Last night I wrote that maybe whoever set up the human experience got some things wrong. Somebody commented to say:

Wow! In my book that would be God and, though I hear what you are saying here, I think we’re looking at the wrong end of the stick as it were. It’s not that God got it backwards, but that we just don’t get Him when we are so perversely intent on ourselves instead of others or Him

I was thinking about his comment when I woke up this morning, and that got me thinking about the idea that things are the way things are because that’s how god decided they were going to be, and we had to accept it at face value without second-guessing god / the human experience, and that we can dismiss our frustration as “user error” rather than “flaws in the design and manufacture of the product”

that was a long-ass run-on sentence, but existential questions rarely conform to the rules of grammar.

two things about god (and i’m going to lower-case the “g” just to make you uncomfortable and lead you to question my salvation, and more than that to remind myself that god is so much bigger/other than the white-bearded construct I’ve labeled “God” most of my life):

first: i’m not convinced that god is the one who “set up the human experience”. even as someone who (mostly / usually) embraces the Genesis story as the starting point for everything we see here, even as someone who (mostly / usually) believes that there is a god and that god is wildly creative to the very core and seems to pulse with the energy of the entire universe, I feel that it’s way too reductionistic to suggest that god set up the human experience as we have it today.

in other words: the way things are is the way things are, not necessarily the way god meant for them to be.

yes, there’s a brilliant spark of creative intent at the beginning of all things but also: random chance, bad luck, sunshine, shitloads of human free will, evolution (maybe? don’t judge me), and lots of general shenanigans / fuckery.

that, after all, is the beauty of living in a universe where the god opens wide the doors and invites us all to dabble as co-conspirators in the act of creation and recreation.

second: if there is a god and that god is anything like the god we catch glimpses of in the scriptures, I think (s)he invites us to express to god our questions, anger, sadness, and general disillusionment about the human experience. i don’t believe god expects us to calmly rationalize away our frustrations using tight theological systems or “user error” explanations.

at least, i hope that’s the case. otherwise i’m going to be in deep shit with god when (s)he reads my blog and realizes how often I’ve lobbed a “what the fuck?” in heaven’s direction.

probably most of the prophets and poets who wrote the holy scriptures will be too, if god reads the old testament and sees the stuff they put in there:

( how long O Lord? )

( how long O Lord? )

( how long O Lord? )

 

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This blog post is part of #write31days. This year I’m skipping out on a theme and going with ten minutes of unedited free-writing every day (unless I don’t feel like it, let’s be honest). You can read more posts from my #write31days by clicking here.