Advent for those deconstructing their faith – Day 2

God, are we just playing at church? Like little kids playing dress-up and pretend, saying all the right things but not actually making a tangible difference in the world? I look around at all the bible studies and sermons and lifted hands and praying lips, and wonder if this is really what you came for. Would we even know you if you showed up?

You came and your people didn’t recognize you. Those who had been waiting for thousands of years, studying the notes and looking for the signs, did not see you when you arrived. They were blinded by their own pride and their devotion to a set of beliefs. They knew the “right way” of doing things and your Jesus was not behaving like their God.

How can we be so sure that we know how to behave like God? If it’s not about the right beliefs or the right behaviors, then what is it about? What is this thing we call “faith”?

I don’t think it is the same thing as shame or guilt or fear or anxiety or anger or self-loathing – which all seem to be abundant among your followers. If the fruits of YOUR spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, then why do we not see more of that? Why do we not experience more of that? Where is your Spirit, God??? Where are you?!?!

“Look for the helpers” they say. “Wait on the Lord, ” they say. “God allows His people to suffer,” they say. At the same time we proclaim to know so much about who you are and how you work, we also proclaim that the “Lord moves in mysterious ways” and “We can’t know what God is doing.”

So, is this real or what? Are YOU real? Is any of this real?

We long for your church to be the safe, supportive community it’s supposed to be.

We long for your Spirit to rain down upon us and fill us with the goodness of You.

We long to know You.

We long to be like You.

And, yet, it seems like we have gotten it all wrong. We look around for evidence of you and, though there are millions of us who have asked you into our hearts, so many seem to throw your love around like fairy dust, bestowing it generously on the already blessed and grateful and beautiful and socially acceptable, before it vanishes into thin air, only a display of our own powers and questionable ones, at that.

Are you here, God? Are you here, and we don’t even know it? We think we already have you… that you have already arrived and we own you and understand you and so can contort our image to fit you or, sometimes, maybe, the other way around…

Did we miss your arrival? Were we blinded by our own ideas of who you are that we can’t see you existing all around us? Do you easily slip out of rooms and duck into alleys because we aren’t actually seeking you in the first place?

Save us from what we are seeking.

Words for contemplation:

We Must Abandon God*

One person said they had God, while another lamented God’s absence.

I say this: we must abandon the God we have in our thinking and believing for God’s sake, so that we might come to know God as God truly is —

who never left us, beyond knowing, in a simple oneness and pure union.

~Meister Eckhart

*From Meister Eckhart’s “Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul” (as translated and collected by Jon M. Sweeney & Mark s. Burrows)

The 2020 Advent Series

Day 1