Magical Thinking?

Google Image
I recently finished a book called “Not Forgotten, the True Story of My Imprisonment in North Korea” by Kenneth Bae. The author, a Korean-American who had emigrated to the U.S. from Korea with his parents as a youth, is an evangelical Christian who was imprisoned by North Korea after a mission trip to that country.

The book is a mix of his prison story and the efforts to free him, and how it was all part of God’s plan. Almost every page recounts how God spoke to him and how God took care of him. It demonstrates a remarkable trust in God. Many, however, would call the story naïve and dishonest and Bae’s attribution of virtually everything to a continually meddling God “magical thinking.”

I prefer to withhold judgment. While I believe that God is perfectly capable of such intervention, I think it happens rarely. I believe God expects us to take as much control of our lives as possible, make adult decisions about ourselves and others and not depend on him/her for the daily living of our lives.

Ultimately Dependent on God
Judeo-Christianity teaches that we’re ultimately dependent on God for our existence and our ultimate fate, but not necessarily that God has a detailed plan for each of us and all we have to do is find out what that is and carry it out. That would impugn our freedom, in my opinion, and if God were continually intervening in our lives, he/she would deserve criticism for the bad things that happen as well as praise for the good.

The Bible is filled with references to God’s intervention in human affairs, of course, in both the Hebrew and Christian renditions, though Scripture scholars have pointed out that it happens in the Hebrew Bible less and less often when going from the oldest to the newest sections of the Hebrew canon.

And God intervened often in the lives of members of the early Christian church. According to the Acts of the Apostles, God knocked the persecuting Saul from his horse and converted him to a staunch ally, made the prison chains fall from Paul, Peter and Silas and brought death to a couple who cheated on their promise to contribute  to the early Christian community.

Google Image
And no God intervention is more powerful and complete than that expressed in the Christian belief that God became a human being in the person of Jesus.

But even Jesus wasn’t continually intervening in people’s lives. He worked miracles, according to the gospels, but over the presumed three-year period of his public ministry, not very often when you consider that he travelled continually and met hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. That’s presuming that all or most of his miracles are recorded in the gospels.

Jesus didn’t appear to make life easier for his disciples, didn’t punish his critics or bring harm to the many who ignored him. He didn’t “call down fire from heaven,” as requested by his disciples.

So if God intervenes rarely, what should our expectations be when we pray?

The writer of the Letter to the Ephesians in the Christian Bible urges us to “…pray at every opportunity in the Spirit…that speech may be given to me to open my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains, so that I may have the courage to speak as I must.”

So the writer of Ephesians, whom Scripture scholars say is likely someone other than Paul, asks for inspiration, boldness and courage, not a magic bullet.

Sister Mary Kay Oosdyke, who teaches theology at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI, points out that many of us have prayed for God’s intervention to relieve illnesses, improve the weather, find a suitable mate, win a football game.

Not Sure How God Works
But, she writes, “In time we all face the question of whether we really believe our prayer changes things. We don’t doubt God; we are just not sure how God works with us in our world.”

I like what God is reported to have said to Solomon in the Hebrew Bible when God invited the new king to ask for something.

Solomon asked for wisdom and knowledge and, in The Message translation, God answered, “You didn’t grasp for money, wealth, fame, and the doom of your enemies; you didn’t even ask for long life. You asked for wisdom and knowledge…. Because of this, you get what you asked for – wisdom and knowledge….” He threw in the “stuff” as a bonus.

And so we who search for God are left with uncertainty, but also with the urging of the Hebrew Bible, of Jesus who taught his disciples to pray, and that of ancient Christians to pray despite our doubts.

Magical thinking? No, that’s faith.








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Gospel of The Little Prince

Image
  Attention all those concerned only with “matters of great consequence:” Is it possible that you’ve become someone you didn’t want to be, having strayed far from the innocence and simplicity of childhood? That’s the main question asked in The Little Prince, which Netflix, the streaming video service, has added to its repertoire of movies and TV shows. Though not a big fan of animated flicks, I was a big fan of the book, The Little Prince, back in the 1970s when it became extremely popular in the U.S. It was first published in French and English in New York in 1943 as a novella by French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery , who disappeared while piloting a Free French Army plane the following year over the Mediterranean Sea. Nearly Two Million Copies “The novella is the fourth most-translated book in the world and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France,” says Wikipedia. “Translated into more than 250 language...
Read more

‘Spiritual but Not Religious,’ Revisited

Image
Google Image I’ve expressed several times in these blogs my skepticism about declarations by some of our contemporaries that they are “spiritual but not religious.” Much of the skepticism results from the false dichotomy this entails, as if the spiritual and religious are mutually exclusive. Spirituality, after all, is the whole point of being religious. With the exception of some forms of Buddhism, all the major religions aim to bring people closer to God, who is “spiritual.” St. Paul, among the earliest leaders of Christianity, wrote that he is imparting a teaching “not taught by human wisdom but taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit.” But Daniel Horan, Franciscan priest, theologian and author, wrote in a recent edition of the National Catholic Reporter: “What if our starting point in thinking about what it means to be a person in communion with God, oneself and the world was not reduced to external expressions of institutional belo...
Read more

Clinging to Archie Bunker's God

Image
Google Image Archie Bunker, the character masterfully played by the late Carroll O’Conner in the 1970s TV comedy “All in the Family,” had his own take on the traditional Christian doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible. “God don’t make no mistakes,” declared Archie. “That’s how he got to be God.” For those too young to remember Archie, who in 2005 was listed as number 1 on Bravo's 100 Greatest TV Characters, Wikipedia says Bunker was characterized by his bigotry towards “… blacks, Hispanics, "Commies," gays, hippies, Jews, Asians, Catholics, "women's libbers," and Polish-Americans….” Bunker was presented as a Christian, however, and “… often misquotes the Bible. He takes pride in being religious, although he rarely attends church services ….” An Anonymous Contributor Sister Mary Matilda, my eighth grade teacher, would accuse me of being uncharitable but I imagine that an anonymous contributor to a recent newspaper column is an “Archie Bunke...
Read more