24. Forgiving ourselves our tribal god
The summer fog was parked offshore, so the sun was smiling down on San Francisco as I stepped out the front door of my building and headed down to the corner to cross to the grocery. Halfway there, someone started crowding me from behind, but I couldn’t see her. Then she was talking to me. Given where her voice was coming from, she had to be eight feet tall.
“Stop it, just stop it!”
My mind was blank with surprise.
“You’re hurting my son.”
Oh. Now I knew who she was—God’s mother. Not Mary, the mother of Jesus, but the mother of God the Father—and she was mad.
“Your president gets to pick his spokesperson and tell him what to say, but not my son. Anyone can speak for him. Anyone can give orders in his name—God says do this, God says do that. And your prayers, they’re all gimme, gimme, gimme until it takes my breath away. You people are insatiable. But have you ever once stopped to think about what my son needs?”
That was it, less than thirty seconds, and I’ve never heard from her again. Of course, the instant she fell silent, I understood she was my own imagination talking to me, but I caught her spirit. I did want God to be okay. And, no, I had never once stopped to think about him in the way a mother thinks about her child.
So I decided to step into her shoes to see how I’d react if I were God’s mother, and suddenly I’m mad, too. I do hate it when people take the name of God in vain. I don’t mean swearing. I mean the holy ventriloquists—the ministers, priests, rabbis, and self-anointed who treat God as if he were a wooden dummy sitting on their knee. I see them pull the string behind his neck and make their own words come out of his mouth.
And I’m upset about prayer. People seem to think God’s a short-order cook and they get to ask for anything they want from a menu they write for themselves—fame, fortune, status, success. Did I say ask? Demand really, as in, “I’ve been good, God, so now you owe me.” But if I were God’s mother, I’d want prayer to be a time of sweet communion between my son and his followers.
Then I notice my attention shifting from those followers to my son himself, and I’m concerned. I mean, look who he’s become. A praise junkie. In verse after verse in his book, he orders people to glorify him with clashing symbols and sounding gongs and to praise him from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same.
But how many hallelujahs does one person need? How likable is someone who demands praise all the time? I want my son to have friends, not supplicants. I want him surrounded with love that’s freely given not forced adoration. I don’t want him to be a lonely king on a lonely throne. I feel so sad that he’s got no personal life, no one to come home to at night, no one to rub his shoulders or to give him a hug when he’s had a bad day.
And he does have bad days. Slight him, disrespect him, even unintentionally, and watch out. He’s got a hair trigger. And he doesn’t hide it: I thy God am a jealous God. So I need to warn him, “My son, please don’t be proud of that. Don’t let your jealousy beget your wrath and your wrath beget the dealing out of death.”
And I need to ask: “Why do you talk about yourself like you’re a victim? God saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
“Of course you’re disappointed. I get that. I get that you’re angry at the ungrateful behavior of these beings, but you made them. Why not just fix them? Why pitch a hissy Flood? Why drown the Earth? Please be the grown-up here.
“And while we’re on the topic, why so much rage? Why do you let it run away with you? Like in that passage in Deuteronomy where you’ve got fifty-three verses of nonstop curses, a vile eruption of evil spite which you direct against those who do not bow down to you: Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field….Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land….The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies….And thy carcase shall be meat unto all the fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth….Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her….Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity….
“On and on it goes, a parade of savageries, and just before the end you proclaim, the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you. Really? Rejoice?!”
Then I steel myself, because now I’ve worked my way down to his worst. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even want to think about it. But I’m his mother so I have to bring it up: “See how your holy book is awash with unholy blood. You hover above the plains of ancient Israel, commanding your chosen people to commit mass murder: But thou shalt utterly destroy them, namely, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee…
“Sometimes you order total death: But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth…
“Sometimes you set a limit on the killing: …thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.
“Sometimes you direct your people to breed the virgins: Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
“You say you’re a loving father, but then you order your people to murder those boys and rape those girls.
“You say you’re a loving father, but you harm children on purpose as part of your grand plan: …for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. You punish little ones for things that happened before they were born. How is that kind? How is that just?
