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 Margaret's Bench 
 

 

 

(…a continuation of thoughts from Margaret’s Bench of April, June, July/August, September ’07 and June '08.)

 

At some point during my youth, while I was still attending church because my parents made me do it, I grew at first uncomfortable, then puzzled and put off, and finally disbelieving at all that LOVE stuff thrown at us pew-sitters, from hymns to prayers to Bible readings to sermons.
 

God made me and all the rest of the world. God loves the world so much that, a long time ago, His son Jesus came down from heaven to save me and everybody else from our sins. Jesus died and then rose from the dead and went back to heaven. Jesus loves me right now. This I know because the Bible tells me so.


The bumpy motivations and circular proofs did not trouble my seven-year-old mind. But as I grew into adolescence and young adulthood, the whole LOVE thing, at least when applied to God and religion, just stopped making sense. The world as I saw it did not appear to have sprung from the act of a purposeful, powerful, loving Creator.

On the one hand, the cosmos was too orderly for love. Love was soft and mushy, difficult to define, impossible to quantify. In contrast, the real world abounded in hard numbers. Wonderful numbers. The intricate repeating patterns in the petals of a dahlia. The coiled compartments of a Nautilus shell. The six-sided design of a beehive’s storage unit. The statistical underpinnings of the periodic table. From these cool and beautiful algorithms, I found the phrase “God loves math” much more convincing than “God loves me.”

And what does math have to do with love?

On the other hand, the cosmos was too chaotic for love. A large meteor strikes the earth, atomizing tons of terrain. Entire species and ecosystems are wiped out. Millions of living beings meet terrifyingly sudden or agonizingly prolonged deaths. It’s happened before, it could happen again, and it’s nobody’s fault, unless it’s God’s fault, because that’s the way the cosmos works.

Or how about this one, from the daily news? A motorist makes a familiar left turn, not noticing a bicyclist cresting the rise ahead and speeding down the slope. Without enough time to swerve or brake, the bicyclist smashes into the side of the car. Killed on impact. The motorist, unharmed, will live haunted by this one momentary distraction, by a perfectly normal blip in awareness. Human beings are not capable of perfect attention at every moment. We aren’t made that way. Couldn’t a Creator who loved us take a little more time and do a little better job in the creation?

And what did the whole Jesus story have to do with love? Or with me, for that matter? If God’s son came to save the world from sin, then again, it appeared to me, just looking around, that the whole enterprise had been badly mismanaged.

As I entered my tough, clear-thinking late teens and early twenties, all that emphasis on LOVE in church just felt soppy to me, along with all the other soppy expressions of love everywhere around.

A classmate dotted her i’s with little hearts, and I mentally rolled my eyes.

In Disney’s Fantasia, the cupids’ naked little butts formed hearts, while pairs of youthful centaurs galloped off to smootch in the pastoral countryside.

Ick, ick, ick! Soppy!

And this attitude thrived, strong and comfortable, in the very same young woman who sat at her school desk and quietly drew hearts, over and over, in her own private, secret notebook. Who fell in love, again and again, with one unsuspecting boy after another. Just smile at me—that’s all it took—and I’m yours, my heart in flames fanned by every prayerful breath.

I had no respect for love, so how could I worship a loving God?

At the same time, love was my god, and I was in constant thrall to it.

More on this subject at another time…
 

 

      --  Margaret 

 

                   

 

 

Archives:  Margaret's Bench

 

June 2008  --  Three separate times, a love without bounds showed itself to me so that I looked and paid attention, so that I could see.   more... 

 

May 2008  --  Last December, in an effort to bring abundant life into our home, David and I got a puppy. We named him Bingo. If abundant life involves sleep deprivation and obsessive interest in someone else’s bathroom habits, then Bingo brought it, right away.   more... 

 

April 2008  --  Every Sunday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Port Townsend, we stand and say the Nicene Creed together. It is my least favorite part of the service.   more... 

 

March 2008  --  "“These are the first two poems I’ve ever written in my life,” said Jeff. As the class instructor, I was glad to hear both surprise and pleasure in his voice.   more... 

 

February 2008  --  "Today I'm going to talk about feet and pee, in stories of attention and change..." — From a talk delivered at the Quimper Universalist Unitarian Fellowship's Sunday services, January 13, 2008.   more... 

 

January 2008  --  Our first dog, Jackie, was a tri-color basset hound named in honor of Jack Benny, one of David’s all-time favorite show biz personalities...   more... 

 

December 2007  --  Happy birthday to the Courtyard—one year old this month...   more... 

 

November 2007  --  I’m deeply attached to my “To Do” list. How would I live without it? The tasks swirl around me, and at times I’m frozen, drowning in a sea of possibilities. I need to write them down, simply to choose what to do next. And so the trap quietly closes...  more... 

 

October 2007  --  We adopted Katie from the local animal shelter about four years ago, just before Thanksgiving in 2003. The folks at the pound had the phone number of her former owners, and before signing the papers, I gave them a call. It was an awkward conversation...  more... 

 

September 2007  --  Three days after my mystical experience in the Safeway parking lot — three days after I was given a revelation of the essential, fundamental love-ableness built into all human beings — I walked into a frightening and infuriating demonstration of its opposite...  more... 

 

July/August 2007  --  On an October afternoon, Tom Waits’ gravelly voice, flamboyant lyrics, and diamond revelations in the grit of city street life felt like perfect accompaniment to the fir trees, horse barns, and small-town neighborhoods that I passed in my car...  more... 

 

June 2007  --  You know what drives me nuts about the recent spate of books begging me to find salvation and give up religion before it’s too late? Books arguing not only that God doesn’t exist, but that religion is a greater threat to humanity than avian flu and reality TV combined?  more... 

 

May 2007  --  This month is the 10-year anniversary of my confirmation in the Episcopal Church. I had confirmed my baptismal vows once before, in the Evangelical United Brethren Church, when I was about 12 years old. Then a few years later, I took it back.  more... 

 

April 2007  --  It’s April, and the dandelions are popping out everywhere, shamelessly yellow. If dandelions could write their own creation story, I wonder if the story would say that the first dandelion was made in the image of God.  more... 

 

March 2007  --  The Stations of the Cross didn’t play much part in my Protestant upbringing. I remember some hair-raising sermons on the crucifixion itself, but I don’t remember spending much time on the stages of the journey from the trial to the tomb, which is what the Stations are all about.  more... 

 

February 2007  --  The proposal to build a courtyard at my home parish of St. Paul’s called for sand-set pavers to be laid in the area between the church building and the parish hall, and for the pattern of a labyrinth to be inlaid in the paved floor. Diane, a parish artist, took charge of designing and making the labyrinth's rosette center.  more... 

 

January 2007  --  In the commercial world, the Christmas season has a long youth and a short old-age: born in mid-autumn, weaned the day after Thanksgiving, and dead by the close of the  New Year's Eve sales. In the church calendar, Christmas is the shortest season of the year.  more... 

 

December 2006  --  I’ve been a writer ever since I could read, and I’ve been a thief ever since I could write. In the first grade, I was publicly unmasked as a plagiarist during show and tell when I tried to pass off a story from Highlights magazine as my own.  more... 
 

 

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