In my university years, one of my summer jobs was program director at a summer camp. After a stretch of raining days I’d be in search of some kind of a wide game to help the kids run off their energy. I often resorted to a game we called “Bigger and Better.”
We’d divide the children into competitive groups, of course. Each team would be given some small item like a penny, a spoon, an egg … that sort of thing. They’d have a certain amount of time to run all over hell’s half acre and approach anyone and everyone on staff, the cottagers who lived near by, campers at the adjacent camp ground … whoever they could find … and the deal would be … they’d present their item and ask if someone could give them something bigger and better. They’d keep doing this and making a series of trades until they began to look tired to me or I thought the mood of our neighbours was shifting from amused to irritated and I’d ring the bell rang to end the game.
The winning team was the one which returned after its sequence of trades with the biggest and best item. Of course they got some prize (generally coated in sugar which had the effect of defeating the very purpose for which we had undertaken this activity). I was always amazed by the creativity of their biggest and best items … they would haul in things like a discarded bathtub someone had given them … an old bike … a set of tires … whatever … but it was always way bigger than the penny, the spoon or the egg they set out with …
The tribal god of our tradition evolved through a long competition of bigger and better … A lot more was at stake, however, for our spiritual ancestors … it wasn’t just about getting some prize for having the biggest and best god … it was about having dibs on the god who could help them survive and win the game of life. I can’t think of any story more revealing of the god we inherit than the story of the esteemed prophet, Elijah, going head to head in a spitting match with the prophets of the god, Baal, and his team.
As the story goes, it’s a contest to see which god is the real thing … the genuine article … which is the biggest and best god … Is it the god King Ahab has been worshipping or the god the prophet Elijah understands himself to serve? The contest begins early in the morning in a place thought to be the nearest humans might get to the gods … on top of a mountain. Apparently someone decided that the winning god will be the one who answers with fire.
So Baal’s team, being the bigger team, got to go first. The way the winners tell the story, Baal’s prophets danced around the altar until their feet were so sore that the dancing turned into limping. They made themselves hoarse shouting instructions and encouragement. They even jabbed at themselves with knives hoping to get their god’s attention with the sight of blood.
The opposing team is anything but humble … Elijah can’t resist the urge to irritate … so he mocks his opponents suggesting that perhaps their god is on a vacation or is caught up in meditation; maybe he has gone to the bathroom or has fallen asleep. Then just to prove that his god is bigger and better, he ups the ante and douses the altar and the animal to be sacrificed in water. Just to make sure the opposing team gets it, he does the big water dump three times. Then he reminds his god of his credentials … you are the god of all the big guns: the god of Abraham, Isaac and not just Jacob but the Jacob who became Israel. And then he runs his own credits: I am your servant and have done everything you’ve ever asked of me … so answer me … vindicate me … so everyone will know you are the real thing.
Like the story of the exodus from Egypt … this is Israel’s story … it is a nations justification for being and doing what it is and does … And since this is Israel’s story, an amazing fire ball consumes everything in sight. Elijah’s god wins. Baal’s team is captured and killed. There is no minority report … no other story from the hill. For the enemy is either silenced, exiled or slaughtered.
We are rooted in the tradition we have received from our spiritual ancestors like Moses and Elijah … the tradition we have received from the ancient Hebrew people. The god we inherit evolved through a long continuum … beginning with cave dwellers, hunters and gatherers for whom the greatest imaginable powers were the forces of nature. For these ancients, the gods were many and were manifest in the forces of nature such as fire so we had the gods of lightning and thunder.
When agriculture replaced hunting and gathering, these gods became goddesses because power now lay in reaping and sowing … So god became goddess … we had the goddess of sun and rain … of fertility and so on. As we moved off the land and into the city-state, power came wrapped in the robes of a new authority: God became the lord and king: protector, enforcer and judge. This idea was nuanced by the ancient Hebrews who consolidated the gods into one with the conviction that their God and king was so much bigger and better as to be the only God and king of the universe.
We are rooted in a story that gives a tribal god … an external being that resides outside the universe but is moved to be involved … we are rooted in the stories of a tribal god that prefers some over others and promises these chosen ones the things of value in this ancient culture: land and lots of descendants; that rewarded faithfulness and punished disbelief; that delivered them from their enemies, led them through a wilderness and brought them into a land occupied by others but divinely granted to them; that fought for them and with them, gave them victory over their enemies when they did his bidding … and punished them when they turned to other gods.
