Be angry at the picture of God they gave you. Be angry, little Meg, at the people who drew the picture of God for us and told us that monster was God.
God is with you. And God loves you.
But I think it's ok to be angry at God too.
I don't know why God doesn't fix everything right now. All of Creation seems to be getting our shot of making the best of it with what we got and where we are and what the other parts of Creation are doing or doing to us and God doesn't seem to get real involved beyond Presence.
But I will tell you that when I have been in my worst places and when I have been in the hands of my abusers and when I have been helpless and alone what I needed more than anything was saving.
But God doesn't save us out of our troubles or our suffering. I don't know why.
Instead, God enters into our sufferings with us. I never got saved. What I got was someone with me who loved me. Someone who would simply be there with me and wouldn't look away.
When my baby girl is racked by seizures for hours. There's nothing that I can do for her. I would give anything. Anything. To save her out of it. I would carry my cross to Calvary if I could save her. But I can't save her.
But I can be next to her. I can be there with her. I know she can't see or hear or feel me while I hold her hands and weep so she doesn't have to go through it alone. But that's the only thing that I as a father can do.
But it's all I can give her.
And sometimes the best way to love someone that we can't help and can't save is to simply be with them. At some point the words run out or just feel pointless. But the presence is always meaningful.
I don't know why God is letting us go through time suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune. I don't know why God forces us to shuffle along this mortal coil suffering the far worse weapons welded and weilded by our neighbors, family, and the bullies of the world.
I'm pretty angry at God about that myself.
And that feels scary coming from where I come from. Like a spider hanging from a thread dangled over the flames between the hands of an angry God.
But that is the God of the Garden.
That was Noah's idea of God.
And as far as I can tell, now, as I look at things from outside of fundamentalist Christianity, the entire history of the Jewish people up to Jesus was God trying to disabuse them of their picture of God as a perfectionist patriarchal suzerain they were given by their fathers while the fundamentalists and Aristocrats among them used all of their power and privilege to convince them that that's exactly what God was like, keeping them enslaved to the God of the Garden's sin & the paralyzing shame that comes with forever falling short.
Jesus came to show his people a way of knowing their God without shame. And how to look back for inspiration and find the good God they knew in amongst the dross of their religion and yet live in the present with an eye on the future to grow towards something better. How to love our neighbors and make life better for each other. And how to live with dignity under oppression. How to find freedom from our fundamentalism.
So they killed Jesus. The same people that always kill the Jesuses of this good world. The Aristocrats, Fundamentalists, Rich, & Empire. The Powers of The World.
But they couldn't kill God. And God raised Jesus from the dead.
Not in order to transfer to us Jesus's righteousness or any such bullshit to subvert God's own bullshit systemic law.
But God raised Jesus from the dead as a proof of concept. God can and will overcome the Powers of The World. Jesus spent his short time giving his people a better pattern to build off of. Inspiration for growth and resistance and overcoming.
Jesus gave his people an asystemic theology of liberation.
And that's what led to multi-ethnic soup kitchens and people selling their houses and giving the money to the poor.
But then the fundamentalist Aristocrats got a hold of Jesus with the useful idiot Paul. And who knows what the early church was really like because
300 years later the Roman Empire nailed Jesus back onto the cross and the victors not only get to write the history books, they get to choose and edit the Scriptures, and they salted the whole earth with their fucked up Roman rhetorician-designed theology using Paul's attempts to shoehorn jesus's teachings and life and death and resurrection into his systemic theology based on the God of The Garden.
Jesus didn't come to be perfect. Jesus came to show his people a better way.
Jesus didn't come to save ALL people from their sins by being a sacrifice for sin. Jesus came to save HIS people from their sins by being a prophet and an inspiration.
And it's not all about Jesus. I'm just talking to people for whom it was/is all about Jesus. I don't want my son to become a Christian. I think it would ruin a perfectly good Atheist.
God doesn't want Christians. God doesn't want Jews. God doesn't want Hindus. God doesn't want Atheists. God doesn't want any of those things exclusively. Nobody has a monopoly on God.
God just wants us to be good. And being good is more a matter of growth than it is about meeting a standard.
And God wants us to find ways of living out Love and Justice and to care for those who need caring for. That's all a religion is for.
Yes spiritual enlightenment is important. Yes God wants to talk with you. Yes some religions are are closer to the Truth than others. But the Truth isn't about the Trinity or the Three Body Doctrine.
On the whole, as long as you can accept Popper's Paradox, I don't really think God gives a shit what religion you have or reject so much as you are growing and finding inspiration from whatever and wherever towards positive growth into becoming a better version of yourself and towards healing and towards love and justice and empathy.