“You say you’re a loving father, but you let Herod slaughter the male babies and toddlers of Bethlehem following the first Christmas. You could have spared them. There was nothing necessary about their death. You baptized my grandson’s new religion with innocent blood. You listened, unmoved, to the mothers weeping, mothers who could not be comforted because their children were no more.”
And now I’m shaken, and now I’m spent, and if I were God’s mother—yet me being me—I would have to say, “Oh, my son, my dear one, better had you not been born.”
We humans are, in fact, the mothers of our gods. We create them, not them us. And our fertility is staggering. Look at the thousands of gods and goddesses who are known to us—Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Sumerian, Hindu, and African. And all the nature gods. And all the uncountable, unrecorded local tribal deities who are lost to us because they lived and died before writing was invented. No other species has ever created even one deity, but we are prolific. We’re the womb of the divine.
I don’t believe in God, not as a supernatural being. But I’m also not an atheist, not entirely, because I do believe God is real. When people imagine God, then act on that belief, whether for good or for ill, they incarnate him, making him real in the world. That old question, “Is God dead?” is easy to answer. No, he’s not. As long as humans manifest him, he lives. But when our species dies, God will die with us.
Most believers today agree with me that every single deity is a human invention. Except for one—their own god. In the past, pagans believed in many gods and tolerated the gods of others. But the followers of the God of Abraham insist that in all of history there has only ever been one true God. Worship of him is called monotheism, except he himself is not mono.
The first time I saw the title of Karen Armstrong’s book The History of God, I was shocked to think that God might have a history. To my childhood self that would have been a blasphemous idea. But once I read the first few chapters, it seemed so obvious. And by the time I finished the book I was dizzy with different versions of God, variations on variations, and endless reinterpretations of those variations.
We humans have given our monotheistic God multiple personalities. He’s the stern God of the Old Testament, the relenting God of the Christian Gospels, the stay-at-home Jewish God of Matthew, the traveling God of Paul out among the Gentiles, the mystical God of the Gnostics, the God of empire Constantine gave us, the cool scholastic God of St. Thomas Aquinas, the warmer personal God of St. Francis of Assisi, the dramatic, showy God of the Catholic Popes, and the dull, gray, severe God of my Protestant family.
Believers make drastically opposing claims for this supposedly unitary God. In our own history, plantation owners worshipped a God who allowed them to enslave human beings, to break families apart, and to drive millions to early deaths. At the same time, those who were enslaved reworked the God of their masters and used him to claim that the highest authority in the universe was on their side. They comforted themselves in their suffering and gave themselves hope for deliverance, if not here on earth then in the hereafter.
Jesus is similarly subject to continual re-creation. There’s a book by Gregory Riley which I bought just for the title: One Jesus, Many Christs. His subtitle gives you his message: How Jesus Inspired Not One True Christianity, but Many. Talk about born again, Christ gets born again and again and again.
But what about the original Jesus? The one who was born only that one time in Palestine. Who was he really? We don’t know. The Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985, is a network of scholars dedicated to stripping away all the interpretations of Christ to show us the nub, the core, the actual historical man who was Jesus of Nazareth. When I first heard about their work I thought if we can pin down the real Jesus then we’ll have common ground on which everyone with all these different versions of Christ can finally come together.
When I read John Dominic Crossan’s biography of Jesus, I liked learning about the times Jesus lived in. For example, if he was in fact a carpenter, he would have been among the poorest of the poor, because such laborers ranked even lower than peasant farmers. I read about the many wandering sages like the Stoics who were out on the road in the days when Jesus ministered, which means he would not have seemed all that weird to people. They were quite used to traveling philosophers and prophets.
Scholars have gathered together plenty of information about the context Jesus lived in, and it’s fascinating. But when we come down to it, despite all their research there’s still precious little about the man himself except from writings recorded well after his death by his followers who had a vested interest in turning him into a good story with him as their hero. Josephus Flavius, the prolific Jewish historian who wrote in the latter half of the first century, makes two passing mentions of Jesus. Apart from that, there’s no independent corroboration of his life. And some scholars say even those references were not original but were added long after Josephus passed away.
All of which makes me think that maybe Jesus has such staying power not in spite of us knowing so few facts about the actual man, but precisely because we know so little. This paucity gives us a blank screen onto which anyone can project their own imaginings.
