“God Laughs and Plays” but doesn’t go to church

I figured that I’d enjoy a book subtitled “Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right.” And I did.

“God Laughs and Plays” is David James Duncan’s paean to fly-fishing rather than pew-sitting, to practicing Christian love rather than judgmental hatred, to finding inspiration in God’s natural creation rather than the artificial human dogma found in misnamed “holy” books.

A talented writer like Duncan best speaks for himself. So I’ll shut up and let him do the saying. Here’s some passages that I especially liked:

Intense spiritual feelings were frequent visitors during my boyhood, but they did not come from churchgoing or from bargaining with God through prayer. The connection I felt to the Creator came, unmediated, from Creation itself.

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Following intuition and love with all the sincerity and attentiveness I could muster, I consciously chose a life spent in the company of rivers, wilderness, Wisdom literature, like-minded friends, and quiet contemplation. And as it’s turned out, this life—though dirt-poor in church pews—has enriched me with a sense of the holy, and left me far more grateful than I can say.

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God is Unlimited. Thought and language are limited.

God is the fathomless but beautiful Mystery Who creates the universe and you and me, and sustains it and us every instant, and always shall. The instant we define this fathomless Mystery It is no longer fathomless. To define is to limit. The greater a person’s confidence in their definition of God, the more sure I feel that their worship of “Him” has become the worship of their own definition. I don’t point this out to insult the fundamentalists’ or anyone else’s God. I point it out to honor the fathomless Mystery.

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If you’ve got yourself a little faith community and feel some love and mercy bubbling up in it, why mess with that? Why “structure” it? Why “enchurch” it? Why not just live it and be thankful?

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To judge by the conservation voting records of those the Christian Right supports in Congress, however, the majority of fundamentalists see Mother Earth as a trampoline upon which we must stomp, the harder we stomp the more proud of us God will be, for Earth is fleeting, and only here to launch us toward heaven, so why not blow mountains up and dump them as rubble on top of streams, and why not support, from the pulpits of our so-called houses of God, so-called conservative candidates who conserve nothing but corporate profits reaped through our Armageddon-aimed Earth-stomping agenda?

We nonfundamentalist students of the Bible can think of many reasons not to practice such a “faith”—the words, example, and Person of Jesus chief among them.

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Needing church—which I have to admit I define as “two or less gathered in His Name”…

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A second thing that attracted me to Jesus at age seven: His father was allegedly God; and God had made the world and trees and rivers and stars and mountains and birds and clouds and sunlight and raspberries and animals and snowflakes and wildflowers and wilderness; and even though nobody could prove any of this like, scientifically, I loved the world God had allegedly made so much that it seemed like a good idea to love God, too.

Trouble was, I didn’t. Loving Creation made sense to me the same way that loving, say, Peanut M & M’s made sense. You tossed a handful of Peanut M & M’s in your mouth, crunched down, your tastebuds fired off, and without even trying, Yum! Love! Gratitude! Piece o’ cake. Loving the Invisible God Who’d created Creation, on the other hand, felt more like trying to love the unknown and invisible people who worked at the Peanut M & M’s factory.

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As for my having left institutional religion behind without bitterness: how in the Name of the Lover of field lilies, the poor, the prostituted, and His own murderers, could I be bitter about having traded self-righteousness, pharisaism, judgmentalism, and church pews for sunlit river banks and rising fish and moonrises over Rocky Mountain ridges and the path of intuition and salmon runs and great literature and world Wisdom traditions and abiding friendships and the incessant following of the sweet scent of love?

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I consider the infinite wilds to be the divine manuscript. I hold these wilds to be the only unbowdlerized copy we have of the Book that gives and sustains life.

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The word “mysticism” still means little to me as an experiencer, since everything I experience continues to simply be what it is. But as the beneficiary of certain inner experiences that have guided my life, and as a writer in love with a world in which much of what is visible is abused and much of what is life-giving is unseen, my respect for the word “mysticism” grows if only because, by definition, it shepherds us toward realms in which “what is” is much more than physical.

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If we are ever to rise to new levels of consciousness or to the Beauty that is Truth, we’ve got to describe our perceptions as consciousness truly perceives them. I therefore confess my lifelong love for a wilderness found outside myself, till once in a while I encounter it within.

It’s a wilderness entered, it seems, through agendaless alertness at work, rest, or play in the presence of language, rivers, mountains, music, plants, creatures, rocks, moon, sun, dust, pollen grains, dots, spheres, galaxies, grains of sand, stars, every sort of athletic ball, cells, DNA, molecules, atomic particles, and immaterial forces.

