Wondering: Who would you cast as God?

#5

On the day (yesterday) I finally thought this wondering was getting close to ready to roll, I learned that Jimmy Carter was also turning 100. And that was wonderful. Then, the Middle East lit up even more today. No surprise, but such big heartbreak.

As a result, I’m wondering, and knowing, if the timing for my piece is awful. In some ways I think I should put it in a drawer. In other ways, I wonder about the timing. Perhaps it belongs here, if only simply to ask 

are these ideas of a God who wants us to kill one another, in God’s name and for God’s sacredness and protection, worth the price they extoll?

For goodness sake, here in the U.S. and abroad, we’re allowing ourselves to not see one another as human, and we’re justifying it in the name of our individual religions and the deity we worship. So, in some ways the exercise in this essay seems more pertinent than ever. I offer it to each of you now, because looking closely at the attributes of what we worship feels critical. As an old boss often advised, I will trust the process. 

When I began

At first, I found doing this wondering both playful and an invitation to poke around in my beliefs, to see what I turn up that’s mine versus what’s been given to me. 

Here’s how the wondering goes:

1. Step into the director’s chair. 

2. Literally name (like parts) who you worship/what you believe in– these are the roles to be cast

3. Cast the parts, using human beings, alive or no longer living.

4. Side note: while I think that your dog might indeed be an understandable choice, picking a non-human simplifies this wondering in a way that lets us off the hook. So, it’s your choice, but I’d say stick to the people.

This is an opportunity to light-heartedly examine what we truly believe.

OMG, is she going to talk about God?

More than I expected to. Whew. 

But don’t worry, this isn’t a moralizing or a recruiting piece. That isn’t my mode. Aside from believing that the root of all this mystery is a love that extends beyond all of our internally and culturally created borders to everyone, I do not care one hoot what the house of anyone’s belief looks like as long as its foundation is Love. And don’t get all tricky and say, she doesn’t care if people worship eating children, because, come on, see the last sentence about Love.

To me, authentic personal spiritual beliefs and internal moral compasses are created as individually as snowflakes, and, when Love is at their core, they are equally as individually beautiful. 

When that individuality doesn’t happen, like when we believe exactly verbatim what all the people in our religious group believe, I wonder how that can be authentic. It’s more likely the result of having been told What is what and How to be for so long we don’t even realize it isn't our own voice naming our beliefs or choosing our language or picking our fears. And as a result, we’ve stopped asking questions and finding our own truths. We have stopped wondering. We’ve simply taken what we’ve been given. 

Full disclosure of my own religious background

I was raised in a Lutheran tradition (one branch of  Christianity) that uses the word “God” for a Love that passes all understanding. And, though I still often use the word God today because it’s the language that holds what I’m trying to say (a comfortable familiar word to me that doesn’t degenerate anyone else), sometimes I use universe or Love. Regardless, I use God knowing there are many other words used by the billions of people on this earth to name this entity, energy, source, thing that cannot be named.

And that’s all good.

Truth is, we humans have a limited language when it comes to this thing that’s so much bigger than us, and yet we still feel the need to name it. (See above, I do, too.) It’s ok. It’s how we’re made. Something’s important to us? Well, we want to be able to talk to it and about it. We’re language-based creatures. Know thyself. But know that others have selfs, too, and language of their own, and this, too, is good.

Which leads us to the place we go wrong (imho): 

when we believe the name(s) we ourselves use is the only right option. 

Easy to see where that’s taken us as humans over the centuries: the Crusades, Holy Wars, Missionaries who think the cultures and people they visit need to be saved (which makes the missionaries more than and those in need of saving less than and that is a terrible trajectory that has nothing to do with Love), seizing Native children and sending them to Catholic schools to strip them of their own culture, language, and spirituality, suicide bombings, the Holocaust, wiping out Tibet’s monks, calling whole groups of people (who were just fine before the arrival of the Religious-know-it-alls) names like heathen and savage and infidel and devil’s spawn and and and. Today.

What it has taken me over two pages to say is, 

I don’t think there is only one right word. 

In fact, it seems ridiculous to me that our need to have one ‘correct’ name to contain something so far beyond us in love, magnitude, and imaginability becomes a topic we argue, fight about, kill over. I have met many incredible people living from a deep core of Love that travel widely different walks of religion and spirituality (including atheism), and I have met many people who do NOT live from a deep core of Love who walk a deeply specific religious life. The label does not the pants make. The way we wear them, however, does indeed.

