A few years ago, I wrote a satirical ditty to the familiar sea shanty whose chorus goes, “Way, hey and up she rises.” Only I connected it to Easter: “Way, hey, and up He rises… early Easter morning.”
The first verse asked, “What shall we do with a risen saviour…?” The rest of the verses were, umm, a shade more irreverent:
“Stick him on the dashboard as a good luck mascot...”
“Lock him in the Bible where he can’t disturb us...”
I showed my song only to a limited selection of people (until now). Perhaps I was afraid of stepping on hyper-sensitive toes.
Interestingly, secularists or non-religious humanists didn’t find it funny. If anything, they felt uneasy. The joke belonged to a different culture.
The people who laughed had a faith strong enough not to be threatened by satire. Laughter wasn’t going to alienate them from God.
Inevitably, though, a few devout Christians felt quite offended. Their faith mattered deeply to them. They didn’t like making fun of any element of it. But I got a sense that they had a brittle faith. They couldn’t risk taking it any way but seriously. Levity might create cracks in their commitment.
Psychologists, I understand, define this attitude as authoritarianism – the conviction that any weakness imperils the entire structure. Like a pyramid of soup cans in the supermarket, removing one can creates chaos.
But soup cans are not the only possible metaphor. In the game called Jenga, you can pull out an astonishing number of sticks without causing the whole tower to tumble.

The opposite of faith
I’ve heard it said that doubt is not the opposite of faith; fear is.
Fear reflects a phobia about nothingness. You fear that if a rigidly held faith weakens, there will be nothing left. The whole thing will collapse into a cosmic black hole from which nothing ever emerges.
Our son’s death, over 30 years ago now, created one of those black holes for me. Until then, I had taken for granted traditional views of God as a supernatural judge who watched us from a distance and dealt out rewards and punishments. By this view, death was the wages of sin. But I could see no reason why our son deserved death by a genetic illness that was not, and could not have been, his fault.
During the months after our son’s death, a minister friend asked what the experience was doing to my faith. I remember saying, “All I have right now is faith that I will have faith again.”
I was right. I did have faith again. Having my existing concepts shaken did not mean that all I had left was nothing.
Today, I see doubt as a proof of faith. Being able to entertain doubts, being able to see humour in the sometimes ludicrous, sometimes wrong-headed things that humans do in the name of religion, means that one’s faith is strong enough to withstand uncertainty and inconsistency.
Your faith will not come crashing down like a house of cards just because one element of your faith is not what you once thought it was.
God is bigger than any doctrines. Or any heresies. Or any silly song.
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Copyright © 2016 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.
        To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN

Last week’s column about what children learn from unstructured play evoked a variety of responses.
Cliff Boldt, a school trustee himself, commented, “Play is the work of Children. Helicopter parents can't handle this.”

Don Schau liked the theme, in general: “However, I disagree with Peter Gray when he says, ‘Tantrums might work with parents, but they never work with playmates.’ Sometimes they do. Today we call that bullying, and it is imperative when we see it to nip it in the bud so children learn to process anger in better ways. Jesus would be an excellent example of how to process anger, in my opinion.”

Isabel Gibson: “I don't know enough about computer games to answer my own question, but I wonder whether today's kids will get much opportunity for unstructured play if that's their primary play outlet. I do know that when I play Scrabble against the computer, I am bound by its rules. There's no negotiating or compromising with a computer.”

John Estrem shared his own experience: “I went to a one room school in rural Iowa where all 11-18 kids in grades 1st - 8th played softball, fox and geese, red light green light, kick the can, Simon Says, and the bigger kids had to play with the smaller kids and we all had fun.”
  John added that play figures into the new Michael Moore film, “Where to Invade Next.” The film looks at other countries’ approach to school lunches, play in education, workers and management working together, prisons, drugs, women’s roles, etc.

Laurna Tallman also recalled her own play days: “I was fortunate to have the kind of freedom in childhood that has been usurped by the felt need to protect children from their neighbours, by television and computers and other forms of pre-packaged instruction and sound, and by mothers who must work outside of the home or who do not find full-time mothering satisfying. I am certain those freedoms to socialize or to explore solitary activities such as art and reading built creative methods for encountering others and the environment that have made me independent and my life profoundly satisfying. Children today are far too enamored of the material culture and subjected to influential voices that are not only unreasonable, but often insane.”
(I suspect she’s talking about the U.S. Election campaign.)
Laurna also commented about the letter “about the schizophrenic woman encountering a voice of reason and love that allowed her to pass back into left-brain dominance… I have contended from my reading of pre-1960s stories and reports about schizophrenics  that more was accomplished by your friend Ian's kind of listening therapy, where the patient is listened to and the patient listens, than has been achieved since psychoactive drugs came into use. In those days, too, live orchestral music was brought into institutions for patients, at least once a week and sometimes oftener. Ian's music may have played an important part in that woman's ability to take action on her own behalf. Ian may have inspired that woman to believe she could make her own way in the world.”

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PSALM PARAPHRASES

The Resurrection is about joy, isn’t it? For sheer joy, it's hard to beat a child's playground. So here’s a paraphrase of Psalm 150, one of the options for this coming Sunday.

1   God has given us a glorious playground; 
let us have fun together!
2   Climb to the top of the stairs with your heart in your mouth; 
slide down the shiny slope with shrieks of glee.
3   Ride the swings higher and higher 
until you can reach out and touch the sky; 
swirl around on the merry-go-round until your head swims.
4   Build dream castles in the sandbox; 
bounce on the trampoline and soar above your troubles.
5   Chase your friends in a game of tag; 
throw your arms around everyone in a giant hug.

6   Let our games, our imaginings, our activities, 
announce to all that this is God's playground. 
God gave it to us to enjoy together.
Thanks be to God!

For paraphrases of most of the psalms used by the Revised Common Lectionary, you can order my book Everyday Psalms from Wood Lake Publishing, info@woodlake.com.

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YOU SCRATCH MY BACK…
Ralph Milton has a new project, called Sing Hallelujah – the world’s first video hymnal. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at www.singhallelujah.ca
Isabel Gibson's thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com
Alan Reynold's weekly musings, punningly titled “Reynolds Rap,” write reynoldsrap@shaw.ca
Wayne Irwin's "Churchweb Canada," an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>
Alva Wood's satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town are not particularly religious, but they are fun; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” – ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at twatson@sentex.net

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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