The Wild Man
He's
Wild, you know!
—C.S. Lewis on God
Perhaps
my single greatest disappointment in most of the world's religions is
that they succeeded, against all odds, in making most people afraid of
God! Do you realize how absurd and horrible that is? It pretty much
makes it an unsafe and scary universe at the core, where no one is at
home and everyone is paranoid. It makes the mystical adventure
impossible. It turns religion into a self-serving brokerage business,
always picking up the pieces after a kind of "taught and learned
helplessness." The result has been massive neuroses, nonstop
aggression and a phenomenon unique to the West: atheism. Poor
"pagan" India where they told me the first week, "You
will not find any atheists in India—except perhaps among those people
taught in religious schools."
Anyone
who has any authentic inner experience knows that God is only beauty,
mercy and total embrace, and nothing but beauty, mercy and total
embrace. The Trinitarian nature of God makes that theologically
certain.1 The only people who don't know that are those who have never
sought God's face. In my experience there is an almost complete
correlation between the degree of emphasis one puts on obligations,
moralities, ritual performance and one's lack of any real inner
experience. Once you know for yourself, you will be plenty
"moral," in fact, even more so, but it all proceeds from a
free response, from the Trinitarian flow passing through you. It is a
response, not a requirement, an effect of having known love, not a
precondition for getting love. God is always the initiator, always good,
always available, and the flow is always free. Yes, sin is real and
common, but it merely means to stop, resist or deny this omnipresent
flow of God's love.
Now,
believe it or not, we are threatened by such a free God because it takes
away all of our ability to control or engineer the process. It leaves us
powerless, and changes the language from any language of performance or
achievement to that of surrender, trust and vulnerability. This is not
the preferred language of men! It makes God free and us not. That is the
so-called "wildness" of God. We cannot control God by any
means whatsoever, not even by our good behavior, which tends to be our
first and natural instinct. As God said to Moses, "I show
compassion on whomever I will, and show pity on whom I please"
(Exodus 33:19). That utter and absolute freedom of God is fortunately
used totally in our favor, even though we are still afraid of it. It is
called providence, forgiveness, free election or mercy by the
tradition. But to us, it feels like wildness—precisely because we
cannot control it, manipulate it, direct it, earn it or even lose it.
Anyone into controlling God by his or her actions will feel very
useless, impotent and ineffective.
God
in the Hebrew Scriptures comes off much wilder than he does in the New
Testament (largely because we have civilized and domesticated Jesus from
his Jewish roots!). Yahweh, the God of Israel, picks out a guy named
Abraham and tells him to pack up his stuff and head out for some place
across the desert that he's never seen before. He tells Abraham and his
wife, who are both about a hundred years old, that they're going to have
a baby—and they do! But then God blows Abraham's mind by ordering him
to sacrifice that only son, and this after telling him he will be the
father of a great nation! This has nothing to do with order, certitude,
clarity, reason, logic, church authority or merit! This is an utterly
free God trying to create spiritually free people. I am
philosophically and theologically committed to keeping God absolutely
free. In general God has not been very free, either with Jews,
Christians or Muslims, all of whom call themselves "children of
Abraham."
Chapter One - Pages 1 and 2
