mmoa_writes

I'm warning you. Really. Don't read unless you want to witness my new found ability to rant politely without swearing or using capitals. Give me an A or something, if you really feel generous...

Today's gospel reading was that really annoying one which the Church officials have relegated to the 21st Sunday after such and such (it's late, ok). In it, a manager commends a dishonest worker because he acts in a shrewd manner. It causes a few problems because it is juxtaposed to the usual view of Xian morals as encouraging honesty and so on, which I think is a shame because it shows just how one-sided most of our faith is. I don't quite understand the reading myself, but it doesn't contradict the image of Abba as a loving, merciful, all knowing, inherently good God. What it does do, is contradict what we tend to think of as 'good'.

The new priest we have dealt with it in a rathe rinteresting way. First off, let me rave about our new priest. He is an intellectual (*swoons*) who has too many degrees - he just likes to know things *swoons again* - and yet has ended up as a priest when he could have given Bill Gates a run for his money. Last Sunday was his first Sunday as our parish priest and he spoke of the transformation that occurs after forgiveness as something akin to the relief and contentment a friend of his felt after having a sex change.

My kind of priest! - When you first hear him speak, he sounds like the most dull person on earth, then you're struck by what he's actually saying... (It was odd how the most conservative of our congregation didn't leave or look shocked or anything and have embraced him all the more for being slightly different: one of the reasons I love old people so much. They're so damn unpredictable).

Anyway, he was saying how the reading prompts Christians to think about what it's all about. Evidently, it's not just about the moral ideals which we also share with the secular point of view, but really about something above that.

This got me referring to something I wrote elsewhere that God is something above morality (and it's not as if it's just with Xianity either - theists generally hold that belief about the deity/ies they worship, as beings outside the human conventions of wisdom and morality) and also why I think that the modern Xian's pathetic drivel under the varnish of 'free-will' is simply not adequate enough.

(For the record, I don't believe in free-will. I think St. Paul made a damn good point in Romans - read it for yourself you lazy things! - I believe that everything is pre-ordained, but the sort which most people would agree with: you don't realise it until you're looking back. I'm not going to go on unless you ask me questions, but that's the long and short of it, I think...)

So what am I trying to say again? Oh yes, that we shouldn't be caging God into the all-too human deity who sends you to hell for something or other (I really don't know what it is that sends yout here now, because everyone says different things. This gets me thinking that the categories of Heaven and Hell are a load of rubbish and there is only God after this preliminary stage) or the Xian faith as a simple case of good vs evil, particularly when we insist on using our own definitions of either.

And I mean it. This is the God, after all, who tells us that He is who He is - not a god of love, war or wisdom or anything like that, but the very font of everything which would include 'evil'. This is the God who informs one of His most fervent prophets that from Him comes 'the darkness and the light'. And above all, this is the God who is described as a Manager who commends a dishonest servant for acting shrewdly.

So don't even try to cage him in (I could get all hysterical and scream that He is the damn cage, but that would be silly).

Having written this, I now consider this minature essaything to be a load of human vanity. I think I ought to go and live as a hermit - my brain demands complication and at least if I am a hermit, I can tell it to shut up without getting funny looks.