Daisies Pushing Through

Today is 9/11. The first 9/11 I have been in full-time ministry for quite some time.

The original 9/11 was a bit of a problem for me. See, I was a young Turk, second pastoral charge, South Shore Suburban Montreal, meteoric career path, doing graduate studies, and I had a lot of answers.

I also had a parishioner, who worked in the Twin Towers, who had married the love of her life that summer. A Jewish guy from New York who seemed really cool and they seemed perfect together.

They died. Horrifically. Their death certificates said they were murdered. I sat with the family for weeks while they waited for news. More weeks while they confronted the inevitable. Then we set down to plan the largest funeral of my life.

Two years before this the worst funeral I did was for a young teenager, whose friends had stolen his clothes while he was in the river swimming with them. He was too embarrassed to get out, and they watched him drown.

9/11 was when I stopped believing in God.

9/11 was when I became an A/Theist

I gave up graduate school. I left Quebec. I left my wife. I left the church. Eventually.

Nothing was ever the same after that because I knew I was a fraud. I was a fraud because I told people that God loved them, that God had a plan, that History unfolded according to some predetermined but ultimately glorious outcome.

That outcome, it turns out, is hatred and death.

And God? God does nothing.

I am a master theologian. I studied ethics with Gregory Baum, Systematics with Doug Hall, Reformation History with Ed Furcha. If I had of written my Theses I would have ended up with five university degrees in Systematic Theology and Religious Studies instead of the three I have now.

And in one fell swoop, thousands of years of the greatest thought on the nature and essence of God meant nothing to me. My experience. My feelings. My mind told me there was no old man in the clouds who could make things better. If there was, he would.

18 years later and I am back in the pulpit.

And I believe in God.

And I am an Athiest.

But it took me a long time, a lot of reading, and a lot of feeling to put Humpty back together again.

Atheism got a lot of press for a while with the Christopher Hutchins of the world, and then the Greta Vosper debacle in the United Church of Canada. I read all that too.

I know that most people should have looked this up before if they follow any of this stuff - but Atheism does not mean "does not believe in God" it means "against theism"

And theism is a belief in the existence of one God, as the creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.

Which is nonsense. There is no old man in the sky deciding who lives and dies. That idea is just untenable. And causes nothing but problems. For example, if we pray hard enough to our god, then he will listen and vanquish our enemies. Or I am cured of my cancer because God loves me. But Billy over there dies from the same surgery because of... what? God hates him?

We are a people of stories - that is what defines us - and throughout history, we have told stories where God is on our side, because it makes us feel better, and because we wanted something.

We created God in our image because it was the best that we could do. But we have had thousands of years of history and development and thought and grace and love and hate and it should have taught us how to move past this.

To me God is the collective spirit of Good in the universe, perhaps drawn from the living organic creatures in the same way we name Gaia the collective spirit of or energy from the planet.

People said of Greta Vosper, how can an atheist remain a minister. Well, the simple answer is that theism is a small part of our understanding of what God is or could be, and not subscribing to theism does not mean that one does not subscribe to the idea of divinity, of God(s), of the spiritual, or the magical.

So I am back in full time because, I guess, the thing of it is, I still believe in the idea of goodness and that we need to actively work at being good, helping each other to love, and spreading the message of hope.

I have a social media presence. I just need to turn on my computer to feel bad about the world. But we still have a role to play by being followers of Jesus, who basically wanted us to enjoy life and love abundantly.

That is what 9/11 did to me. It made me into the person Jesus would have loved to drink with.