It’s a wilderness that occasionally “inside-outs” me, leading to a Teilhardinian burning and Leopoldian harmony that leave my mind wondrous happy but far, far behind. It’s a wilderness my trusty dog, Reason, will never succeed in sniffing out or chomping up, yet a wilderness I’ve been so long and grandly assailed by that I’ve lost all but comic interest in the dog’s endless hounding and suspect that even he begins to enjoy himself when the wilderness flips us inside itself.

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If I stake my life on one field, one wild force, one sentence issuing from Sinai it is this one: There is no goal beyond love.

One last quote. Concerning the title. From Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic theologian whose teachings were so truthful he was accused of heresy by the Pope.

Truly! Truly! By God! By God! Be as sure of it as you are that God lives: at the least good deed done here in this world, the least bit of good will, the least good desire, all the saints in heaven and on earth rejoice, and together with the angels their joy is such that all the joy in this world can’t be compared. But the joy of them all together amounts to as little as a bean when compared to the joy of God over good deeds. For truly, God laughs and plays.

Comments

[Cathy]

I consider the infinite wilds to be the divine manuscript. I hold these wilds to be the only unbowdlerized copy we have of the Book that gives and sustains life.

I agree with that. I never found God in a church only in nature. Thanks for pointing out the book I plan to read later on. Right now have book coming to read.

[Edward]

The same abandonment to God's love is what I experience in the sharing of breath and water with the ten-thousand things. There is no part way in unconditional love, and accepting that means I remain present with the immediate world.

Although not as repulsed by organized religion as Duncan and many of the Churchless seem to be, I also find that the eternally created now is participatory. Which means complete abandonment to my life.

What a relief not to have to pick and choose which manifestation of creation I will love, (even those mean, mean fundamentalists!). Imagine that: unconditional love in awareness of the all-powerful creator.

And since I didn't have other plans...

[Roger]

Edward;
Could you expand on the topic of: Complete abandonment to...? Sounds interesting, however, I do not understand what that means. Thanks for more info.
Best wishes to you.

[Edward]

Well, Roger, if you can read the postings on this blog, you probably understand the concept of spiritual abandon. So you are either being coy, or you are writing a book.

Regardless: sensate experience is reliably inefficient, memory is creative, and my ability to control my environment is not only minimal, but dependent. For purposes of this discussion, I will characterize driving at 75 mph in bumper-to-bumper traffic for an hour as abandonment to the world. I am trained to drive, but incapable of grasping the hive communication that is required of all of us on that road. The one in abandon is not capable of beating this heart, or secreting these hormones, which keeps me in communication with the other humans around.

If I am honest, I see that I have no idea what is going on, that my best guesses are silly conceits based on fantasy and pain. Yet, life goes on; I like it; and there is something non-entropic afoot. You, I, any of us can suppose that our personal mythology is correct, or that our clan has a unifying belief system. Experience has taught me to intend to do the next right thing, and then act. Just like driving at rush hour.

Although at first it seems like a lot of work, my daily life is filled with moments of giving up. Call it prayer, maybe, or mild shock therapy. All the while I’m accepting the unspeakable limitation; I am also respecting the special effects offered up by my brain. One act of faith is all it takes, that there is a power greater than me. Whatever that is, just beyond my ken? Let it have me.

[Roger]

Edward;
Thanks for your reply. Am I writing a book? No, however thanks for the compliment. Am I being coy? Well, I do have a fascination with definitions. Is that ok? I hope so, it's a hobby of mine.

I attempted to look up "Spiritual Abandonment" on the Internet. Found no responses.

Is "Spiritual Abandonment" a personal idea or thought of your own? Do other groups of persons subscribe to this idea or thought?

Best wishes to you..........

[Edward]

Two different things:

"Spiritual abandonment" is the existential predicament that leads one to exclaim, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me."

"Spiritual abandon" is just another linguistic compound, like "lascivious abandon" or "spiritual demands". I just found five references using a search engine.

As for others' subscription to spiritual abandon as an idea, I think a good collection of hagiographies, read successively, would condition the idea for you as fairly routine.

Anthony of Egypt comes to mind; Bodhidharma meditating in front of a wall for nine years fits the description as well as any dozen dervishes; Ida Scudder; Gerard Manley Hopkins, (on a terrible day); etc.

According to the literature, expertise in kung fu requires spiritual abandon. Find a few translations of that Chinese phrase to get the idea.

[Roger]

Edward;
Thanks for your reply. Your reply was excellent. Thanks for helping me with new ideas and thoughts. Many best wishes to you.