If I ever got my hands on a time machine, despite all the amazing epochs and places I could choose to visit, I wouldn’t think twice about where I’d go. I’d set the dials for Jesus and launch. What a thrill to be in his presence for a day. It would be so amazing to hear how he talked, to see what he looked like, to find out if he told jokes, and to witness how his followers loved him. Of course, I would have picked up Aramaic in the time machine so I could understand his preaching. And maybe I would get to shake his hand. Maybe he would sign my Bible. Or maybe he didn’t do that kind of thing. But for sure I’d take a video camera with me so I could capture him, then bring back the footage to show it everywhere.
But would that be good for Christianity? What if the real Jesus was not who we expected? What if he didn’t match our imagined version of him? How would we handle that? What if he wasn’t handsome like in our paintings of him? What if he didn’t seem manly enough? What if his mannerisms were odd? What if we didn’t like the sound of his voice? What if he didn’t close his mouth when he chewed? What if I had to report that he smelled like people sometimes did back then when they spent days on the road in hot weather? Would we feel repelled? And what if we heard directly from him the kind of commitment he asked of his disciples, and what if it was too much for us?
But meanwhile, until someone invents a time machine, we get to keep making up new Christs without hindrance. Personally, I’m fond of The Gospel According to Jesus by Stephen Mitchell. He takes the standard Synoptic Gospels and cuts out everything he believes does not belong, which leaves him with a story that fills only twenty-five pages in big type with lots of white space. In his version, there’s no righteousness. Not one person is damned to hell by this Jesus. He’s portrayed as entirely human, devoid of divinity, but enlightened, a man who lived as an itinerant preacher and used simple parables and sayings to promote compassion. But as much as I like Mitchell’s Jesus, I always know I’m dealing with an invention.
Atheists get inventive too, like the aggressive ones who argue that God is the very devil. One of them, Richard Dawkins, wrote The God Delusion. I romped through it because it triggered my anger about fundamental Christians with their righteous attacks on anyone they don’t like, their meanness of spirit, and how they hold our national conversation hostage. Dawkins gave them their comeuppance and I cheered. But when I came down from that rush, I felt empty. I had to wonder what he was thinking. You can’t convert religious folks to reality by attacking them in the same way they attack their enemies.
Besides religion is an evolutionary adaptation, one which endures because it has survival value. Otherwise something that complex which demands such a major investment of energy would have long ago died out. Religion served a serious purpose for our ancestors. It helped hold people together in cooperative groups. This makes God a very real evolutionary force. So to say he’s a delusion is a delusion itself. The followers of religion are doing what human beings have done in our tribes and nations for how many thousands of years. They’re doing what evolution has given them to do.
It seems to me that Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and the other new atheists who pride themselves on their grasp of reality, and who consider themselves champions of rational thinking, are actually, in their blunt attacks on religion, taking leave of their sciences.
And why? In The God Delusion, Dawkins is no longer explaining evolution but promoting salvation by arguing that if only we could wipe out religion we might have a chance to save ourselves. I think it says something very human about Dawkins that because he has such a deep desire for our species to survive, he allows salvation thinking to take precedence in this one instance over his beloved scientific method.
But what if he got his wish? What if we humans exterminated all religion? What difference would that make? We’d still be human and our operating system would still keep chugging along. By itself, getting rid of religion would not get rid of our tribal identities and our groupist behavior. It would not rid us of our nationalism and militarism, which I bet would still manage to hang in there quite well on their own even without religion to support them.
I’ve read the argument several times in different books that religionists are better than atheists because atheists, through war and oppression in the twentieth century, have killed more people. Examples cited are Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. And these guys are indeed ahead in numbers when it comes to mass killing. Tens of millions of brutal deaths are credited to each of their accounts.
And maybe it’s true they didn’t bow to the God of Abraham, but they were religionists nonetheless. They were believers. They believed in the deity of themselves. They saw themselves as the saviors of their people and they were worshipped by tens of millions, so why wouldn’t they imagine themselves to be gods?
