Reflection
is dangerous. Necessary… but dangerous. Most of us have some vision, some
picture of our place in the world; who we are, who we wish we were, who we are
supposed to be. Those of us who assume an active deity, a god who participates
and leads, often find themselves the recipient of this whispered question… the
same question uttered by a serpent in a garden in our creation myth.
“Did god
really say…?”
Usually we
hear this question and remember that, in the creation myth, it was a trick; a
manipulation meant to push the story’s heroine away from the story she was meant
to live and into a new and much messier story.
We remember that this question planted a seed of doubt that grew into
full rebellion. We remember that to entertain this question was to bring about
the fall of the human race before it had much of a chance to stand. And in this
remembering I sometimes ignore another important reality; what if this is a
fair question? What if this is the question we most need to ask?
“Did god
really say…?”
