Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Act of God
Among finishing paperwork for the Missionary Church, and writing rap track beds for our latest recording studio client, I found some time to sit down and read some of a little book we got at the library book sale.
It's a rather short book, full of wonderful stories through the eyes of a Rabbi who sees God in every aspect of life. To quote:
There are two ways to understand our relationship with God: God can be above us or we can be within God. In the first, it is possible for us to have a relationship with God. There are two discrete parties who can each behave freely and independently. And since God is other than the world, there must be some things which are not God: A devil, an evil instinct, the "dark side of the force." Evil has its own independent existence. It is in business for itself.
In the second model, we are within God; we are one with God. God is everywhere and everything. All being derives its reality from God. According to this paradigm, if God is within all creation, then what appears as evil can only be a distant, albeit distorted, expression of the divine. This doesn't make it "good." But nothing can be entirely separate from or independent of God. Everything, therefore, is the way it is "suppose" to be.1
We often separate God from many aspects of our lives, as if in hope that He's not part of the pain, but only the beauty. It can be very difficult to see the character of God in suffering, loss or unfair death. I can almost feel what Job must have felt as God showed him animals tearing each other apart for food, storms, earthquakes, as well as the rest of creation, and pointed out that He was in that too. The marvel of it all; God being intricately and intimately involved in our lives. The unfairness and suffering somehow find reason and beauty as we begin to notice our existence within God, instead of without.
1Kushner, Lawrence. Invisible Lines of Connection: Sacred Stories of the Ordinary. Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1996.
