergarten for his child, and they were threatened with a rent increase and eviction. The new system was as hopeless and exploitative as the old. "No matter what the system," he said, "the poor always get ripped off.
Those on top have only one interest—to remain there.
Ecological devastation, ozone holes, slave wages—none of these matter to them. This whole thing here is going to blow up—it can't go on much longer.
Human beings are such a design failure they make me laugh." In the face of his dark cynicism, I knew I needed to witness to hope—but I failed miserably. I first told him of the millions protesting injustice and the destruction of the earth. He wouldn't listen. I told of some courageous witnesses in the peace movement and of young conscientious objectors I know in the East, the former German Democratic Republic. "Everyone does not want to maintain the status quo," I continued. "I know many who agree with your analysis, but act with hope. We resist this craving for more death." But he was trapped in his disillusionment. Nothing made any impression. He didn't want to hear of resistance and dissent. What did either accomplish? His disillusionment combined with his apocalyptic view of the destruction of the earth seemed to lead him to hatred of God. My last, timid attempt went something like this: "You know, I am a Christian, and I simply don't believe this is the way the world was meant to be. Do you understand? God doesn't want it this way." He began to laugh uncontrollably, full of bitterness and scorn. I had reached my destination. "What about your child?" I asked, sure that a remnant of God must still be hidden somewhere. He shrugged his shoulders and drove off. Why was I so powerless to share God with this person? Why couldn't I pass on my hope, my strength, my joy despite everything?
The fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart said that if God is really God, then God is that which is most communicable. God desperately desires to be sof 60 June 2003 shared—that is part of who God is. But has it become impossible in our modern age to speak about God? Is there no comprehensible, communicable language for the inner mystery of hope? Are we unable to testify that something comforts and supports us, that we are not alone in our longing for another kind of life where we no longer exploit and abuse one another? I have come to believe that, whether we acknowledge it or not, we all function with one of two images of God— the God of life who accompanies us or an omnipotent idol who determines everything.
That young taxi driver believes in the idol. He sees a world of people consumed by greed, who arm themselves and turn deaf ears to the cries of the poor, the starving, and the powerless - and a God who does nothing. This idol God is incomprehensible, unintelligible, and uninterested. The driver’s perspective says there is no God and no hope.
Justice and love are sentimental illusions that we must forget. We live under fate, a destiny that runs its course. It matters not whether we assent to it.
I had encountered a very similar world-view in a very different setting ten years earlier. I was visiting a Manhattan public housing project in the late seventies along with another young pastor. The elevator was out of order, so we climbed eleven stories, past unpainted walls graffitied with violence, to a small apartment. There, I met Michael.
Michael is drinking a beer. He's a New Yorker, he laughs, and adds that he was in Vietnam. He has been unemployed for a year and a half. His wife left him three years ago, and he's raising three children. One at a time, he calls them in, has them stand at attention, We are responsible and asks, "Who is the boss? Who commands here? Do you love me?" After answering these questions they may again go play.
I ask Michael whether he believes in God. "Not to speak of," he replies. "But ultimately there must be a boss who commands, right? There has to be someone on top." Seldom has anyone spoken to me so matter-offactly and unceremoniously of the false God. Though Michael says he doesn't believe in God and does not want to be identified with churchgoers, some image of God from his childhood emerges. The most important attributes of his boss-God are power, authority, and command, echoing the belief of his younger but equally desperate brother in Berlin. In this image, there is no room for love, for suffering, or for passion, for remembering a vulnerable child in Bethlehem.
Bruce, the gentle young Baptist preacher with me, Sof 60 June 2003 prays for Michael and for us. He asks that Michael find work soon. He does not try, as I did in that taxi, to testify about God using words. Instead, he prays with Michael. On the way out, we meet Joe. He is only forty-four but looks much older. He chain-smokes and whistles through a white tube extending out of his throat. His apartment is bare. Two hand towels hang from a clothesline across the middle of the room. His radio was stolen last week. Joe tells us of his great-aunt in Georgia and how he'd like to be there for her burial. He speaks of the plants he would like to have—a few that bloom in spring, one that blooms in summer, and some that are always in bloom.
Bruce prays for Joe and for us.
Give Joe, he says to God, what he needs and, above all, your kingdom.
Bruce taught me that day that often the only way we can speak about God is to speak to God. And yet, when we speak to God, which God are we truly speaking to? I pose this question because it touches on Buber's question to me. How we live our lives determines which God we actually believe in.
I once attended a conference where one of the primal questions we ask of God in this era arose: "Where was God at Auschwitz?" "Auschwitz was willed by God," said one young woman. The words fell into the room like a stone. Immediately, everyone demanded an explanation. "If God had not willed it, it would not have happened," she responded. "Nothing happens without God." She worshipped the idol whose authority, logic, and omnipotence could not be questioned. Those things we cannot understand, we must humbly accept.
