Wrestling with Religion

  A historic image of me in front of the old Phenix City house, blind to the angel standing beside me. Life if not a fast-food menu, life is not a video. You can't get a ticket telling you where you'll go. And you're already in your coffin if you feel you're in control. Life is taking a stranger into your home. We come in this world as strangers, and we feel from time to time That the place where we are resting is our own. But that old parking meter's ticking, and that feeling is a sign That it's time to take a stranger into your home. Home is where the heart is, and the heart's a living thing, Not some treasure we can lock up and call our own. You've got to find your reflection in unfamiliar eyes. You've got to dare to take a stranger into your home. If an angel rings your doorbell or the Lord stands in your yard, They will prob'ly look like someone you don't know. Don't expect them to remind you, you're a traveler in this world And ...

              Deep in Christian mythology is the image (particularly in the Old Testament books of history and prophecy) of God as a judge who tests his people, abandoning them to misfortunes such as the Babylonian Captivity when they are weighed and found wanting. Psalm 33:12-15 draws this picture, though even David must have seen the chair in the sky as a figure of speech: The Lord looks down from heaven;     he sees all the children of man; from where he sits enthroned he looks out     on all the inhabitants of the earth, he who fashions the hearts of them all     and observes all their deeds. This radical personification of Supreme Being serves to ground our moral responsibilities, denying bogus self-forgiveness. The trope of a Judge-God leads us out of selfish isolation. If there isn't literally an eagle-eyed jurist on a throne above the clouds, the figure has a function.   ...

   Since Roe v. Wade fifty years ago, the debate over abortion in America has stagnated because opposing sides begin with different premises, talking past each other and ignoring the narrow common ground. It's a battle between an elephant and a whale, noisy but inconclusive because they fight on different grounds.    I want to define the arguments (almost hermetically sealed off from each other), find common criteria (in justice, not the theology of any one sect), and state a personal resolution.    First, it's not about killing babies. The word baby means something. It's an air-breathing person who can be held in arms, an income tax deduction. A baby can survive outside its mother if cared for by another adult. Ancient cultures permitted infanticide (recall the story of Oedipus), but Christianity outlawed it, and today nearly everybody condemns the intentional killing of babies. So baby-killing isn't the issue. The entity terminated in an early abortion...

      In a recent letter to the editor in the Washington Post , a professional wedding photographer complained that his religious freedom was being infringed on. The writer is a "Christian" who  (unlike many Christians I know) believes it is immoral to participate in same-sex unions while a Virginia anti-discrimination requires his business to make its services available to all citizens, regardless of race or gender identification. The photographer's repetitiously worded argument--long on claims, short on evidence--runs something like this. He is an artist who approaches every wedding as a personal expression. His art is to celebrate the holy joy of a heterosexual union, and Virginia law makes it illegal for him to practice this art. That's what he wrote. I find it nonsense. He remains perfectly free to celebrate traditional marriage.      Obviously, he could get a day job like most artists and photograph weddings pro bono, only the ones he approves of...

      Even after I rejected the rococo supernaturalism of John's Apocalypse, I never weakened in my allegiance--the higher meaning of belief --to the brilliantly zen-like moral teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and the parables. I never doubted that, even in a Godless world, Jesus' genius defined how decent people should treat each other. This may explain why I saw the civil rights movement as on the side of the angels when it broke into the news the 1950s. When I heard about Brown v. Board of Education  on the car radio, I thought, "It's about time!" I had seen the pickup truck with wooden benches that was the "colored" school bus in Bibb County. Mother, who grew up there, told me it wasn't right. I owe that woman alongside Jesus. We were on the road to visit relatives in 1954 when decision came on the car radio as we rounded a slow curve between Alabama pastures. As the civil rights movement grew, I identified with the Freedom Riders, Rosa Parks...

      Apparently, I haven’t learned my lesson. I still understand "God" in an eccentric way debased by my Baptist upbringing. In one of the last sessions of the 4-year "Education for Ministry" (come by and I'll show you my Sewanee School of Theology diploma), we were asked to write a “knee-jerk” response to the phrase, “God shows up.” My response didn't remotely resemble anybody else's, and theirs were mostly alike. Again, I was the outsider.      I wrote that I'd love to know that God had showed up, but found "the curtain between the subjective and objective, the relative and the absolute, to be opaque." Everybody else responded, not to “God shows up,” but to "I feel a spiritual presence,” which to me is radically different because of the vast gap between what I feel and what is . If I feel something strongly--say, that Hillary will be elected President--my feeling makes me likely to be wrong. Bias clouds judgement. So a feeling of t...