It's amazing how the dark, late summer, early mornings, here at Quiet Rest, provide allowance for an array of
personal thoughts. Thoughts about the day before
me, yesterday and days long past. I
have a habit of reflecting, most of the time, submitting to emotions that are elicited
from unlikely filing cabinets of thought. This morning I found one of those emotions that I haven’t given much thought since the time I morphed from childhood into adulthood. Longing. The longing of desperately
wanting to be good from a young age. For sure at age nine. I remember that I tested the boundaries tightly drawn around
parental definitions of good and bad, approved, condemned, and censored. It was
usually clear that I was not lining up with these oft-voiced thoughts of the
good. Yet, somehow, I don’t remember this entering into my childhood account of
the virtue. I wanted to be good. Good in a matter far beyond parents and
teachers (though I seemed more eager to please the later than the former). And
I haven’t tried to figure that one out.
But a good, in a way that altogether overwhelmed the very silly strict legalisms
and relative pieties around me. Good in a way that somehow reached the source
itself.
I believe it was Plato who famously argued that we should struggle out of the dark caves of ordinary human existence and towards the eternal forms—of which the supreme form is the Good. The pull of goodness, at the age of nine, was for me the first step toward the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (whose very name indicates the first step was not my own). I desperately longed to be good, to know Good, to somehow become united with it. Yet unfortunately, when climbing out of dark caves, churchly regulations and narcissistic perfectionisms look much like the thing I thought I was seeking, and the terrifying God who demanded perfection Matthew 5:48 seemed the terrible schoolmaster who would not have it any other way. No matter how many A's & B’s my adolescent efforts were able to manufacture, no matter the good deeds for elders, the outrage at worldly acts, the attention to ethics in history and in school, God seemed a teacher I could not please.
My pursuit of the good no sooner became an impossible undertaking than it became my most devout undertaking as I headed for religious studies. The God I followed through high school and college was one I feared, though at the time it was not the kind of fear that comes from the force of great beauty, but more the terror of insatiable expectation. I did not yet have the words to voice what C.S. Lewis's Orual managed in Till We Have Faces, when she finally had her chance to state her case against the gods. And yet, the first time I heard her words forty five years ago, I knew they were my own: "That there should be gods at all, there's our misery and bitter wrong. There's no room for you and us in the same world. You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive."
Nevertheless, I resigned myself to this God. Whether I saw myself more as the wry opportunist keeping one's enemies close or the sad duckling eating out of the hand of the one who plucked all her feathers, in those days God was never far from my mind. I wanted to be good, I wanted to please, I wanted to meet God's approval, I wanted to be united with it. I knew I was failing, but new formulas for success, much like the latest self-help manual, appeared as often as I needed them, until finally, I resigned myself to failure.
It and fairytales long forgotten, began to appear in thoughts and dreams. I found myself suddenly startled by the troubling idea that I was angry—not because I couldn't reach the higher good myself, nor at the ravenous headmaster who demanded it. No, I was maddened at the thought that the Father who demands perfection could be good Himself. This was troubling to me, first, because my fury was real, but second, because it simultaneously seemed foolish. I was angry at the possibility of a good that was in the throes of giving up my defeated attempts to please this divine terror and pursue his Good that his face began to change. Images of good kings, gentle fathers, and untame lions, childhood hopes God's mere existence. Goodness had long seemed so unattainable that I willed the Source had to be evil or only a myth. It was far more disconcerting to consider that God might be both good and true.
Up until that point, most of my life had been spent wholly unconcerned with truth as a philosophical category. This is not to say that I went about declaring reality purely relative or truth non-existent. It was far less conscious than that. The idea of following God because of some good this following would afford me, the idea of following God out of fear, dread, legality, or even hatred—this somehow made sense to me. But the idea of following God because the story was true, because a good God was really there, because Christ was indeed who he said he was—this had never entered my mind.
Father, God, thank you for being where I have been all along. Thank you for clarity of ruminating of what is Good and the conviction of beginning a new starting point some forty five years ago after admitting that I might not have been seeing with all the facts in the first place. I ask for Your assistance as I grow older that I continue to see the facts and not respond from anything else. Amen
I believe it was Plato who famously argued that we should struggle out of the dark caves of ordinary human existence and towards the eternal forms—of which the supreme form is the Good. The pull of goodness, at the age of nine, was for me the first step toward the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (whose very name indicates the first step was not my own). I desperately longed to be good, to know Good, to somehow become united with it. Yet unfortunately, when climbing out of dark caves, churchly regulations and narcissistic perfectionisms look much like the thing I thought I was seeking, and the terrifying God who demanded perfection Matthew 5:48 seemed the terrible schoolmaster who would not have it any other way. No matter how many A's & B’s my adolescent efforts were able to manufacture, no matter the good deeds for elders, the outrage at worldly acts, the attention to ethics in history and in school, God seemed a teacher I could not please.
My pursuit of the good no sooner became an impossible undertaking than it became my most devout undertaking as I headed for religious studies. The God I followed through high school and college was one I feared, though at the time it was not the kind of fear that comes from the force of great beauty, but more the terror of insatiable expectation. I did not yet have the words to voice what C.S. Lewis's Orual managed in Till We Have Faces, when she finally had her chance to state her case against the gods. And yet, the first time I heard her words forty five years ago, I knew they were my own: "That there should be gods at all, there's our misery and bitter wrong. There's no room for you and us in the same world. You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive."
Nevertheless, I resigned myself to this God. Whether I saw myself more as the wry opportunist keeping one's enemies close or the sad duckling eating out of the hand of the one who plucked all her feathers, in those days God was never far from my mind. I wanted to be good, I wanted to please, I wanted to meet God's approval, I wanted to be united with it. I knew I was failing, but new formulas for success, much like the latest self-help manual, appeared as often as I needed them, until finally, I resigned myself to failure.
It and fairytales long forgotten, began to appear in thoughts and dreams. I found myself suddenly startled by the troubling idea that I was angry—not because I couldn't reach the higher good myself, nor at the ravenous headmaster who demanded it. No, I was maddened at the thought that the Father who demands perfection could be good Himself. This was troubling to me, first, because my fury was real, but second, because it simultaneously seemed foolish. I was angry at the possibility of a good that was in the throes of giving up my defeated attempts to please this divine terror and pursue his Good that his face began to change. Images of good kings, gentle fathers, and untame lions, childhood hopes God's mere existence. Goodness had long seemed so unattainable that I willed the Source had to be evil or only a myth. It was far more disconcerting to consider that God might be both good and true.
Up until that point, most of my life had been spent wholly unconcerned with truth as a philosophical category. This is not to say that I went about declaring reality purely relative or truth non-existent. It was far less conscious than that. The idea of following God because of some good this following would afford me, the idea of following God out of fear, dread, legality, or even hatred—this somehow made sense to me. But the idea of following God because the story was true, because a good God was really there, because Christ was indeed who he said he was—this had never entered my mind.
Father, God, thank you for being where I have been all along. Thank you for clarity of ruminating of what is Good and the conviction of beginning a new starting point some forty five years ago after admitting that I might not have been seeing with all the facts in the first place. I ask for Your assistance as I grow older that I continue to see the facts and not respond from anything else. Amen
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