Thursday, August 30, 2012

"did god really say...?"


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…?”