And when all is said and done, it’s simply gross for religionists to argue we’ve only slaughtered half of the numbers you atheists have slaughtered, so we’re better people. This debate about mass murder is one we all lose. With or without religion we humans are quite capable of killing whoever we’ve decided is the enemy.
So it makes me sad to witness battles between believers and atheists which become tribal in their intensity, because what we so badly need to do is find common ground in opposing tribalism of any kind.
During the last month of the summer after I graduated from high school, I got a one-page printed form in the mail from the college I was about to go to. It asked for all the usual information: name, address, date of birth. Then there was a box for religion. That stopped me in my tracks. My Christian upbringing had taught me not to lie. I couldn’t honestly count myself as a believer anymore, yet I was still officially a Presbyterian. So I set down my pen, walked the three miles over to church, climbed the stairs to the minister’s study, and knocked. Reverend Garvey was in and received me with a nod. I sat down in a cool leather chair, and told him, “I have to quit the church.”
“Why?
“Because I don’t believe in God.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
I was relieved he didn’t ask more questions because I didn’t have more answers, only that one. I knew that all you had to do to join the church was to say, “I believe.” So I figured if I said, “I don’t believe,” I’d be released.
But Reverend Garvey told me it wasn’t that simple. My request would have to go before the church Session for a vote. Now it so happened that my mother had just been appointed to that body, along with Mrs. Stone my fifth-grade teacher. They were the first two women ever to be appointed Elders in the history of our church—which was founded in 1776. Oh boy, this was not what I wanted.
My request was on the agenda at the next meeting of the Session. Mrs. Stone argued for a six-month grace period, but I heard through the grapevine that my mother said she wanted to honor my request, because while she was unhappy about my decision, she believed I was sincere.
So the vote was taken and I was out. At home we didn’t talk about it, but I was now an ex-Christian. Which meant my relationship with God was over, right? Not so. Not for decades. This legal termination was only a precursor to years of struggle about what might replace God at the center of my life. And about how I could fit into a world of believers if I wasn’t one of them yet longed for their approval and their caring. I did my best to keep up diplomatic relations with Christians while I questioned everything I had grown up on. Sometimes I sidled up to Christianity for a second look, then impulsively stiff-armed it away.
I feel embarrassed that I struggled so long over my relationship with an imaginary figure. But the relationships of childhood are deeply rooted. Billions of synapses which formed in my brain during my early years and made me who I am were formed under the imposing presence of God. So it makes sense that I couldn’t walk away from him through a single act of will. Or dozens.
Matthew 3:16, a verse I loved as a child, says: “And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him….”
Next to that verse in Wikipedia is (or used to be) a modernized, digital version of “The Baptism of Christ” by Fra Angelico. And there in the painting you can see the opening in the sky, the divine breaking into our human world, and there’s the Dove with a touch of gold, its wings held steady and still. It’s not flying down, flapping would be too ordinary, it’s descending. And before it a dusting of light leads the way down to Christ below where he stands in the popsicle-green water of the Jordan River.
Finally there came a day when I had the reverse experience. After so many years of being tangled up with God in an angry, hungry wrestling match, I felt his spirit quietly lift up out of me and return whence it had come, the Dove ascending, up into the heavens, where it disappeared into grace.
It took me years to settle into a life empty of God. There were still times when I wished with all my heart for a savior. In fact, that longing is still a strong echo in my life. And if there were such a thing as a trans-tribal God, the unshakable champion of compassion who could actually save us instead of tormenting us with promises he can’t possibly fulfill because he’s not real, I would partner up with him for the rest of my days. But that’s not to be.
Instead, I’ve cleansed myself and found peace. Not the peace that passes all understanding, but peace that comes with understanding. These days I feel surprised by how much of an advocate for God I’ve become. God cannot save us, but we can save him. We can save him from being a copycat of the brutal worst of our tribal chiefs.
I’ve come to understand that in finding compassion for God we’re finding compassion for ourselves. When we set down the burden of his bloody divinity, when we take pity on him, renounce his authority, and lay him to rest, we get to stop hurting ourselves with him whom we’ve imagined into existence.
When we realize we can make better moral decisions on our own without him, when we take on that responsibility, then we can begin to forgive ourselves his evil.
