My cat has been very sick these last few days. She is beloved in our family, the queen of my son’s childhood. Living on a ranch with lots of animals, I have faced this so many times before. Sometimes I think that the possibility for so much disaster in my life means that I cannot rest in peace, even for a few moments. In the last few years I have found this constant vigilance against life, or nature (or is it God?) has darkened my perception of life’s wonders. It seems that the human memory highlights the negative and fades the positive.
Marcus Borg, in his article Jesus as Sage: Challenge to Conventional Wisdom said: “ We typically live our lives as if reality were not gracious”. This went right to the heart of the matter. Life has its hard and sad moments, especially when not seen through the filter of time and experience. But more often everyday life is filled with beauty: the wondrous experience of nature and the camaraderie of family, friends, and random strangers. Have our religions contributed to this graceless view: a view that may reveal a demanding, punishing God, an indifferent Nature, and evil in our fellow man?
Jesus’ parables in the New Testament, as interpreted in Mr. Borg’s article, offer a contrast. They paint a picture of a gracious God, a god more in the image of a father/mother of the human type. “If you, then, evil as you are, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”(Mat. 7:11) The New Testament makes use of the father/mother model with God as father and Jesus and the Church as mother, and this model is one that I would like to expand upon a bit.
As in the macrocosm, so in the microcosm: this is a concept used often by author and physician Deepak Chopra, MD. I use this as a foundational concept when I propose that the model of family as we know it in our lives, the concept of motherly and fatherly love and concern for the welfare of their children, is a model for understanding our relationship with God. A loving parent sees the child in the large picture. This child is evolving, not from evil to good, but from inexperience to experience. The difficulties the child encounters during this learning experience are not cemented and final, but shaping and creating so that at a further point in time they can be seen as the building blocks of growth and evolution. In the larger picture, “bad things” and “good things” lose their identification as independent events and become, instead, ingredients. This model is consistent with a God who says: “Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice” (Math 12:7).
So perhaps it is possible to find that life is meant to be good and gracious, and punishments are not meted out by God but rather good and bad things happen, to the wise and the unwise, because all experience is needed to reach ultimate wisdom. Life is not meant to be lived by waiting for the “next shoe to drop” but rather, by living each experience for its lesson. And when you look closely at the culmination of the moments in life, reality is gracious.