For a long time, I had a theology all worked out in my head.
The universe is pretty random, went my line of thought, because God made the
world wild. We have tigers, and we have bacteria, and we have meteors being
flung wildly through space. Sometimes a person gets in the way of one of these
entities and bad stuff ensues. I worked this out after a lot of trial and error
and suffering as a way to answer that big theological question, and to not hate
God. I don’t expect the world to be safe and snug and predictable, because I
know it is not. I don’t expect God to intervene to fix the universe my way,
because so far, in the times it really would have mattered to me, like when my
mother died of cancer at an early age, there was no intervention. And truly,
there is so much suffering in the world and so many people who need help, why
would I get the help instead of someone else? So that’s the way it went on for
a good long time, and I thought it was settled. I still sang hymns in church
whose lyrics I had to sort of mentally translate, songs about God’s eye on the
sparrow and the whole world in his/her hands.
But then a couple of years ago, something happened that sort
of set my theological homeostasis on its
head, and I am still shaking my head like a dog that just climbed out of a
swimming hole trying to recover. It started with losing my job in the book
publishing industry back in 2010, a loss I sort halfway engineered, seeing that
some positions in my company were going to be phased out, I quietly let it be
known I had a book I wanted to write and ideas about freelance work, so if
somebody had to go, it could be me. And then after that, every step I took,
every bright idea I tried to bring to fruition crumbled in my hand like dust. I
had business plans and Kickstarter proposals that got almost to the finish line
but never…quite…worked.
What was going on?
Well, certainly part of what was going on was a national
economic crisis, but even so, I could not seem to get any traction anywhere. I
applied for a job delivering candy to
vending machines and could not get an interview. And one night, during a long
soul searching session with my best friend, she asked, “Is there something
else? Something you have always wanted to do that is calling you?” and without
having any idea this was still bottled up in my heart, I said, “Well, you know,
I was really born to preach, but it’s too late for that.” And then the room got
very still and my friend said, “Why is it too late?”
And I said to myself, well this is nuts, I really can’t
possibly go back to school, and yes, there was that divinity school program I
entered twenty years ago and abandoned for a number of excellent reasons, and
so now it would just never work. But the idea, having been said out loud kept
pulsating and expanding, and something in me started to say, well of course.
But still, I kept expecting to run into some obstacle that would stop this
whole ludicrous enterprise, like the fact I had no job or money, or that I am
over fifty, or that I am so introverted I can barely use the telephone.
And yet every time I took a half step toward this idea, all
those obstacles that seemed so insurmountable in all those other projects
seemed barely to exist in this one. I found a living situation two blocks away
from a seminary. The seminary helped me find funding. Friends and colleagues
wrote recommendations. It was as if there were some force pushing me forward,
as if I were on a river, and the current was gathering speed. “But I don’t
believe it works this way,” I shouted at the other boats I was passing, and
people waved and smiled at me as I went by, which I took to mean “You don’t
really have to know how it works. Just keep going.”
So I am. I don’t know why we suffer and I don’t know why we
thrive, and I intend to just be grateful and to report occasionally on my
progress. If you want to share theories, or playlist suggestions, or tips on
paddling techniques, leave a comment.
