God is greater than...an Easter meditation

 

An Easter meditation.  If you wish to read it.

 

God is greater than religion;

Faith is greater than dogma.

     Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

 

God is greater than…

 

There is a hole in the heart that is wide as the sky.  Nothing fills it.  Nothing touches it.  Nothing takes it away.  It cannot be cured, this search for the ultimate in life.

 

It’s not that people do not struggle mightily to grasp it as life goes by.  On the contrary.  Like children on a carousel, adults old enough and smart enough to know better, reach for false stars and watch them all turn to mist on their fingertips.  They stretch themselves to the limits of their strength to grab the gold ring of life’s happiness as they go from one attempt to another, always disappointed by the last one.

 

They go into debt they can’t handle.  They take risks that fail.  They succumb to the failures of them all and sink back into the anodynes of life.  They substitute drink or drugs or work to anesthetize the pain of it.  Or sometimes, a kind of magic they call “religion.”

The problem is that there is a thin line between magic and what some people call religion.  Magic is what we ourselves can perform on command.  Religion has to do with what we believe about creation, its origins, its purpose, its end.  People often mix the two.

Magic makes God “a cosmic bellboy,” as the American clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick put it.  God the magician runs the world by pulling strings from behind a hidden screen.  If we ask in the right way.  In the right language.  With the right prayer.  In the right liturgy.  Then we get what we want.  Unless God is being surly that day for some reason that we cannot imagine.

So, as a result, we go through life praying for things rather than for God’s grace either to bear our burdens or to reshape our worlds ourselves.

We call faith the notion that religion is a set of ideas designed to get us to heaven.  No questions asked.

The effect of that kind of thinking is worrisome.  It keeps us spiritual children all of our lives.  It means that we may think we know a lot about God but ourselves never really know God at all.

It means that the great hole in our hearts will never be filled at all.

And that’s why this insight from the great rabbi Joshua Abraham Heschel is so important.  Indeed, God is greater than religion.  Faith is greater than dogma.

It is our search for the God who is searching for us that is what life and religion and faith must really be about.  Whatever we do, we must not be fooled by anything less parading as religion, posturing as faith. 

Sister Joan Chittister,  Benedictine  Sisters of Eire.