God is so good. Right when I'm at the breaking point, He reels me back in. I read this today and I started laughing. I love those every once in a whiles when I realize someone else has been in the same crazy place.
"By this logic, we can't view ourselves as interpreters of truth or members of a pilgrim species learning their way through life. We are instead holders of absolute truth, possessors of the saving knowledge of God who hold to copies of scriptures even though we aren't inclined to read them too closely. We feel most in line with the faith when we are most afraid. We view as a threat those voices that don't easily coincide with what we think we have to believe to be saved. They aren't safe voices. Music, films, and literature that don't fit our categories might cause us to lose whatever hold we still have on our religion. It's as if old Nobodaddy is just waiting for us to slip up- by way of a wayward imagination, an unsafe thought.
To keep it all simple and safe, we often become selective fundamentalists. We know where to go to have our prejudices explained as just and sensible, our convictions strengthened, our group or political party reaffirmed. We process whatever already fits the grid that is hardwired in our heads. It's difficult for anything else to get through. We're easily offended. Maybe we're looking to feel offended, which can make us feel better about ourselves. Felling offended summons a sense of being in the right, a certain strength, a kind of power, an espresso shot of righteous indignation.
...The God tradition calls Immanuel is both with us and for us. The God in whom love and justice meet, the God whose love radically exceeds whatever low definitions we settle for when we think we're loving God, is the God who is most present among us when we're having a go at that complicated practice of loving one another well."
David Dark, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything
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