Nature and the nature of~

I’m spending an awful long time writing in this journal when I should be writing a book and getting on with my projects.  But I think it’s because through this last six weeks or so of glory and confusion, yearning and business, I’ve been putting a whole mass of thinking on hold.  Now, that mass seems to have gone critical and it really, really needs to be dumped onto the hard drive.

I want to talk about the nature of God.  Because I was thinking about it yesterday, and thinking things I’d never thought before.  To begin: it is my firm belief that there are as many concepts of the Nature of God as there are people on the planet.  I think we cobble our concepts out of what we have lying around the house: the relationship we had with our own fathers—and thus our expectations when we hear the word “father”—the things we are afraid of and how helpless we feel to deal with the world, our hopes, our need to be forgiven – especially for things we’re not willing to stop doing.  I think there are a million elements that go into what we need God to be: God is love.  God is vengeance.  God loves the children.  God hates sin. On and on and on.

But I think God is probably just God.  He is what he is, regardless of our flurry of concepts of him.  Like the people around you—some of them love you and refuse to see flaws; some of them hate you and refuse to see virtues.  But you are yourself.  Liberal to those who stand on the far right, maybe.  And at the same time, way too conservative to those who stand on the far left.  Where is the truth of you?

If God is what he is, all the philosophy, the religion, the fear, the dogma, the hope—it’s not going to change the truth.  So the important thing is this: if we are to believe in God, does it not make sense to try to get as close to that truth – as empirically – as we can?

So—how the heck (umm) do we do this?

I think we can learn some good things from the scriptures.  But scriptures are a little bit dodgy.  I love them, but not when they’re used in the way that people put together university paper assignments—you take a paragraph from this book and a paragraph from that book, cutting them off from their context and gathering them together in a new one, never envisioned by the original authors—cobbling (I like this word, yes, but it happens to mean exxx-zactly what I mean, so I’m using it as much as I want) together a rhetorical flow that will support the premise we are presenting – self-decided, self-directed, self-serving.

So I like to take the scriptures in context.  I feel like there must be a reason why the stories are included in these books, and that there is meaning in them that defies the constriction and imperfect nature of human language.

But what I really want to talk about is what I learned in college to be a pantheist view: that nature itself is book of scripture.  That what is created might say reams about the being who creates.  And that’s what I was thinking about.  What does nature teach me about God himself?

The first thing I thought of was the tremendous elegance and economy of the design.  Complex systems that interact in ways we haven’t even realized need to be discovered.  Millions of cells that come out of the combining and then splitting of just two—mechanisms that are so dependable that they can happen millions of times a second in millions of bodies, and rarely misfire.

But what I was really thinking about was the beauty of the earth.  We’ve been told that this isn’t the garden of Eden.  But I find myself not that interested in Eden when I stand in the middle of our farmland, watching the sun go down over the far mountains.  Or when I ride in the mountains and look down through a woods lacey with fern.  When I am awake enough to watch the snowdrops push up through warming soil or the unrolling blooms of windflower and crocus, tulip and rose.  When I smell rain, or see the sky go brown at night, just before snow falls.

I look at the beauty of wood, both in the tree and in the harvested version.  At the interesting striation of rock.  At the exquisite flow and clarity of water.  The sky dance of endless colors and shapes of birds.

What can I conclude from these things – things which could have been purely functional and without any other grace, but that were colored and textured, fleshed out and given the ability to move in loveliness.  These are gifts.  They have to be gifts.  I don’t believe that they all just accidentally happened—honestly, I can’t.  Washing machines didn’t spontaneously generate.  Or watch actions or cameras.  And those are primitive things next to the reality of eyes, seasons, spring.

Why are gifts given?

Then I thought about the tough stuff: tornadoes and floods and mudslides, and tsunamis.  And for a flash of a second, I thought—are these anger?  And what do you think?  Do you think that a tornado happens because a powerful being is angry?  These are terrible things.  They smash what we’ve built.  They pick up the little earth suits we wear and break them so that our lives are changed, or are finished here.  But do they feel like punishments in the grand scheme of things?  If God did these things because he was angry, wouldn’t most of the globe be covered with climatic and geological catastrophe pretty much all the time?  Would human kind have survived past the first generation?

Like God, these things just seem to me to be what they are.  And if we don’t want to be hurt by them, we have to grow some sense and do what we can to avoid them.  A lesson?  Could these things be object lessons?  Could the whole thing be a logic lesson – to make us understand that the universe, or existence itself is basically beautiful and self-regulating – that we just have to have the sense to treasure the beauty and seek it out, at the same time using good sense, regardless of our momentary whims and acquisitiveness, to continue in our growth and avoid taking harm?

And spring.  Isn’t spring a lesson in itself?  Funny – I’m just thinking that people who live in temperate climates don’t really have a chance to know the incredible deliverance of spring experienced by those who live through real winter.  Is that a lesson, too?

And what kind of being designs a planet full of lessons for the bunch of little ants who tend to run around trying to own the entire globe?  Not the kind of being, it seems to me, who is cocked and ready to disapprove.  Who has no hope for us.  Who has no mercy.  No whimsy.  Who does not, himself, rejoice in beauty.  And the fact that the cycle of seasons continues constantly suggests that the being is patient.  Patient enough to tell us the same thing a thousand times.

I don’t think I will really know who or what God is until I come face to face with him after this is all over.  And I find I believe absolutely that that will happen—even if I’m too insignificant to get an appointment with Chaz’ dean. And I also find that I love Him.  As much as I know how to love, I love this Being.  And I love Christ, too, who sacrificed his comfort and most of the years he might have spent on this earth to save every single soul from Hell, and from the buffetings of him-who-wishes-us-to-fail. I am taught that the state of being in which we will rest through all the rest of our endless existence will be decided entirely by the choices we make ourselves – by the good sense we develop in life, the love we learn and the obedience, the hearts we take with us when the suit comes off.  When I fall short of what I could be, I have no one to blame but myself—kinda like working with horses; if I get hurt, it’s because I wasn’t using sense.

As a parent, I taught my kids everything I knew.  Sometimes I came down like thunder; sometimes I was refuge and healing.  But the one true thing is that I loved my children.  Love them fiercely.  And I knew even then that it would be up to them to choose what they would become.  Is that part of the pattern?

I don’t know for sure.

I’m still learning.