This is a long way of saying, 

this wondering has room for everyone, regardless of your beliefs and the language you use. 

So, I invite you to accompany me in the next number of paragraphs by substituting your own personal language each time I say something like God. 

It’s a pick your own potato kind of thing. 

Is it a sin to wonder about God?

Although I’m going to throw down on this right from the start, rest assured it is a question that in my past I’ve spent time wondering about. And here’s where I am: 

It isn’t a sin. 

I don’t wonder about this anymore. I don’t think when I die, and I sit at the feet of God and (at times quite uncomfortably) watch the movie of my life, that God will say, 

Amy, you wondered too much. 

Nope. While there will be plenty of my bad choices to review, I don’t think wondering about God will make the list. That is, unless I haven’t wondered enough. 

Grabbing a little evidence from my own religious upbringing, lemme tell you, Jesus was a huge wonderer about God and the structure, teaching, and rules of his own religion, especially as they related to God. In Jesus’ youth, it’s described that he was often found with the religious higher ups, asking and discussing and, yes, arguing. Hours and hours, days and days, he’d even sort of slip away from home (and I assume chores) to go find these guys. Throughout his brief life (ended by people who did NOT want to wonder), Jesus noodled aloud and in his head and heart in social, religious, and spiritual ways. This included him teaching in parables, which are, pure and simple, wondering-riddle-stories meant to draw us in and get us to think. So, for me, when it comes to wondering, all of this basically answers the question: 

What would Jesus do? 

Heresy

I’m certain that there are some who will find the wondering I invite here immoral, heresy even (a word I once heard a visiting pastor hiss when our own pastor invited all to the communion table in the spirit of Jesus, who in addition to wondering, traveled all over, across borders and religions and genders, even into Sinnerville, to invite everyone to eat with him) (but I digress, sort of). Look, I do not intend this wondering to be immoral, whatever that means (wonder about that)(I am). And I’m not making fun of anything. In fact, I’m inviting each of you to bring to this what you will. The spirit of the ball is in your hands alone.

But, people? It’s not heresy. Because even though this wondering is a bit of fun, like an adult version of making a cotton ball lamb in Sunday school, it’s also an inquiry into what our beliefs look like. It’s a visioning that allows a closer look at elements of an engine we may not realize powers us. 

In the end, as with every wondering in this series, you will each do what you will, feel what you feel, decide what you decide, but I myself simply do not believe that the great who or what you believe in will be pissed off at your imagination and true wondering being put into play when it comes to your own individual spiritual, heart-based way of inhabiting the world. 

Are we not supposed to grow?

The anti-spiritual wonderers 

What about your religious leader? Only you know (or suspect) their response (or pre-gaming) on the subject. If you’ve ever been told not to wonder, or are discouraged from it in more subtle ways including being told what to think, I’d suggest a hearty dose of wondering why about that. Why would a religious leader not want you to wonder?

Sadly, all over the world, there is much anti-wondering teaching. I initially met it in full when I began my first career in Kansas City in the ‘80s. Because I worked out of my apartment and traveled four states, in the beginning, I was lonely as all get out. Eager for community and spiritual anchoring in this new place, I trundled down to a local Lutheran church (not Missouri Synod, the fire and brimstone Lutherans that believed I was going straight to hell because I was that other kind of Lutheran) (other other other, can’t you just put your head in your hands?). Anyway. I was eager and full of hope as I scooted into that pew.

Let me tell you, I had never before heard the kind of sermon I heard in that church. Its hair on fire messaging blasted me back against my pew. Here was the core: God is an angry God, a smoting God, we are totally effed up sinners, and boy is God pissed. I mean, it was literal fire and brimstone. And let me tell you, the only word the pastor didn’t use in the above description was effed, though it would have been the gentlest part. 

It was in that church I first learned some people do not learn that God is love. Instead they learn that they’re awful, and their trajectory is the fiery chute straight down unless they conform, put coins in the Good Acts jar, and that only their spiritual leaders can tell them how to slowly dig themselves out of their awfulness and into being saved, which often looks like the twin of conformity and maybe much worse. Later I realized that their way to get around the God is love message and still condemn was the line, love the sinner hate the sin, which allows a preacher (read: many many preachers) and his congregation to judge, condemn, punish and yet claim they’re still God-models, filled with love. OMG, we are indeed language creatures, and damn we can be tricky with it because No, no matter how you dress up this saying, it does not work.

