Is God a means or an End?

Love cannot be a means to any end. Love does not promise success, power, achievement, health, recovery, satisfaction, peace of mind, fulfillment, or any other prizes.  Love is an end in itself, a beginning in itself.

This quote is from The Awakened Heart by Gerald May which I finished reading a few days ago and I have begun reading again.  I do not usually reread a book right away but there are so many things in this work that touched my experience of God and of life that I want to delve into it once more with to see how it speaks to me a second time. 

The above quote resonated with me because it holds a deep truth about our relationship with God.  If we understand God as love, the essence of love, we can see how it applies to the Ground of Being—to use Paul Tillich’s term. 

There is a great danger in wanting to relate to God in terms of what God can do for us; for our loved ones; or even the world.  It is natural to pray to God that God will give us what we desire and believe is right.  Those things may be reasonable from our personal ego driven perspective; we may want healing for ourselves and others.  Indeed my daily prayers and our collective prayers ask for just that.  However, what happens when God does not deliver on God’s part of the implicit contract. We are told we are God’s people and if we are God should give us the things we ask for.

We often end our prayer with the phase, “if it is your will” which is a reminder and declaration that God is supreme in this relationship.  However, behind that can be the belief that if God is just we will get what we ask for and what we deserve; well not necessarily what we deserve but what we should receive as God’s children.  This can be misleading and the darker side of this is the prosperity Gospel which preaches that if you have success in life, as the world defines success i.e. material possessions, a nice home, a good job, and a happy family etc. it is a sign that God is rewarding you because you are a good person. 

This view is summed up in that wonderful song recorded by Janice Joplin, O Lord Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz.  There is a wonderful phrase which captures this approach to God, ‘God the Butler’.  We believe that we can keep God down in the servants’ quarters a la Downton Abbey, and call on God to come upstairs when we need something.

That is what happens when we make God a means rather than an end.  This can happen when we use our spiritual practice for a personal means rather than making space for us to recognize God’s work in our lives.  We can use contemplative prayer, centering prayer, meditation and other spiritual practices to make us feel better and to give us physiological and psychological benefits such as lower blood pressure and feeling at ease with others.  However, when we do that we are placing ourselves above God.  We believe that we know what God should do for us.  We are indeed using God as a means and not an end. 

Gerald May addresses this, “beware if turning it (spiritual practice) into a psychological method… I caution you not to “use it” to cope with stressful situations or to increase you efficiency.”  In my experience this is certainly tempting and I have turned to contemplative prayer to deal with stressful situations.  The trap is that it seems to work at times.  In my experience what seems to be the key is intention.  Do we open ourselves to the love of God or do we substitute our will for God’s and demand my will not Thine be done? 

In the end we are called to make God the end, the goal of our existence and not to means to the existence that we want or believe we deserve.  Thanks be to God. 

Taming the Wild God

²⁶Surely God is great, and we do not know him; the number of his years is unsearchable. ²⁷For he draws up the drops of water; he distills his mist in rain, ²⁸which the skies pour down and drop upon mortals abundantly. ²⁹Can anyone understand the spreading of the clouds, the thunderings of his pavilion? ³⁰See, he scatters his lightning around him and covers the roots of the sea. ³¹For by these he governs peoples; he gives food in abundance. ³²He covers his hands with the lightning, and commands it to strike the mark. ³³Its crashing tells about him; he is jealous with anger against iniquity. “At this also my heart trembles, and leaps out of its place. ²Listen, listen to the thunder of his voice and the rumbling that comes from his mouth. ³Under the whole heaven he lets it loose, and his lightning to the corners of the earth. ⁴After it his voice roars; he thunders with his majestic voice and he does not restrain the lightnings when his voice is heard. ⁵God thunders wondrously with his voice; he does great things that we cannot comprehend.  (Job 26: 24-27:5)

Last week I heard someone on the radio (I don’t remember the context) speaking about taming the wild God.  My thought on this was that this is exactly what religion attempts to do—tame God.  Religious doctrine must, perhaps of necessity, define God.  For most Christian denominations it is the Trinity of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Whenever we fallible human mortals try to define God we are in effect trying to tame him or her or it and make it in some respects a house pet.  In that respect we do create God in our image or at least in an image we can get our minds around and define God as something which we approve of.  When we say God is this God is that we are saying that God is not something else. 

One of the dangers in doing that is that is that we will want to have God at our beck and call.  That has been called ‘God the Butler’.  We keep ‘Him’ downstairs conveniently out of the way when it doesn’t suit us or is inconvenient to have Him around.  Then we ring for Him (or even Her) when we want something.  God is then at our beck and call.  God help God if God doesn’t live up to our demands or even expectations.  Then we say, “Well if God can’t do what I want or need Him to do then what kind of a God is that?”  The conclusion to that can be, “There is no God”. 

One of my favourite books of the Old Testament, if not the whole Christian Bible is the Book of Job.  It is also one of the more controversial and I am surprized that it made it into the canon.  It puts God/YHWH into less than a shining light.  God and Satan (before he was thrown out of Heaven) have a bargain that allows Satan to do pretty much what he wants to Job — who is described as “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”   The object of this little bet is to see if Satan can get Job to curse God.  Satan does his best (or worst from Job and our perspective) and yet Job is faithful.  However, he demands a hearing before God.  God justifies his actions by saying that Job is a mere mortal and cannot know the ways of God:

6Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: 7“Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you declare to me. 8Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be justified? 9Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?

