The ragtop was down, the radio played “Drift Away,” and the sky was baby blue over the raked edge of my windshield, but a sand-in-my-shoe comment I’d seen a few hours before kept me from singing backup for Dobie Gray. “This world is too big for one god.” That’s what it said under “Religious Views” on the Facebook page in my head.
I know the man who said that, though not well. I wish he had said something I could agree with, like “God is too big for any one religion” (not a problem unless you think religion is for boxing God in rather than for listening to what He says).
Still, I find myself drawn to the “big world, small god” comment. Its author and I graduated within a year of each other from the same Catholic high school in Hawaii where Brother Stanich was a master of Socratic dialog, and Brother Maloney taught Latin while suffering excuses like “Bruddah! I cannot translate da kine! I got scoliosis!”
With that in common, I’m in no position to tell Facebook Guy that my karma ran over his dogma. But it’s hard to keep from asking whether he lingered too long in the cul-de-sac shared by professional throat-clearers who make a living from the premise that all religions are more or less equal. However he came by that “big planet, small god” point of view, it must be challenged, and there’s no better place to start than with astronomy: Earth is not big when compared to other worlds. Many things about Earth are special, but by galactic standards, our planet checks in with average mass at best. On a beach patrolled by giants like Jupiter and Saturn, Earth would get sand kicked in its face. If this world really were bigger than any one god, then Mr. Facebook Philosopher would only have transposed the question about whether God could make a rock heavier than He could lift into a new key, and there’s no harmonic convergence or sense there, either.
Beyond the problem of asserting nonsense on stilts, “small gods” are pretenders to the throne, because what is small could conceivably be bigger, and capital-g God (the Father) has no growing to do.
Yet logic only goes so far. While Elijah recognized the voice of God in a tiny whispering sound (1 Kings 19:12), the same God spoke in a basso profundo from a cloud at the Transfiguration (Mk 9:7). As David and Goliath could attest, questions of degree are often more important than questions of size.
In contexts like this, philosophy and theology dance with each other, and not in the forced or cringe-making way that attracts condescending observers like crows to shiny objects. Think of the tango in “Scent of a Woman,” or the ballet that shorebirds do with waves. With no unrealized potential to grow into – even in Mary’s womb before He was born, Jesus was fully rather than “potentially” human — God cannot be inert. On the contrary, wrote John the Evangelist, God is love, and the essence of love is the act of self-giving. Love would have to be that way, wouldn’t it, springing as it does from the template laid down by a triune God? Some beach glass, then: who God is and what God does are inseparable, and neither part of that leaves any room for improvement.
Disciples of John the Baptist glimpsed God’s perfect unity when they came (in Mt 11:2-5) to ask Jesus if He was the “expected one.” Jesus did not answer their question with another question, or touch a finger to his nose as though affirming their guess in a game of charades. Instead, He said, “Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the good news preached to them.”
What John’s disciples got from Jesus, in other words, was the unabridged version of “By their fruits, you shall know them.” Jesus had already taught His own disciples to pray that the Father’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” He had worked miracles, explained forgiveness, turned fishermen into “fishers of men,” and encouraged them to learn trust from the lilies of the field.
All of that backs my claim that small gods end up in fantasy novels. Large gods inspire multi-volume love stories. And when the glee club at the U.S. Naval Academy breaks into a stirring rendition of “Eternal father, strong to save,” it’s not Poseidon or Neptune who receives the prayer offered by their harmonizing voices.
Where would the assertion about “small gods” that got to me have come from? It bobs like a marker buoy over the crab trap of confusion, and my guess is that the man who dropped it into the wide water suffers from misplaced tolerance. David Mills recently described a related pitfall while explaining how “spiritual” sounds better to some audiences than “religious” does, and why that is a mistake:
“The man wasting away from pancreatic cancer will get no help nor comfort from the ‘spiritual,’ which will seem a lot less friendly and comforting when he feels pain morphine won’t suppress,” wrote Mills. “He has no one to beg for help, no one to ask for comfort, no one to be with him, no one to meet when he crosses from this world to the next. He wants what religion promises. And he is right to do so.”
There is more going on in that paragraph than I can unpack while gliding over the wave tops of Christian thought, so let me close by noting that musicians often write about the same search for security (see, for example, King David’s work in Psalm 23). Nowadays, the search colors everything from “Stand by Me” to “Landslide,” but it’s strongest in gospel music. Here, for example, is part of the lyric from a Patty Griffin song: “Calling the sheep in for the evening / There’s a voice, calls above the howling wind / It says “Come rest beside my little fire; we’ll ride out the storm that’s coming in.”
That invitation is something an old priest might also have sung, though he wouldn’t sound so much like an angel playing guitar. But as the Capuchin friar I’m thinking of told an anguished writer, “True belief is a decision. It’s also a gift. Accept the gift, and you will make the decision.”