Luckily for me, I’ve had a few pretty miraculous experiences of God, and they were not this. Not at all. They were Love way beyond my imagination and understanding. But it was in Kansas City I began to see that some people are simply taught fear (and hate and shame)  in the name of God. And fear (and hate and shame) that goes in, comes out, and it’s the killer of love.

One more anti-wondering anecdote. 

An older friend recently told us about going with her fiance for pre-marriage counseling from the local priest, in preparation for their upcoming lives together. Because one of the two of them was not raised Catholic, and because as a couple they’d been talking deeply of matters God and church and it mattered to them, they came with a lot of questions. Turned out, the priest was not big on this. Evidently, questions were considered a bad thing, and he told them so. In fact, as they left, he said he would be incense-ing his office to clear it of the badness of their questions. That was his parting statement. 

They had upset a priest! They came with questions that didn’t have easy answers, and they were shamed. She said she still gets uncomfortable thinking too far off script. That priest taught her to be afraid of asking. Of looking at the world through the varied lenses that questioning brings. 

Were you taught to be quiet?

The point is, something like this may have happened to you. You may have been taught, back in your small naturally inquisitive wonderful child body, or even now, in your amazing curious adult body, that to think beyond the confines of what you’re told about God, or whatever word you use for God, is BAD. Dangerous. A sin. The path to hell. You may have had the wondering scared out of you. 

This is an important personal wondering. Have you?

Part two of this  wondering is why a leader who believes in God would tell you not to wonder. 

I’ll be here when you get back.

I hope this didn’t happen to you but it’s not lethal if it did

Because how could the maker of the pollen-bottomed, flower-snuggling, bumbling bee, and the river otter, and the cute as pie puffin that flies like a football with little wings, and your dog standing there with that ball jammed in its mouth and its head turned sideways and its tail repeating the infinity sign in the air, how could that maker hate play and questions?  

Questions actually show involvement, rather than the contrary. So, while I’m certain God loves actual sheep (the wooly kind) a whole lot, I find it very very hard to believe that God wants us to be sheep. Sheep were made to be sheep. We humans were made with minds that can wonder. Don’t you think we’re each supposed to use what God gave us?

DIY, arriving at the actual wondering exercise

So, here we go. Let’s wonder-play.

First task is to pick the parts you’re casting for. For example, a Christian would ask, “Who would play God? The Holy Spirit? Jesus?” An atheist might ask, “Who would play the Spirit of Nature? The Spirit of Love?” etc. A Buddhist might ask, “Who would play Right View, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration?”  And so on. You get the picture.

Fit this wondering to however you walk through the world in a spiritual way, even if the word spiritual makes you itch, and so you pick your own word for that. This is yours to design.

I myself, for this exercise, will cast the Trilogy (which isn’t the term), you know: God, Jesus, and Holy Ghost, and I leave it to everyone else to modify my wondering language to best fit their world view. My spiritual world view, by the way, isn’t the trilogy any longer, but when I began my wondering about God, I discovered I didn't want to stop there, so I just kept going, chose to work with the three, and there you have it. 

Now, I’ll share mine. Then you can riff and do your own.

Anyone else start with Morgan Freeman?

Until now, and without any deep thought (though with deep joy), Morgan Freeman has always played God in my mind. I mean, have you heard his voice? And there was the Noah movie and Jim Carrey movie, etc., each with a patient, loving, tired, humorous Morgan Freeman trying to guide all these misguided ego-based humans with his deep rich voice and twinkling wisdom. One day that somehow lead me to wondering, if I was casting God in my own life, would it really be Mr. Freeman? 

Turns out, no. Though it would indeed be his voice (which makes me so happy every time), and that awesome twinkle (ditto), I decided I wouldn’t cast him. Apologies, Mr. Freeman. What caused my no is that I don’t know much about Morgan Freeman’s actual life, which means his actual personhood in the world, and for this wondering, knowing a bit about the human footprint of who I cast turned out to be important for me to know.

Casting God

So, I have cast two people to play God. I know. I know. (Make a decision!) Sorry, not sorry.

The first is Toni Morrison. 

