I'd love to tell a hard tale of miserable abuse that I have suffered at the hands of conservative evangelicals that might excuse my tendency to push against them when in conversation. The thing is, I haven't suffered enough to have even a modestly-interesting story. I have issues, I guess, and those issues make me bristle in my soul whenever someone claims certainty about God--not certainty that God exists, but certainty about what He thinks or who He loves or doesn't love. Truth be told, I the only concept of God that doesn't set off angst in me is God as the source of unfathomable, unconditional love. That's my idol of choice.
It is no better and idol, really, than my Calvinist friend's 5-point, concrete system, and no better, really, than my brothers and sisters who picket funerals and claim to know with certainty that "God HATES Fags." Still, I choose Love. I say that it is better to throw away the scriptures than to use them in a violent, unloving way as a weapon against another. I say that God LOVES Fags at least as much as He loves self-righteous believers, women-haters and bigots.
But there I go, again, weighing this monologue to may way of thinking.
I love the way this poem, by Mark Jarman, strips away concepts of God as a thing--idolatrous versions of The Real God--and replaces that with the Truth that God is NO-THING, and therefore beyond concepts of God. Jesus is as close as we can get (I believe), and we pretty much mess Him up, too, and use Him in ungodly ways (and there I go yet again!). I swiped it from Steph Drury's blog Get your adverbs here.
Unholy Sonnet 4
Amazing to believe that nothingness
Surrounds us with delight and lets us be,
And that the meekness of nonentity,
Despite the friction of the world of sense,
Despite the leveling of violence
Is all that matters. All the energy
We force into the matchhead and the city
Explodes inside a loving emptiness.
Not Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth,
Out of which comes and into which light goes,
This God recedes from every metaphor,
Turns the hardest data into untruth,
And fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows
Itself in absence, which the stars adore.
—Mark Jarman
