The Bible is a love story. It tells us how very much we are loved by God – loved, no matter what. My life has been a love story as well. God’s love and grace have been with me through each stage of life – in the good times and the bad times, when I was at peace and joyful, and when I felt lost in the universe. Many times I had my back against the wall and felt that there was no way out. But God always made a window in that wall and pulled me through.
My life has been filled with love and forgiveness; it has been a series of recurring cycles of commitment, success, failure and redemption. Through it all, through every cycle, every up and down, there has been a single thread – a thread of covenant – that has been woven through my own story. It is a covenant between God and me – one that I have broken many times; but one in which God has never abandoned me. Rather, God has always pursued me and loved me. I have felt the love experienced by the Israelites, by David, by the prodigal son, by Mary Magdalene, by Peter. I am thankful and pray that, day-by-day, I may follow my love, my God with a loving and open heart.
One of my favorite things is to pull down our family albums – all 37 of them – and go through each book slowly and with love. These albums tell the story of my life from infancy through the present. There are really many stories in these books: the story of Wanda, my soul mate, best friend and wife; the stories of Danny, David, Julie and Meg, our children, of Mike and William, our sons-in-law, of Duncan, Harrison, Grayson, Will and Elena, our grandkids. But for me, these books represent my Sacred Story. They, like the Bible, tell a story that speaks of love and grace.
The Bible contains many interwoven allegories and metaphors to tell us that we are loved, that God’s grace is ours for the taking, that God’s promise (his covenant) will never be broken. A parent speaks to a child in metaphors that the child’s mind can comprehend. These metaphors get adjusted from the most simple when the child is an infant, to real life ‘that’s how it really is’ facts when the child is an adult. The parent always speaks truth but that truth is presented in a language that, given the intellectual and social development of the child, he or she is capable of grasping. So too is it with the Bible.
I think that God speaks to humanity through his revelation in a similar way that a parent speaks to and teaches a child. God uses allegories and metaphors, and reveals them through the lens of a particular historical moment in humanity’s intellectual development; and, further, through the prism of a given culture, which is also in progressive stages of intellectual development.
Thus the stories of Creation, Adam and Eve or Abraham, for example: did God really make the world in six days; did our first parents really blow it for all of us and bring death, suffering and pain into our lives by eating an apple, or is God telling us about commitment and faithfulness through an allegory, and at a particular time in human development (3,000 to 5,000 years ago)? Did Abraham really almost murder his beloved son to please God or is God, again, making a point about commitment and faithfulness, i.e., covenant, with an allegory that a culture that was surrounded by pagan sacrifice of first born sons to Baal could mentally grasp?
This does not discount that God revealed truth and inspired the writers whom he used as vehicles for recording that truth. But it tells us that God continues to reveal the same truth in progressive stages of history and culture, when humanity’s intellectual development reaches another level of comprehension. That truth is that we are loved. That truth is our collective Sacred Story.
If archeologists find some physical proof that Moses really didn’t part the Red Sea, but that such a thick fog settled over the beach between the Israelites and Pharaoh’s army that Moses and his people were able to escape, that doesn’t diminish the truth that God did indeed bring the Israelite’s out of bondage. It doesn’t diminish my truth that God has brought me out of bondage over and over and over again.
And if we find out some day that Jesus didn’t magically multiply a few loaves of bread and fishes to feed a multitude of people, but that his goodness and love inspired people in the crowd to generously share the food that they were hoarding, it in no way diminishes who Jesus is and what his redemptive mission on earth was all about – and how each of us is called to live out our own individual Sacred Story.
Like everyone else, my story was meant to be. Logically, I don’t see it. There are so many, many people, so many stories, existing today in the present row of the matrix called, ‘alive now, at this instant, snapshot, in time.’ And each column in this endless matrix goes back to somewhere in forever, and will go forward to somewhere in eternity.
And so many people are, have been, and will be limited in options, choices, potential. So many people have done awful things. So many, many, many stories: sometimes it’s like thousands of ants. Across, up and down time. How could each and every one, each story, have been meant to be? How can each and every one be personally known and loved and called by name by God? How can so many have dropped by the wayside, through chance or choice, through environment or genetics?
Logically, I don’t buy it; yet intuitively, I know it’s true. Somewhere in the big picture it all fits together. There is free will, and at the same time there are overpowering conditions that wipe out true freedom to choose good over evil, love over hate. But God takes it all into account and makes the necessary adjustments. I’m not sure how it works, but Jesus tried to explain in the parable of the prodigal son. And I have been the prodigal son. I have lived it over and over again, as part of my Sacred Story.
God loves unconditionally to the point where someone with less capacity than God for love can never really understand. Looking through the eyes of a son or daughter of God, it really is unfair — grossly unfair. How can the bad son in the story be loved as much as the good son is loved? Where’s the justice? How can the sinner be embraced by God and have a seat at the same table as the saint? Where’s the justice?
God’s justice is not our justice. We can only see the kindergarten classroom where the tower of blocks has been knocked down, and the child who worked so hard to build it experiences the loss of ‘everything.’ Our vision cannot see past, present and future all existing together — that is God’s vision, it is his kingdom.
So, like everyone else, my Sacred Story was meant to be. My choices have been skewed by circumstances beyond my control, but God adjusts. God just asks us to keep plugging along and not give up on trying to be what Jesus called us, all of us, to be — 100% selflessly in love with God and with each other.
For me the word ‘God’ is abstract. I intuitively know that there is a central, knowing, loving personal source of all creation. I use the word ‘God’ but the concept goes beyond language, beyond culture and religion. Carole King wrote a song, Only Love is Real, Everything Else an Illusion. Saint John preached that God is Love. So ‘God’ and ‘Love’ have the same meaning. Whether we call it ‘The Force’, ‘The Tao’, ‘God’, ‘Nature’, ‘Love’, it’s the same essence. And whether we believe that it knows us intellectually with a mind that uses language and constructs like the human mind, or that it knows us in some other way that is beyond the limits of our comprehension – it still knows and loves each and every one of us.
In my Sacred Story, I have faith that I’m here to be what I am: a dad, a husband, a grandfather, and a deacon. I’m here to love, and I really do love. I’m not 100% present to others like I wish I were. I have hurt others, others who depended on me. I really and truly am sorry for the people I have wounded. And yet, I think I have grown as a person, as a follower of Jesus, and that, as my story unfolds, I will continue to grow and continue to fall big time. But with the love and grace that has been given me, I will keep trying to love God and others with my whole heart. God adjusts.
And it is the same for all of us, I think, within the framework of our own limitations – as long as we don’t give up. I want to believe that ultimately God makes things right and everyone experiences redemption and conversion to God’s love, and is made whole with God. I’m not sure how God balances it out, but I don’t really need to be sure. That’s for God to handle. I just need to keep trying my best to be who I am. I am here to love. God is love. Love is a verb; love is a noun. I am here to be in active motion; to journey towards a timeless constant, the constant that I am comfortable to label ‘God’. I am here to live out my Sacred Story.