Of course, I didn’t know her (I actually don’t personally know anyone who I’ve cast), but I know more about her personhood. Toni Morrison, in addition to being a breath-taking writer, understood and explored the human condition, its suffering and love, with hope and clear vision and a brave and steady eye no matter how difficult it was to see. She kept looking. She offered us challenging messages, deep thoughts, and new ways of seeing the world, one another, and ourselves. She didn’t fall into old tropes, she humanized. She was wise, did not give up, was not afraid to deliver a straight message. On top of this, there’s a wisdom and kindness in her demeanor that makes me think of bell hooks’ On Love and a definition of love that hooks feels is truly meaningful, 

“The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth…Love is as love does. Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Over and over, Morrison showed up to write books for her own, and in my mind even more, for our own growth. She willingly entered the hardest of learning arenas and stayed there on behalf of the world, which means us. Her writing and speeches reflect a direct seeing that’s an act of hope and love, a wish to nurture our own spiritual growth. And oh, how we all need that.

So, in my casting line up, I imagine Toni Morrison. I imagine that she sees me and this must be a complicated thing for her. Though I feel a reserve, time and again, when I turn to her words, she has been waiting for me. Nurturing my spiritual growth as a human. Being seen by her complicated for me. How I must disappoint her. All of the ways I walk though the world and fall short, hurt people. I want to be worthy of Morrison’s gaze, of her love and respect. And I know how far I have to grow to be worthy of it and that no matter how I try, it may never be possible. 

I grew up with the Narnia books, and Aslan (the book’s lion metaphor for God) was both deeply loving and fearsome (as well as wise), and I see those features in Toni Morrison. There was a deep, fierce, and regal beauty in her presence. She saw it all, gave us the goods, and let us find our way. 

Look. Beyond what I get from her writing and her talks, I’ve invented most of this, it’s true. And if you were her friend or relative and you are like OMG this is so not accurate, so be it. It’s my wondering. And I’m casting her. To me, she is aspirational. And what is God but aspirational?

Where does this meet what I believe?

Can you see how this imagining helps me begin to recognize the ways I see God? I’m not sure I knew about that bit of fierceness amidst the love and wisdom and compassion and truth. It’s an attribute I’m questioning. Was I given this? Is it drawn from my past? Church? Narnia? As I wonder, I recognize there is absolutely something of Aslan in it. But in my experience of God, have I felt fierceness? 

Only once, when I was in about fifth grade, did I experience a more, hmm, stern version, and even then it wasn’t fierce. I felt seen, not cast out. I was playing on our patio, which was sort of a courtyard surrounded by our house. I was happily running from wall to wall, leaping up steps and ledges and back down. All the while, I was thinking really mean thoughts about another fifth grader, a boy named Mark W. He was one of those super pesty fifth grade boys, and I was mad at him and having a heyday of mad thoughts. I have no idea what I was thinking, I can just remember the unmitigated joy at wishing him UNwell while I ran and leaped and ran. Pure gloriousness. I can assure you that I was not troubled by my conscience at all. I was having a great time. Mark W was a pain in the ass and was receiving just (albeit mental) retribution. 

I’d just reached the top step (again) and was turning to descend when a voice inside my head said, Oh Amy. 

I froze in my tracks. That voice was deep and kind, and yes, it was loving, not at all mean or fierce, but it was absolutely clear: This was not my finest hour. I can remember standing stock still on that patio. My whole body was a huge Whoa. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t punished. I wasn’t even really scolded, though that was the human explanation I had. Really, I was reminded. 

You might say it was a (insert some appropriate psychological term here) but it was not. That voice, well, it saw me, both in that moment and as who I was in a larger sense (one I wasn’t living up to). 

Thinking about bell hooks, that voice (which 5th grade me knew was God, not one bit of doubt) had spoken to support my spiritual growth.

This story is all to say that fierceness is not something I’ve met in my experience of God. Separation, perhaps yes, in that I can’t access God when I want (hello? hello? and usually, I’m guessing, because I’m so busy trying to do it all on my own). But withholding? Nope. I’m thinking fierceness is an idea that’s been given to me from somewhere and is a thing I need to reconsider against my own experience.

God Casting 2

The second person who I cast as God is Jimmy Carter. Happy birthday, Jimmy Carter!

Here’s why I’ve chosen him. Carter has the warmest of smiles, knows eternally that we can make the world an equitable place for everyone, and has faith that each person has it in them to do this kind of work and growth.

And now back to Aslan, interestingly enough. In the final book, Aslan lets the enemies of Love take him and tie him up and mock and kill him. Yes, I know that Aslan is sort of supposed to morph into Jesus seven books in, but I’m not casting Jesus yet, and anyway, Aslan always felt like God to me. 

