On Earth as It Is in Stories

Dear Kate,

What does God want?

I know this is not a popular question, haven't heard even Christians asked it for I don't know how long, not even in church, but I am asking just to know why one would go through all the troubles to keep up a churchgoing lifestyle.  After all, it's a very expensive lifestyle, and nowhere close to being productive (if we even know what we are trying to produce at all).  Who can afford the time, the money, the attention, life itself, to listen to the same trite story again and again?  Why would you?

And this is probably my question: What is this same trite story we are trying to tell?  What is God up to when He was up on the cross?  What is He getting at, working on now?  To give ourselves a performance review is to give our Boss one too.

There is an easy way to answer the question - by asking a different one, as if it is the same: What do I get out of being religious?  WIIFM (What's in it for me)? a marketing tactic all salesman should know in crafting her campaign message.

"I want to go to heaven when I die." An old answer crude and trite, but to the point, makes things simple, clears the field of any unnecessary confusion, complication and contradiction, and, as a Christian, to "believe" is to subscribe to the fishy story, usually with utmost conviction when one goes belly up.

In the story my mom told, that's probably the man's motivation when he sought light at the end of his tunnel and - lucky him, finding Jesus, "going to heaven" after all.  A bit too convenient, wasn't it?  I am sure that too was his thinking, or else why refused for years to believe God would forgive him?  Belly up; brain down.  One would rather be stupid than sorry, especially when the choice wasn't even his to make.

Yesterday I said the point of the entire and entirely embarrassing Biblical drama, the heart of God's heart, is to reconcile the world to Himself.  Is this what you've learned in Sunday School?  Is this what you heard when you read your Bible from front to back, Creation to Consummation, with the bloody detours and bloodiest climax in between?  Were you told, to "believe" is to "have faith," to trust God would accomplish what he set out to complete, and that He has called Himself a people to join Him in His re-creation project, which, among other things, would mean to die the same death on the cross, to go through the dark tunnel of death and live in the light of Life, who, strange enough, is, yes, what the man saw: Jesus Himself?

We can say Amen to doctrines a thousand times with a straight, tearless face - nonchalant, a word you like to use.  An unfashionable churchgoing lifestyle must have its meaning to us fashionable people for us to keep it up, even as with a shrug. One can also refashion the trite story to make it a bit more triumphant, a bit more upbeat, appealing, more user-friendly, more marketable, but the core is there, from beginning to the end, how God wants His will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, to bring home what He loves.

So yes, the man's refashioned version of meeting Jesus at the end of his tunnel is probably baloney.  You can take a course in university to study and debunk near-death experience, any and all of them.  While you are at it, you can also stop reading story, any and all of them, altogether, including Greek mythology, such as how Heracles wrestled Death at Alcestis's grave and rescued her, or, as in the Disney animated version, how Hercules jumped into the River Styx to retrieve Megara's spirit: a god seeking to restore lost soul, our repeated telling of the same old childish story, fashioned in our own culture, a bit too conveniently and coincidentally, to articulate a rather sentimental, yet universal longing.

"Light at the end of the tunnel," a trite metaphor that never grows old: just listen to our pandemic talks.  But what light? What tunnel? Why even bother if we are doomed to decay and die?

What do we want, after all?

Yours, Alex