This is a hard truth but truth none-the-less.  We can’t comprehend why God acts the way we believe God does.  Jesus presented God the Father as a God of love but this world of God’s creation is unfathomable.  God is unknowable and as much as we would like to tame Him/Her and explain why good things happen to bad people and vice versa there is mystery in life that is beyond us.  We have scientific understanding for those things that the opening quote from Job that credited God.  However, that does not take away any of the mystery of creation and the wonder which is still there if we are open to it; “At this also my heart trembles, and leaps out of its place”.

All we have left is the eternal why—why is there evil in the world of God’s creating; why doesn’t God answer prayer the way we want God to; why isn’t God behaving like God should?  Beyond all these questions we have Job’s response:

25For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; 26and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God,

Thanks be to God.

Gretta and me

Recently I have re-encountered Gretta Vosper—not directly but on the radio and in the news.  Gretta Vosper is something of a well-known personality.  For those of you who are not familiar with her, she is a United Church of Canada ordained minister who has declared herself to be an atheist.  She has written a number of popular books including: With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. 

I became aware of the Rev. Vosper a few years ago when I heard her interviewed on that wonderful CBC radio program Tapestry with Mary Hynes.  I was somewhat troubled by what I heard at the time but I guess not enough to follow up on what I heard.  I re-encountered the Rev. Vosper last week when I heard a rebroadcast of the program while driving in my car.  That was followed by a Canadian Press news item on Huffington Post that stated Vosper was undergoing a process in the United Church that could lead to her being defrocked.  The article notes, “An ordained United Church of Canada minister who believes in neither God nor Bible said Wednesday she is prepared to fight an unprecedented attempt to boot her from the pulpit for her beliefs”. 

My reaction to hearing the broadcast and the news item was quite visceral—indeed I was surprized by how charged it was.  It caused me to investigate and examine her beliefs in more detail to help me understand my reaction more fully.  My initial reaction (which probably many people have) to hearing about Vosper was, “if she is an atheist and no longer believes in God (the definition of an atheist), why is she still an active United Church minister leading a congregation in The United Church?”  I felt I needed to understand more fully where she was coming from and where she was going in the church.

Vosper “came out” and revealed her atheism in a sermon in 2001.  The lay leaders of the congregation agreed to walk with her in the new path she was exploring which was, I presume, the bringing about a non-religious church in a non-religious time.  However, there were apparently, and not surprisingly, many of the members of the congregation who could not make that journey with her and left her flock.  As she describes in the interview, worship looks very much like a typical United Church worship service with hymns and prayers and a sermon. However, there is a distinct difference.  They no longer use scripture passages; they have rewritten hymns to take out any reference to God; indeed they no-longer is the G** word in any in most context.  If there is a reference to God they always state, “By God I mean…”  

Vosper noted in the interview that she came to the point of “coming out” when she had to deal with the devastation of her daughter who was mourning the loss of a beloved teacher to cancer. The daughter had, unknown to Vosper, prayer for God to heal her teacher.  Vosper could not reconcile the devastation of her daughter  and her non-belief in an interventionist personal God who answered prayer for which she had no satisfactory answer to comfort her daughter.    She decided to stay in her position as a minister due to the pastoral relationship she had with her flock. 

My next question is, why Vosper doesn’t join the Unitarian Church (as one on-line commenter noted) where she would fit in with no problem doctrinal?  Vosper holds the United Church to be the most progressing denomination in the world and is comfortable staying in the church.  As she states on her web site:

My congregation belongs to The United Church of Canada, probably the most progressive Christian denomination in the world. It ordained women over seventy years ago and has been ordaining openly LGBTQ leaders for decades. But theologically it remains in the closet about the human construction of religion and all its trapping. I couldn’t stay in that closet.

I have concluded that Vosper doesn’t want to leave the United Church to join the Unitarians or perhaps lead an independent secular humanist “church” because she would not be able to make an impact on the church.  She believe that the church needs to be converted to an organization that does not believe in a supernatural being in the sky who intervenes in human affairs for better or worse—a belief that, in her mind, has caused so many problems in the world. 

As noted above, Vosper does not usually use “God” in her worship—but when she does she qualifies if with, “by God I mean…”  This seemed to imply that she does believe in some form of higher power.  I had hoped to discover what Vosper does actually believe in which could be considered a higher power.  Unfortunately in the interview she did not specify what she might mean by God.  My investigation to date has not born much fruit.  I have not read any of her books.  However, the blurb for her book, With or Without God on her web site states:

Envisioning a future in which the Christian church plays a viable and transformative role in shaping society, Gretta Vosper argues that if the church is to survive at all, the heart of faith must undergo a radical change. Vosper, founder of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity and a minister in Toronto, believes that what will save the church is an emphasis on just and compassionate living—a new and wholly humanistic (my emphasis) approach to religion.

What then are the conclusions I have reached at this point in my investigation?  First, I must say that I admire Vosper for having the courage to say and stand by what she believes—even if I believe that she is wrong—and I certainly do.  I do not believe that she is wrong about wanting the church to move beyond the belief in God as a supernatural person in the sky who is arbitrary and can be bribed (she didn’t say that last part directly, as far as I know, but I extrapolated  from what she has said).  That has been called succinctly “God the Butler” who is called up to serve us on demand.   I believe that the church must change.  However, if all that the church is going to become is another place to gather together to be a supportive community and do good works—which are undoubtedly a vital part of being church—how is that different from any secular group such as Rotary already in existence?  If we Christians do not believe in God—a higher power who calls us to be more than we are and shows us how we can be that—then that is not Christian. 

May the God, who Gretta Vosper apparently does not believe in, bless her and keep her.  I wish Gretta Vosper well in her future endeavours however, I hope and pray (to that same God) she will pursues those endeavours in place where atheists have a home: that in my view is not the Christian church.