True relationship with God isn’t conditional

A “Mother Goose and Grimm” cartoon some time ago showed man and woman marionettes (with all strings attached) sitting at a restaurant table. He says to her, “I’m not religious, but I do believe in a higher power.”

Some people seem to believe God is The Great Puppeteer, responsible for every move people make – indeed, manipulating everything that happens and has happened in the history of the world.

On the other extreme end of things are those who believe God put everything in motion and retreated off into the shadows to watch what happens.

Most of us are somewhere on that continuum. (I won’t pretend to characterize where folks who proclaim atheism are on that wide-swinging pendulum.)

Some years ago, I wrote a column that asked us to consider the implications of the religious cliché, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

I don’t like the phrase because it implies that God’s grace may be for me at one moment, but not for you. It is grace with strings attached, and it depicts a capricious, fickle god.

I don’t buy it. Where does the idea of “unconditional grace” fit into that image of intervention?

In fact, I find it very hard to swallow any theology that pays homage to a God who intervenes on my behalf, but not yours, or your behalf but not mine. I believe that the Christian Church’s traditional explanations of human suffering fall woefully short of what God wants us to know about the great life-mysteries.

I know how easy it is for us to imagine God in human terms. We learned to do that from infancy.

God’s intervention is ingrained in our religious culture through hymns, worship liturgies, prayers, sermons and scripture. God has been blamed or credited for natural disasters since the beginning of human history. Even insurance policies speak about “acts of God.”

Our broader culture is trained to imagine God intervening – or not – in all things bad and good. In a myriad of ways, this weekend’s 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks will undoubtedly pay homage to a God who was either involved in the saving acts or the destructive acts of that horrible day in our national history.

So is God a puppeteer? I don’t believe so. I do believe we are too easily ready to see God mostly as a projection of our own limited imagination. It is more comfortable imagining God in human terms than pushing that spiritual envelope to explore what “more” God might be than what we traditionally imagine God to be.

Many people will disagree with me on this theological point. Even people close to me will raise their eyebrows on this one.

I do respect others’ embrace of God in ways I am, at best, agnostic about. But I also ask that my skepticism about whether God intervenes in our lives also be respected.

I believe God’s true relationship to human living and the entire world eludes us all. What if God wants us to be real partners – partners who take responsibility for what we do and don’t do?

What if God’s perceived intervention is also the visible result of “natural consequences”? What if God’s intervention is really our own intervention into a situation that either redeems it or further screws it up?

I am not a marionette. Neither are you, unless you allow yourself to be, though I’m not sure it is God who pulls our strings. It’s likely other people who pull them.

What if we cut some of those strings? Might we trust God more? I think so!