So, Carter let his enemies do this to him. Mock him for being faithful to his wife, mock him for traveling in human form (yes, I see I’m blurring boundaries here), mock him for his work on behalf of everyone, his deep rejection of violence, and his belief in love for everyone. Jimmy Carter left office in public mockery (because he was not enough of a ‘man,’ and yes, a man then was considered to be that old cowboy image that’s only possible without any vulnerability, true empathy, or connection), and yet Carter has become the most earth-changing former president ever. Ever. He’s worked to make elections fair in countries all over the world. He’s done medical research in the least researched most ignored places in the world. He has built homes and created clean water. He has been a love dynamo.

Jimmy Carter is, in some ways, a blend of three chakras: the core, heart, and the one above the head opening the channel between us and heaven. If I met him, I know he would look at me and see all the potential that’s inside of me, and in this seeing I would be able to touch it, aspire to it, try to be it, too. Carter believes in being Neighbors. He’s sort of the Mr. Rogers of Presidents and world leaders, if we’d allow that. In many ways he gave himself for himself (so he didn’t lose what he valued) and he gave himself for us. 

Over romanticized? So be it. These two humans are rock stars in my book. I can romanticize them if I want.

Jesus

I think this wondering really took flight when I saw Ross Gay speak (twice! outright bragging!) in Vermont last spring. The first was a reading and a Q & A for his second Book of Delights, a fund-raiser (of course) for the Montpelier library that was a victim of the flood. The second was a keynote talk to educators that delved into the type of students we want to raise and what this takes. 

His talks gave me so much to think about, as do his essays (especially in Inciting Joy, my favorite). Here’s my read on him: he loves humanity and nature, and illuminates for us the starkness of what we people do to one another in our darkest moments and the beauty of the moments we do the opposite (and all of the in between). Reading Gay with an openness to all that’s there is like hearing parables that will change your life if you let them in.

Seeing him in person, however, is what perhaps made me cast him as Jesus. His demeanor is a blend of joy, humor, sadness, and perhaps heartbroken anger, all of which you can see in his eyes. His eyes are a wondrous hurtful thing. See, Ross Gay allows himself to see it all, enter it all, and, it appears to me, feel it all, too. He sees the injustice, over and over and over, and he works to reach us so we can see it, too And change. And all the while he’s doing this, he lives in one of the most threatened of human forms to inhabit in this country, a Black male body. 

And, though his writing delves into everything, like so many Christians today, I’ve noticed that at least his privileged audiences (read: White, that’s pretty much exclusively where I’ve observed it anyway) speak of him as the Joy Guy. I’ve heard it in person and on podcasts. Ross, Gay, the Joy Guy.

Is Ross Gay the joy guy? Well, of course he is. He sees, and helps us see, all these little moments held in life and human behavior that bring forth joy, and laughter. It’s incredibly important. He helps us laugh, savor, notice and appreciate. These things transform us, help us to be better in the way we walk through the world and treat one another.

But is that all he is? No. In fact, Gay’s willingness to see and to enter life are, in my opinion, the reason he has both deeply sad eyes and can feel a sharp rush of joy in a small tomato seedling. 

So, I cast Gay. Because Jesus sat on a boat with the wind in his hair. Jesus made wine at a wedding so they wouldn’t run out (and I’m guessing had some, too, or at least was wide open to the joy that wine and a party and dancing and love can create). Jesus fed everyone. Jesus asked us to see. He turned over the table of our understanding. And told stories to help us do it all.

Activist, neighbor, poet, gardener, baller, skateboarder, co-creator of a community orchard for everyone who wanders in, right smack in the middle of Bloomington. He can be stopped by a weed in the crack of a sidewalk, the turn of an old library’s stairs, the clambering of a spontaneous community of strangers searching for figs. He also asks us what a University who accepts x billions in funding from an arms manufacturer (that makes bombs! And missles!) must train its students to be and do. What kind of people, he asks, does a university need to create so that they show up day after day to make bombs? What do we have to teach children to make them willing to dedicate their lives to this profession? What do they need to be taught not to see? And not to wonder about?

Don’t you wonder, too?

So, to me, and yah I know, this is lofty language, but Gay is a prophet. We would do well to listen.

And finally, I wonder, what it could possibly be like, to see and write so deeply, humanly, whole-heartedly into the world, andoffer it to us, only to have the people who most need to listen, to grow, to change, to make the world and themselves better for all, choose to stay safe by calling him the Joy Guy?

