MAKING SENSE OF SCRIPTURE, SAINTS, AND SAVIORS
PEOPLE ASK: “Do I have to believe the Bible was written by God to be considered a ‘good’ person?” That’s like saying you have to borrow every book out of a library to prove that you love the library. Or asserting that scientists, who have done a great job over the centuries explaining what goes on in the universe, are all sinners and doomed to the netherworld.
The Bible was not written by God, but by men and women inspired by God. If you start with this rational view of the Bible, it will give you, here and there, a lot of meaningful insights and moral direction. And you won’t get stuck on some of its significant inconsistencies in terms of narratives, ideas, and chronology.
I have been touched by the compassionate examples of many people—nurses, musicians, fire fighters, schoolteachers, hospice workers—who didn’t know a lot of Bible yet exhibited a kind of goodness and dedication that was as biblical as it was unpretentious. I have also visited clergymen and temple presidents serving time in prison for corruption, embezzlement, and sexual criminality.
The Bible is an archive of disparate books, written at different times and by different authors living in different times and circumstances. When we let other people determine what we should take out of it, then we have made the librarians into priests and we have ceased to be learners. We have choked the creativity of this literature, muffled its poetry, and stifled its many daring stories of dissent, controversy, and even spiritual ambivalence.
We have taken ourselves out of the discussion and handed it over to a few ecclesiastics, many of whom don’t feel safe with it unless they are pounding you with the miracles and cataclysms that are colorful and safe and give these clerics dangerous power. What about the love stories, the sexual sonnets, the political cunnings, the family dysfunctions, the deep deceits, and pounding griefs? They are much more in tune with you and me and our little lives. You and I are less likely to witness a sea being parted than we are to win the lottery. The big marvels in some parts of scripture are diverting but they don’t deliver when it comes to managing our marriages, our kids, our employers, our money problems, or our health.
The Bible is only as alive as your take on it and you are invited to grapple with it, just as you are included in its complicated tapestry of life and death, triumph and trouble. Finding this section of it repugnant and that section of it rhapsodic is actually its purpose. Believing that it is an indisputable testimony is like asserting that life is completely predictable. You’ve been around long enough to know that’s not the case. It reduces the spiritual power of this long literature into a lunch menu and it trivializes our need to think, react, and argue with fate.
A lot of GIs carried bibles into World War II but, in the end, we beat the fascists and saved the free world with gasoline, guts, and a bit of luck. The bibles often gave our soldiers comfort, especially when they saw their friends being killed or they themselves were wounded and maimed. In the end, the Nazis didn’t surrender to our gods; they succumbed to our strategy and courage.
I worry when somebody tells me the Bible is infallible and that people who don’t understand this are not included in “God’s plan.” Without curiosity or contention, the brain becomes a rusty tool. The heart falls into a pattern of hollowness. Every one of the big faiths asserts, in one way or another, that we are God’s partners. So why devolve into robots when the point of being a person is to discern, grow, create, and enjoy a few things before our brief time on Earth has come and gone?
I’m not surprised that many children and adults are looking for spiritual breakthroughs more than they are seeking liturgical formulas. Who wouldn’t prefer a song to a libretto? A prayer book is a guide, and it has sanctity. But every faith, East and West, basically asserts that when we are born, we acquire a soul, and when we die, the soul returns to its creator. Families and circumstances imprint a theology upon children; heaven is dealing directly in souls. The birth canal is not lined with religious billboards. The cemetery, though it has religious symbols carved into markers, is dug into the neutral earth even as mortality is completely unaffected by doctrine, status, or vanities. Yes, a lot of people want God more than they desire formulas; after centuries of religious conflict and now, as they endure a twenty-first century global war by and on terrorism, they’d just like to sit by the still waters and savor the spirit.
Here’s an irony: Vivid concepts of inclusion and realism lie quite openly in the old and later scrolls. These lyrical scrolls were scrawled by men and women who heard God, each in their own way and in the context of what they experienced or suffered. Some survived Egyptian bondage, others endured Babylonian exile, Roman oppression, Spanish inquisitions, and just wanted to make sense of the world. The writers included the early Christians who saw more insight in healing wounds than in hawking dietary laws. More often than not, they were responding to tyranny and making sense out of chaos. They were trying to defeat brutality with the power of ideas. These concepts are right there, in between the lines of tribalism and territoriality that sometimes skew the canonized texts.
These spiritual yearnings float above the thunder and lightning of the big miracles, the screaming mountains, the parting waters, and the ground opening up to swallow conspirators and sinners. These yearnings are still there in the morning after the smoke clears, the skies quiet down, and Earth sighs with relief. These sweet little truths are larger than liturgies; they are the products not of supremacy but of life’s longing for itself.
Everybody is included in “God’s plan,” and there is no written contract. There is simply life and the reality that we are often hurt, lonely, insecure, and in need of someone else’s friendship and love. What we don’t need is judgment.
In 2013, Pope Francis, who does not fancy a lot of perks but sees magic in children, publicly wondered, “Who am I to judge?” He was referring to the love shared between homosexual human beings and he may have been inspired by something from the old scripture. Remember, the Bible is a library and it contains widely diverse views. In Leviticus it says that if a man lies with another man, they shall both be put to death. But Leviticus also archaically instructs us to bring young bullocks to a mountain and burn them in sacrifice, to the point where “the aroma pleases God’s nostrils.” The fundamentalists who are parsing human love aren’t out in the fields lighting fires and offering calves to satisfy God.
Pope Francis is well acquainted with this stuff in Leviticus, but he likely also knows a poignant love story that is found later in the Bible: The romance involving the future messianic King David and Jonathan—the sensitive and brave son of the melancholy King Saul. These two lads shared something beautiful and undeniable: It’s right there within the same books with all those antiquated statutes about bullocks, blood rites, and the banishment of lepers from the camp. David and Jonathan frolic in the fields and convey clear filial messages to one another. (It’s in the Book of Samuel, a premier biblical prophet.) “Your father knows about us,” David apprehensively says to Jonathan. “Wherever your soul goes, that’s where I go,” replies Jonathan.
Later, when Jonathan is killed in battle, David mourns with as stirring a message as any in the Psalms that he ultimately wrote and that has consoled Jews and Christians for millennia. Remembering the times they had wept together and kissed one another (it’s verified in the text), David moans: “I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.”
Who could read this and not know that a benevolent God does not discriminate between human loves?
They