God wills everything that happens, completely independent of all creatures. It is not our place to ask why. Her manner of speaking about God sounds pious, but I now think of it as blasphemous. This theology is founded on a complete acceptance of hierarchy. We make God the ultimate and only authority, and make ourselves, the children of God, into impotent nobodies on whose lives nothing actually depends.
I know that this is a lie. Growing up as a child in Germany, I knew that countless lives depended on the behavior of the German people toward those in our communities who were targeted. If there had been more people to hide the Jews among us, fewer Jews would have been killed. It is that simple. Similarly today, the preservation of the earth depends on the lives and behaviors of people in the rich world. We are involved. We are responsible. This young woman's belief is not very different from the apocalyptic, doomsday belief of my taxi driver or Michael's belief in the boss. All three see us as components of a vast, inscrutable machine to which we must submit. All three are fixated on power and find it impossible to think in terms of shared power One of the clearest contributions of feminist theology, a discipline in which "empowerment" is a critical concept, has been new understandings of power. Any power unwilling to share itself with others is not working for good or for wholeness. When we do not seek to distribute power, we do not know or understand God's power. Shared power is another name for love. By contrast, the most significant attribute of God for that young woman at the conference is omnipotence. Her Sovereign Lord demonstrates power either by intervention or lack of intervention, but never by sharing power.
One of my deepest criticisms of the contemporary church is that it has not moved believers beyond this childish image of God as a Father who sets things straight, punishes us when we are bad, and fixes—or doesn't fix—painful situations. The church has kept Christian believers in their childhoods, instead of teaching us to share power with God and assume responsibility for this world in which we live. Yet only the assumption of that responsibility can lead to authentic prayer, prophetic hope, and true witness.
Christians who insist on staying in subordinate and dependent relationships to God will not learn to be friends of God.
Some years ago, I sat with a church congregation near Hamburg on an evening in which we recalled Kristallnacht, the 1938 night when Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were vandalized, prefacing the full terror of the Holocaust. We were trying to work through our own memories to understand that terror. One woman introduced herself as an outsider to this congregation. She described how she struggled for years with Jewish-Christian tensions, trying to understand how we came to the Holocaust.
She concluded by saying, "When I understood Auschwitz, I joined the peace movement." This woman bore witness to a dramatically different God—not an omnipotent lord completely independent of us. She understood that our own failure to act on behalf of God during the Nazi era rendered God powerless. Where God has no friends, where God's Spirit has no place to live, God cannot act. Instead of dismissing this awful history as "willed by God," she looked within herself. As one who speaks of God in the world, she took responsibility—and joined the peace movement. This woman neither submitted to a God of fate nor adopted the values of this world—money, career, and prestige. She believed in a God who lives in our actions, incarnating liberation.
From a pragmatic viewpoint, in the context of Auschwitz, such a God can seem politically suspect, weak, and unsuccessful. But as Martin Buber has said, "Success is not a name of God." In fact, this failure to interfere is precisely what makes God irrelevant for many people. Often when people share why they left the church, they say God did nothing when their child fell sick and died. Or when their marriage broke apart.
Or when they lost their job. They are angry that God did not intervene. But God is not an interventionist.
God is an intentionalist, working through us and alongside us to make divine will and intention discernable. God needs us in order to fulfill the intent of creation. God is in need of us. Like that woman in Hamburg, when I understood Auschwitz, I joined the peace movement.
The fact is, we know in our bones what the will of God is. We know what it means to love our neighbors.
We know what it means, in the words of Micah, to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God. To say that we do not know the will of God is a lie. When we view God as an intentionalist, but not interventionist, our childish expectations of a God-incharge have to go. We understand that our task is to make our will one with the will of God and to enact God's will in the world.
This can seem like a contradiction—some may argue that speaking about God in this way only makes sense if God embodies some omnipotent power. Does such an intentionalist God have any power? Or is this form of divinity as powerless in the face of the forces that control us as a child in Bethlehem slaughtered by Herod?
From the mystics, I have learned that our love for God is as important as God's love for us. It is not enough for our church leaders to tell us God loves us, God wants us, God protects us, God will heal us. If we love God, we must be able to say these same things back to God: "I love you; I want you; I will protect and heal you." Love is always mutual. When one is always the giver and the other always the recipient, there can be no mature love.
The first commandment is to love God above all things—with heart, mind, and all that we are. This is our task. In terms of our faith, it means to become an adult and no longer to be trapped in a childish relationship with God that is not life-giving.
The mystic Jacob Boehme says, "God is nothingness that wills to become everything." In a world that idolizes the stock market, economic prosperity, and power, the God of power-sharing, of love, of relationship is nothing. To embrace God means to embrace a process—a process of love, a process of going forward, a process of infusing everything. Only with our partnership can that love become incarnate in our world every day.
God dreams for us. Today, at this moment, God has an image and hope for what we are becoming. We should not let God dream alone.
Reprinted with permission from The Other Side, January-February 2001, Vol. 37, No. 1.