Elijah’s god pretty much carried the day with a few quiet exceptions like the god of the mystics until a few centuries ago … when Copernicus and Galileo made Elijah’s god homeless and Darwin made this god unemployed. With the birth of the scientific method, we have begun to retire and re-imagine the god we inherited from our ancestors … moving beyond the all knowing, all powerful, jealous and capricious … the demanding deity we inherited from our spiritual tribe. And we have begun to turn our spiritual telescopes around looking deeply within our own experience, seeing holiness around us and within us … no longer projecting our favourite human attributes onto our understanding of our god nor designing a deity to respond to our deepest fears and insecurities.
Rooted in an old conversation like the shouting match on Mount Carmel, we are reaching toward a new and gentle conversation about meaning, about whatever the “more” is in which we imagine our experience to be immersed. Rooted in images that served a flat earth in a three tired universe, we are seeking new images that would help us make meaning in a world our ancestors wouldn’t recognize.
Rooted in stories that interpret ancient life and re-enforce notions of my god is bigger and better than your god, we are seeking to know life itself as sacred … to re-learn what left behind as primitive in the so called enlightenment … to re-visit what we dismissed as superstition … the mystery we traded for bigger and better words, theologies and creeds … for relationship with sacredness … to hear the minority reports of those we dismissed as mystics, lunatics and heretics … to find in art and music, in sky and sea, in the forest and flower, in act of kindness and courage that which what we might call god … to see in ourselves, in our tears, in our compassion, in our fear, in beauty and in bravery that which what we might call god.
Instead of continuing to be a tribe bent on dropping water bombs on the altar and calling each other names … instead of singing songs or saying prayers that prop up a dying notion of deity … instead of defending or worshipping an outdated tribal god, what if we were to become a community of godding? Instead of attributing and abdicating everything to our projection of the biggest and best outside of ourselves, could we build meaning and shelter for one another by embodying the best of what we imagine an all loving deity to be? Could we find our way into a spirituality that celebrates mystery, reverences life ands honor death, embodies hope and meaning even amid the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death?
Could we mature in our ability to respond as human beings and come to name our experiences as acts of kindness or acts of violence, acts of mercy or acts of greed, as acts of love or acts of hatred … and in respect of the floods and famines, earthquakes and tsunamis as acts of nature not the act of any god? Could we begin to teach ourselves new songs even as we teach the insurance industry new language? Could we come to see the love we give, the good we do, the resources we share, the wounds we heal, the protection we offer the web of life as acts of godding, both great and small?
A friend of mine told me about a moment she experienced during labour with her first child. Suddenly in the midst of the hard work of trying to give birth, there was for her this stark realization that she was in the middle of something no one could do for her … this was something her mother couldn’t do for her … something she could only do herself. This is how I see this moment for our humanity in our spiritual development.
We can no longer worship, celebrate, and serve the tribal god of our tradition … we can no longer rely on the way our ancients interpreted their experience and defined their deity. Nor can we continue to define and describe this deity as the creeds and councils did more than 1600 years ago … nor can we continue to sing about this tribal god with the language and imagery of the previous three centuries. Our earliest spiritual ancestors taught us to crawl but we must learn to stand and trust our children to learn how to walk. Our forebears gave us their understandings of their experience not for us to make them our own but to model how they made meaning of their lives and how they came to understand their identity as a people, a nation, a community of faith.
In the first century, the friends of Jesus found a new way to be Jewish … in time, that new way of being Jewish came to be called Christian. We, in our time and in our experience, need to find new ways to be Christian (just as they found new ways to be Jewish).
It begins by finding new ways to understand ourselves as sparks of the divine … as creatures in evolving cosmos … as citizens of a global community … as spiritual beings in a human experience … as responsive and responsible beings seeking to know ourselves as part of wholeness and holiness.
We live and move and have our being in sacredness … in a sacred love that was here long before us and will be here long after we have drawn our last breath. And it is our acts of godding, that transforms that little dash between the date of our birth and the date of our death into that which matters now and that which matters ultimately. By our acts of godding, both great and small, we water our roots and grow from and beyond them … we sift carefully the understandings we inherit and we evolve in and beyond them … we retire our tribal god from the spitting match, end the competition for the biggest and the best, make our way over to the other teams and use our biggest, best and brightest parts of ourselves to build a fire together than will not only keep us warm but keep us speechless before its mystery. In the absence of our tribal god we just might find ourselves in the presence of the sacred.
-Nancy Steeves
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