What is God For?
Elizabeth Gilbert was unhappy. On the outside she had what many of us want. She was successful in her career as an author, she lived in a large beautiful home, and she had a husband who wanted to start a family with her. What she wanted was out.
“Out” didn’t prove to yield the happiness and contentment she was seeking right away. She had a large advance on her next book and so she used it to travel Italy, India and Indonesia. She eventually figured out that what she really needed was God.
If unhappiness was the problem, God was the answer. Where could she have gotten such an answer? She couldn’t have avoided a thousand evangelical tracts and evangelists while living in America. Christians are always selling God as a way to give us happiness.
Her path to God, however, was not especially Christian. She would discover, in the words of Ross Douthat, “The God within”
Through all these earth-shaking, all-enveloping encounters, though, Gilbert’s theological views don’t seem to change a whit. Despite meeting God in a Hindu ashram, she doesn’t become a Hindu, but then again neither does she revert to the Christianity of her American upbringing. Her initial premises endured unchallenged to the end: All religious traditions offer equally valid paths to the divine; all religious teachings are just “transporting metaphors” designed to bridge the gulf between the finite and the infinite; most religious institutions claim a monopoly on divinity that they don’t really enjoy. To the plight of so many contemporary Americans, awash in spiritual choices but skeptical of every particular religious option, eager to worship and pray but uncertain where and how and to whom to do it, Gilbert offers a reassuring endorsement of do-it-yourself religion. “You have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God,” she insists. Not only a right, indeed, but a positive duty: “You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.”
Her final theological epiphany is the same as her first one. A journey that began with God speaking to her in “my own voice from within my own self”— albeit “as I had never heard it before”— ends with the realization that the Elizabeth Gilbert-ness of that Voice is the key to understanding the nature of divinity itself. The highest spiritual wisdom, she writes, isn’t just that God waits for us inside our own hearts and minds and souls. It’s that “God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are.” The best way to remedy our “heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment,” then, isn’t to remake ourselves in imitation of Christ (or Buddha, or Krishna, or whomever), but rather to recognize that “somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine.” This is the highest religious dogma, and our highest religious obligation is like unto it: To “honor the divinity that resides within me,” and to worship at the feet of the God Within.
Douthat, Ross (2012-04-17). Bad Religion (Kindle Locations 4252-4278). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
The God of Happiness is a Tease
I hear Christians and religionists of all stripes hawking the God of happiness but I am deeply skeptical about their claims. I share that skepticism with the aisles of self-help books at the store. If any of them worked, the rest would certainly be obsolete. If any God simply provided consistent, pervasive, enduring happiness, religious diversity would have certainly ceased by now along with the rest of the market economy.
While I am skeptically chagrined about the religious diversity of the God of Happiness, I get thoroughly annoyed when this God is somehow tritely associated with the God of the Bible. I don’t know how an honest reader of the Bible should come away from even a casual reading of it imagining that this God is intent merely on making our dreams come true. If anything this God seems to be a disturber of the peaceful fantasies we naturally concoct for ourselves.
The God of Barren Women Continue reading →
