Wrong Way?

I felt like I had so much to say yesterday after not blogging for so long.  I want to spend a bit more time on this wrong worship vs. wrong God idea.  I briefly reference the Nicene Creed in which we state the "We believe in one God..."  It is quite common amongst many Christians to acknowledge that we are all talking about the same God, particularly amongst the Children of the Book - the three main Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  A goodly number of us would argue that even the other faiths of the world are all pointing to the same divine essense - the words we use, the traditions we follow, the way we pray, may seem different but that "all roads lead to God."

Yes, there are some fundamentalist and evangelical folk who take a very literal only through Christ hard line.  It is likely that there are fundamentalists in most faiths who believe that they alone are right.  These are the folks who would argue WRONG GOD over what I am calling Wrong Worship.

I am not suggesting that Wrong Worship means "incorrect worship."  Perhaps it might be better to think of it as wrong for us...or in the case of the Ancient Hebrews, wrong for the Jews of YHWH.

Those Canaanite Gods, Ba'al in particular, were still a group of humanity trying to understand the divine - the great, all encompassing Being - and how that Being interacted with them where they were.  Even the Canaanites though, imagined a greater, more removed abstract God, the Prime Mover, the Creator - they called this God "El."  Ba'al was the God who was closer to home as it were.  Not exactly an "Incarnation" but God reaching out and touching them.  The God who lived in the place with them.

The Ancient Hebrews also struggled with this - understanding the greater Being (YHWH) and understanding how that Being comes down to interact with us in our limited physical lives.  The Exodus reading this past Sunday concerned Moses arguing with God about staying with the Hebrews and making his presence known.  YHWH agrees to stay close but essentially tells Moses that at best humanity will only see the vapor trail of God's presence...his backside as it were...that will be the closest they will be to seeing God.  Besides he tells them that to look on the face of God would be more than their frail human bodies could handle.

Even in Christianity, as we struggle to understand the Trinity, we are essentially struggling with understanding the divine Being (God the Father) and how God interacts with us here in the mere physical realm (God the Son)...however, rather than a monolith housed pagan God or a vapor trail of YHWH we got Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The chapter I am currently working through in Karen Armstrong's book, The Case for God, has opened my eyes.  We are not meant to understand the Trinity, it is a paradox to meditate upon.  As we sit in church and say our communal prayers, we are to remind ourselves continuously of the inability of mere human words to adequately express what God is.  All those times we trip up on phrases where we feel need to cross our fingers or simply stop and let others say the words because we slip into a too literal mode of thinking.  Those are the very moments when we can remind ourselves of the inadequacy of our words...and the silence that follows is a recognition of the divine within us.

In fact, that one tricky word in the Nicene Creed -- Believe -- didn't used to mean what we say it means.  I believe the Latin word is credere and "believe" is a weak translation.  A more appropriate definition that doesn't appear to mean "take as the literal Truth" is apparently along the lines of trust or put myself in trust of...we trust that their is one God, we put ourselves in the the trust that there is one Lord, Jesus Christ...  This wording isn't about swearing on the Bible that this is the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth...it's a subtle difference, and, remember, we're not meant to understand the Trinity...it's a paradox that reminds us of our inability to adequately express in mere words what we are not able to understand.

Just like the God of Exodus telling Moses that we mere humans cannot survive looking onto the face of God, (to quote Jack Nicholson/Tom Cruise:  You want answers?/I want the truth/You can't handle the truth!)  Or as a posted on Facebook as a status update, quoting from The Case for God, "...get beyond simplistically anthropomorphic ideas of God and experience the divine as a transcendent presence within."  Peace.