“The End of Providence” Nov. 25, 2018 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
from Carl Dennis’s poem “Providence”
Providence seems to be one of the words
That shouldn’t be mourned as it falls from fashion.
Goodbye to the notion that whatever happens
Is meant to happen, foreseen and approved
By a thoughtful heaven. A word that’s proven
Invaluable to the privileged when they’ve cautioned
The less-than-privileged to be content
With the portion that happenstance has assigned them.
It’s the work of providence that you were born
To a sharecropping family on a hardscrabble farm,
Not to the family that owns the land.
The environmental advocacy group, Conservation International, has done a wonderful series of short videos, voiced by famous actors, to teach environmental awareness. They are masterfully produced, and beautiful to watch.
I especially like them because they are using these familiar and powerful voices to speak in the first person as if the oceans, the trees, the soil were speaking to us, very personally, and, with no small amount of contempt for us for pollution, global warming, and exhausting resources. Most of them assure us that the earth is eternal, but humans are mortal and that if we wipe ourselves out through ignorant abuse of the earth, that while we may be extinct, the eternal aspects of nature will go on.
The videos are powerful, informative, and they are almost voiced as mini-sermons delivered by ancient gods, speaking to our more primitive selves who, in antiquity, really did believe that the earth was a feminine goddess, and the oceans were a male deity. Producing the videos this way speaks to a very ancient place in our unconscious memory of when we automatically attributed emotion, character, opinions, likes and dislikes to the gods and goddesses of the universe.
We experience the world through conscious thought and we react through our emotions. Ancient people projected this same consciousness and emotional instability to the weather, the growing season, fishing, the oceans themselves, they were all gods, gods who were sometimes loving, sometimes punitive, and sometimes just totally capricious, psycho, nuts, unpredictable and inscrutable.
The evolution from this primitive polytheism towards the claim of monotheism in the western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was seen as a cultural evolution away from primitive thinking towards greater levels of sophistication and awareness. However, any fare assessment of that evolution really just looks like a kind of pantheon of hierarchy. While Jews, Christians and Muslims claim to have only one god, there never has been a way to make that work perfectly. If you conceive of one true God who is all-knowing, omnipresent, omniscient being who is good and loving, then there is a whole of explaining to do as to why there are diseases, floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcanos, and hurricanes. So all of these alleged monotheisms have complicated layers of divine angels and demons, mini-gods, who account for some of the darker aspects of life.
The movement from this ancient polytheism towards the monotheism of our time failed to actually move away from this very primitive tendency to award consciousness and emotion to the universe.
And, honestly, I am sometimes conflicted about saying anything about this. I know that people use this imaginary world of belief to cope with things that are too difficult for them to emotionally process. A local pastor I know whose husband drank himself to death, copes with that horrible loss by telling herself that certain Cardinals and Robins that show up at her birdfeeder are her deceased husband coming back to watch over her.
I have been tempted to suggest that she stop putting seed in the birdfeeders to see how concerned her late husband really is, but you will be glad to know that I have resisted that temptation. Belief in ghosts, spirits, re-incarnation, seems harmless enough if it helps some people to cope. I don’t like it when this willingness to suspend an orientation to reality is palmed off as religious belief, but it is not your responsibility to correct every stupid post you see on Face Book and it is not my responsibility to go around correcting every silly religious claim that I hear.
But I can’t be entirely indifferent. In a very serious conversation this week with a victim of domestic abuse who has recently felt so desperate that she made a serious attempt at taking her own life, I learned that she is now deeply involved in Bible Studies with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are telling her that what she needs to do is to pray harder. I know that my prescription of: Stay on your meds, keep your appointments with your therapist, stay in the domestic abuse shelter, don’t have contact with your abuser, and find a job is rather more demanding than the Witnesses prescription to pray, study the Bible, and join their very controlling cult-like religion, but this is the point where superstitious religious beliefs can get a person killed.
For those of us who have transitioned from traditional religious beliefs into a more progressive view of faith as a practice of ethical living and thinking, it seems clear that being fully oriented to reality is to be preferred to any kind of self-deception in magical thinking. For progressives, faith is a matter of deeply engaging in reality whereas much of traditional religion has to do with denial of reality and investment in an imaginary world filled with angels and demons and unseen rewards and unrelenting torture.
In the new Robin Hood movie, released this week, the narrative has the church in league with the corrupt Sherriff of Nottingham. The wholly despicable cardinal tells the cruel sheriff, “Fear is the greatest weapon. It’s why the church created hell.”I’m sure they will get some push back from mainstream religion over that line but it was a bit of honesty in an otherwise poorly written script that critics are telling me that I did not, in fact, enjoy as much as I thought I did. Honestly, who goes to a Robin Hood movie expecting historical realism?
I see that and just feel that, once again, the world is being told that the Ozarks is just one giant “Darwin’s Waiting Room” where we sit around hoping that one day the frontal lobe of our brains will evolve. But I immediately dismissed the story because it was obviously just an attention getting device and no one on earth is dumb enough to believe in demons in 2018. Apparently, I have once again overestimated the critical thinking skills of our neighbors, as many local yoga studios announced a sudden decline in participants.
I know that most people will counsel us to say, “Who cares what other people believe?” There is no harm in thinking that your deceased love one is eating earthworms in the backyard, but it would seem to limber up people’s connection to reality to a degree that it leaves them vulnerable to being manipulated by either political or religious charlatans.
More than that, saying that you believe in divine providence seems to allow people to let themselves morally off the hook. They don’t worry about the environment because God will take care of it.
There are 300 mass shootings in our country already this year, but they just send thoughts and prayers because it is all up to God. We have 500 people living in the streets this winter and most off what we get from churches is thoughts and prayers.
I am unapologetically disgusted by religions rooted in beliefs. Real religion is a matter of how you live.
It is a bit frightening to realize how small we are and how big the universe is and the child within us would like to believe that there is a big God who is a benevolent Father in the clouds who is in charge of everything and that there is a big wonderful plan.
But Harrison Ford is not Neptune, he is just a Hollywood actor who got rich pretending to be Indiana Jones and Han Solo, both of whom, never existed. Julia Roberts is not mother earth. The God of the universe, that ineffable spirit that we feel but cannot describe, is not a person as we are who has a specific will that is governed by emotions, either anger or love, that’s us. If love happens, that’s up to us. If meaning happens, that’s up to us. If justice happens, that’s up to us.
We don’t care about reverencing the earth because the soil is a god, and the water is holy, and the wind is sacred. We care about protecting the earth so that plants, animals, and people can live on into the future. We are not afraid of being punished by an angry God, we’re afraid of stupidly poisoning our grandchildren!
The goal of a spiritual life is not quiet acquiescence but a will to roll up our sleeves and keep working to make both peace and justice, not religious beliefs, but visible realities. We invite our religious sisters and brothers to join us in the real world where God has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet, and where we have a lot of work yet to do.
