breaking up with God...words to keep.

I have just finished reading Breaking up with God, a love story, by Sarah Sentilles, and now, I must write down my most favorite sentences, paragraphs, passages, words--words to keep, before the book goes into the return bin at the Carnegie in Oakland :)  Consider this my book review, and my treasure trove.

Sentilles, who graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree in literature and a master's of divinity, and from Harvard with a doctorate in theology, relays her professor of theology at Harvard, Gordon Kaufman's, perspective on God, through a quote taken from his book, In Face of Mystery.  The quote is by a Jewish philosopher named Martin Buber:

"God is the most heavy-laden of all human words.  None has become so soiled, so mutilated.  Just for this reason, I may not abandon it.  Generations...have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden.  [Humans] with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their fingermarks and their blood...But we may not give it up...We cannot cleanse the word 'God' and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care" (p116).

I feel this is a very eloquent and expansive view of God that speaks to human nature's imperfections and failures, its stubbornness and its ability to hate and to love so deeply, so resiliently, as to hope for greater good to preside over and heal even the evil humans have caused with their own hands.

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 And then:

"I imagined God in my studio, in the butterfly chair in the corner of my space reading passages chosen from the lost and buried holy texts to remind me I was participating in the ongoing work of creation.  Listen to this, God said.  'If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is in you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you' (p132).


"The ongoing work of creation," or, taking more responsibility onto our own shoulders for continuing the work of God, whatever he or she may be or not be, wherever in the cosmos this entity may reside, is noble work, indeed.  It is up to us to create, to pour forth what is inside us and let the light shine on it.  This is doing the work of God.  But even after this, our job is not done.  The work of God is ongoing.

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Next, Sentilles mentions the theologian Ludwig Feuerbach and his perspective, as gleaned from his book, The Essence of Christianity.


(The following, in quotations, are Sentille's words.)


Feuerbach argues that "Christianity has taken everything that is good about humanity and projected it onto God.  All of the good things that belong to us as a species--love, generosity, strength, beauty, justice--we've given to God.  God and humans have been mistakenly construed as opposites: God infinite, humans finite; God perfect, humans imperfect; God eternal, humans temporal; God almighty, humans weak; God holy, humans sinful.  The good news, however, at least according to Feuerbach, is that the situation can be easily remedied.  All we need to recognize is that the qualities we have ascribed to God actually belong to humanity.

In other words, Christianity has turned God into a kind of superhero capable of doing everything human beings can't do, a move that renders humans helpless, small, in need of rescue.  We enrich God, Feuerbach argues, but we impoverish the world."

Each time I read this, a slow smile creeps onto my face, so many words and feeling pulsing through me.  Yet when I open my mouth, all I can whisper is, Wow.  That is truly a novel concept, one that I have never really pondered, nor have I ever really heard anywhere, from anyone.  Have human beings as a whole ever, ever, collectively decided, come together and realized, allowed themselves to do something resembling admitting, that the world is in our own hands?  This isn't necessarily to say there is no God, but that we can, and just maybe, we must, be the ones to change the world.  Saying a prayer should not be thought of as action so much as reaching into the pot and getting your own hands dirty instead of waiting for God's all-encompassing hands to reach down from the heavens.  If there is a God or if there isn't, maybe it is our job not to pray that he will save us, not to pray that he will save our neighbors, but to be each other's heroes...to save each other.  What an incredible, empowering idea.  What a new way of looking at God.  Christians go so far as to say that we are all created in God's image, yet never so far as to consider that maybe that means the saving is up to you and me.

"We are the ones we have been waiting for" (p220-221).

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"Love one another."


"I walked away from Christianity and left behind the story I had been telling about my life, the story in which I needed God to feel right, seen, loved, safe, chosen.  Without that version of God, I had to write something new.

Words are world-making--they get inside our heads and shape the stories we tell about what is possible--for ourselves, for the earth, for all the beings we share the earth with.  God says, Let there be light, and there is light.  To make something beautiful--a painting, a novel, a sculpture, a meal, a play--is world-changing.  Look! I imagine these creations saying.  The whole world is a sanctuary.  Look!  We can make the world a place where everyone and everything can thrive."

Breaking up with God, a love story, by Sarah Sentilles,
New York: HarperOne, c2011.
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