It feels so like what people today have done to Jesus’ message and the very way he lived his life. All of these Christians, who profess to give their lives to Jesus, who accept him as their Lord and Savior, and yet who do not do a single thing he taught everyone to do? Who hate socialists and ignore pretty much every single one of Jesus’ messages which are pretty much all (and I hate to use any term to define them) socialist?

Jesus, the joy guy. Did his eyes look like Ross Gay’s eyes, too?

The Holy Spirit

This one taught me that my vision of the Holy Spirit is fun. I don’t usually know much what I think about this third angle of the triangle of Christianity, in fact, to be honest, I don’t think much about it. I guess I’ve figured, if God wants me to understand it, it’ll come into my life in some obvious way.

But my Holy Ghost is Maya Angelou. Wise, funny, adventurous, a survivor, a storyteller, a singer and dancer and groundbreaking woman. Unexpected, time and time again. She is the whisper to swing your hips like God gave em to you, the call to risk it all and tell your story bravely in a form never told before, the bell to be the first in your world to drive a cable car through the SF hills, the song that turns into opera in Europe. She illustrated racism in a new form of writing (creative non fiction), and child sexual abuse, she taught us what it is to survive and refind your voice and glide your strong velvet voice all through the air, giving people courage, and hope, and the desire to love everyone, including themselves. 

I have seen Maya Angelou’s words – her poetry, her non-fiction, her quotes, her speeches – transform my students like a whisper that lifts their arms above their heads and leads them to step forward in ways they never imagined. She whispers and calls to me, too. She’s an energy that swirls the air, saying, you are beautiful, you are enough, you are not done, look around you, see, laugh, be alive, be brave, be alive, and laugh.

For me, Maya Angelou as the Holy Ghost can be what she needs to be most in the moment, a hammer in the hand, nails on a chalkboard quieting a classroom, a song through the air, a ripple of soft breeze along your skin, the call to close your eyes and listen, the call to open your eyes and see, the poke when people are taking themselves too seriously. 

I love this Holy Ghost. 

What these castings remind me of

I don’t know about you, but no where in my spiritual upbringing does it say to love my neighbor once all my own ducks were in a row. To speak once I knew exactly what to say. To be kind or give or act or whatever once my kids’ college savings or vacation planning or the paying of my electric bill was done. They remind me of who I am asked, by those I most hold up, to be.

Closing wonderings

Yesterday was my final work afternoon in a local market garden that approximates heaven. This generous arrangement happened as a result of losing our collective garden to the flood a year ago, and when we were reinvited, back we came this August. Each week, we work for two hours (yesterday was all harvesting, potatoes, red and yellow bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, and I think it’s possible my fingertips have been saturated by glorious tomato dust for the last time this season).  Then we get to bring home produce. I’m with people I love, in an environment I love, doing something I love. 

Yesterday, while I dug my hands into the potato-nuggeted earth or trudged across the acres hauling cartons and clippers, I had time to reflect on this piece. Because I didn’t get it done yesterday, on Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday. And this closing still lay ahead.

What is the importance of this piece? I offered you a question and gave you a lot of my own words on the subject. This trade feels an imbalance, just like the trade of gardening last night where I get a lot and you? well. 

And was yesterday’s violence between Iran and Israel really about God? Not mainly. It was about land and power and the way we are willing to view each other and the value of other people’s humanity versus our own needs and how easily we sacrifice one another for our own ends, no matter how we frame it.

So this wondering that started so playful? Does it matter? 

No. It doesn’t matter. 

And yes. It matters immensely. 

Last night was the vice presidential debate where we again were offered opinions. Opinions that create actions, actions we’re seeing already play out all around us. Like, to lie for an end goal is ok. To tell lies that hurt, even kill, people is ok as long as it allows you to reach your own end goal. Like what we have done to our environment and if we’re going to stop before it is completely too late. Like wars and our hand in or out of them. Money and care and who gets it. What it means to be the greatest distributor of killing mechanisms on the planet. Where love comes in.

My hands were more dusted by tomato pollen than that conversation was dusted by these things. 

So, this wondering? It matters. Because, ultimately, this silly little wondering offers to return us to our core, to mine the language and inspiration that powers it. Whether you believe in some version of a God or think spirituality is bunk, every single one of you believes in something. 

What you pick is what inspires you. To play this game is to open your eyes and look directly at it again. Name it, define it, try to cast it with another human body (which drives deeper reflection), and then ask:

Am I living my life in accordance with what my casting choices reveal?

Am I? Am I? Am I? Am I?

Go for it.

(who’d you pick?)

*****

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