MANNA 96 - How I stick with God
Written by Rabbi Lionel Blue Monday, 13 August 2007
I tried to answer the questions which arise from my own belief very simply in two recent radio talks, which I have here adapted for Manna. They are personal and experiential, not theological.
There has been a lot of religion around lately what with Passover and Pentecost, or sects badmouthing each other, or blowing each other to kingdom come as in the Middle East, or interesting arguments between believers and non-believers with indecisive results. Some youngsters at Passover asked me how I came to join such a bizarre bandwagon. Their honest question deserves an honest answer, so here goes.
As a youngster I never liked religion much, I preferred Marxist revolution because my share of the world’s lolly was not large enough, which did not seem fair. Politics also attracted me at that time because sexual gratification, which was not permitted then, could be sublimated into power drives, which were.
But one day I left a marching procession extolling Stalin and his East European Mafia and never rejoined it. The gulags were known. So such shouting seemed obscene. I watched ‘scientific’ professors twisting themselves into corkscrews to avoid seeing the obvious. Parted from my comrades I was so desperate to be loved by anybody, anywhere, anyhow, I wondered if a spiritual flirtation with the cosmos could substitute for the real thing in bed. But I tried to believe too much too quickly and retched it all up. In our cheerless college chapel I wondered what sort of universe I was in.
It seemed a pointless one from my viewpoint. Species waxed and waned eating each other up alive. Stars blew up and new stars formed out of their detritus and cycles of creation and destruction led nowhere. Later Moon and Mars landings did not excite me, despite the hype. They were just more rocks.
And yet this chilling cosmic dullness was shot through by flashes of transcendence that I also experienced. I list them as they appeared to me in 1950: The compassion in Rembrandt’s pictures of decaying oldies. The hopes of Anne Frank. The people who stood up for me in crowded carriages when I was ill. Victor Gollancz, a Jew struggling for the rights of Palestinian refugees after their military defeat. My mother giving up her only winter coat to the cleaning woman. How did these fit in with the rocks? What was their origin, and their relation to dead debris whirling around in space?
These flashes started to coalesce, in a Quaker meeting, into a spiritual dimension, which eventually found an inner voice that spoke in me. I tested it out. It did not lead me into cloud cuckoo land but towards generosity, kindness and self-knowledge. If your religion does the same for you, you are on the right road. ‘And that is why I became a rabbi’ I told the youngsters. For non-sensible realities, you need self knowledge because you will have to use your imagination and you must be careful that you do not trick yourself.
‘No I’ve never experienced miracles – only wonders,’ I said, forestalling questions. ‘What is the difference?’ they asked. ‘Our rabbi’s prayers are so powerful’ his followers asserted. ‘He even persuades God to do his will.’ Well my prayers are occasionally so powerful that they even persuade me to do God’s will. I went into religion because I was in need. I stick with it because it works.
Here is how it works. Today I woke up twitchy what with a war with no foreseeable end, global warming which sounds cosy like an electric blanket but could cover our earth in a deep freeze with mammoths, the discovery of strange new earthlike planets, ever suffering refugees and my personal ageing problem of how to plan ahead when the goal posts shift ever faster and in only one direction.
But it is my BBC morning and my immediate concern is not the cosmos but just the courage to get up. So I bellow in bed my old friend Sidney Carter’s hymn:‘As I travel through the bad and good,Keep me travelling the way I should. And where I see no way to go,You’ll be showing me the way I know.’
Then I say, ‘My dear Friend, my Whomsoever Whatsoever, stay with me. Stick around please.’ No blinding light follows, which being epileptic I would not appreciate, but my attention turns from my own ego to the needs of my listeners. So, spiritually, I’m back on course.
But when I am back home from the BBC, I must complete the course with an act of kindness to people worse off than me because they are God’s stand-ins, whether by e-mail, telephony or bringing gifts to a charity shop.
And then it is time to treat myself. So should you because you cannot love your neighbour unless you love yourself. It says so in the Bible. Perhaps you will find a first hand Rembrandt in the charity shop. Perhaps in the charity shop you will sing ‘God loves a cheerful giver, so give him all you’ve got’ and your goodness will glow like a holiday tan. Do not worry if your good deed is small. The reward of a good deed, say the rabbis, can be a bigger and better good deed . And if all this sounds too sweet, sentimental even, like a romance or love story, well that is just what religion is.
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