Sum of All Being

 

 

Sum of all Being

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

February 27, 2019

 

Today is the feast day of George Herbert, poet and priest. One of his poems is called “Bitter-sweet”:

 

Ah, my dear angry Lord,

Since thou dost love, yet strike;

Cast down, yet help afford;

Sure I will do the like.

 

I will complain, yet praise;

I will bewail, approve;

And all my sour-sweet days

I will lament and love.

 

The conceit here is that having contradictory feelings toward God is alright since God appears to have contradictory feelings toward us.

 

Herbert, of course, knew that God is One, and not in self contradiction. But he uses a trope from scripture that sees God as behind and beneath all being, and so is seen as the author of all, both weal and woe, joy and sorry, forgiveness and punishment, blessing and cursing. In typical fashion, writers in ancient Hebrew expressed the comprehensiveness of God by describing God in opposites: God blesses and curses, is jealous or angry but also long suffering and of abundant mercy, makes high and brings low, and is with us in our going out and our coming in, in our rising and in our sleeping. Opposites here listed as polarities actually mean the poles and all that is in between them. When Hebrew scripture gives the name of God as YHWH, it clearly is thinking of the Hebrew verb hwh “to be” in its causative form yhwh: the one who brings into existence all that is. The first person form of this is ‘hwh. That is why in Exodus God tells Moses his name is “I am,” whose form is probably also causative “I bring into existence.” In such a view, we tend to explain good things as blessings from a benevolent God and bad things as cursing and punishment from an angry God. Better to think there is rhyme and reason to the universe that randomness or accident. But the problem of the righteous suffering and wicked prospering puts the lie to such a simple way of seeing things. That’s what the Book of Job is all about.

 

Scripture speaks of the anger of God but also of God’s patience and love. For this very reason, it is unwise to take as literal one description of God from one end of a spectrum and act as if it tells the whole story. Those who say God is an angry God forget what Jesus taught about God as a loving parent. Similarly, those who take the image of God’s love to mean that somehow God is always predictable, gentle, and above all tame, have missed the point that God as love transcends the limits of human love and at times might be appear as forbidding or punishing. But this is more an effect of the eye of the beholder that it is inherent in the nature of the God beheld.

 

One of the great blessings we have in Jesus’ teaching is the idea that at heart God is better described as love than as hate, as forgiveness than as punishment, as parent than as policeman. But in this intimacy, Jesus does not lose any of the otherness of God, the mystery, the glory.

 

Herbert’s poem reminds us that such contradictory images, though often abused, are relative and as changeable as our own emotions and feelings.

 

Grace and peace.

     Fr. Tony+