To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
13
Aug
2018
I’m not sure whether this is a poem, a meditation, or an experiment. And I almosthope you find it confusing. You see, we all know what pronouns are. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines them as “a word used instead of a noun to designate a person or thing already known…” In theory, then, a pronoun is simply a stand-in. But a pronoun is also a word in its own right; the choice of pronoun has its own implications. It conveys singular or plural, gender, and even the closeness of the relationship. So how, I wondered, do the pronouns we use for God affect our perceptions of that, umm, whatever?
...Can one still be one when two are one?
Now I am We, and They are I
And He and She are You and Me—
And I don’t know who I is anymore.
Categories: Poetry
Tags: God, pronouns
27
Sep
2017
Does God lie awake at night, worrying about things?
Yes, I know -- that image immediately pictures God as a person. A person who sleeps, in a rumpled bed, tossing and turning. In other words, someone just like one of us, only more so. Psychologists call it “anthropomorphization”-- seeing others in our own image.
It’s the kind of misplaced identity that led Marc Gellman to title one of his books, “Does God Have a Big Toe?”
But basic question is not whether God lies awake at night, but whether God -- whatever God may or may not be -- worries.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: God, Nashville Statement, biblical sex, worry, worship
9
I cannot deal with a world in which there is no God at all. As I wrote last week, I need something that I can call God.
That’s why I write about God. Writing about God is how I sort out my thoughts. Often, I don’t know what I think until I try to put my vague intuitions into words.
But those words convince me that I am not just an atheist, an unbeliever. Yes, there is a God. I am obsessed by God. I don’t know how to understand that presence. But I keep trying.
Tags: God, gravity, relationships, attraction
2
“Why do you keep writing about God?” a reader asked.
Good question. The only answer I can think of is that I have to write about God. I need something that I can call God.
I use the term “something” loosely. It doesn’t have to be a thing. Or a person. Or a being, supernatural or otherwise. It doesn’t even have to be an idea. It just has to be more than me.
And it has to have some kind of volition. It has to be something more than blind chance, more than a probability field in quantum physics. Whatever it is, I want it to have an ethical sense – to want, even to desire, a better outcome for all.
Tags: God
31
May
Okay, God, I apologize. In the past, I have occasionally argued that you don’t intervene in worldly events. I have even suggested that you cannot intervene to fix things down here.
I was wrong. I must have been. Because Dan Rather writes in his Facebook blog, “I end each of my days with a silent prayer for my country… I hope against hope as I slip off to sleep that our rapid descent into governmental chaos has hit a nadir -- only to awaken to a new set of incoherent tweets or explosive headlines. I pray again that our Constitutional government, the great gift of our Founding Fathers, will provide a safety net to catch us before everything we hold dear is no more…”
If a famous news anchor like Dan Rather believes you can do something about the state of the world, who am I to disagree?
Tags: God, Dan Rather, intervention, prayer