Finding our Middle – 40 Days with Anna

Day 35 – Monday in Holy Week

To Read:

Anna searched for Mister God and her desire was for a better understanding of him.  Anna’s search for Mister God was serious but gay, earnest but light-hearted, reverent but impudent, and single-minded and multi-tracked.  That one and two made three was for Anna a sign that God existed.  Not that she doubted God’s existence for a moment, but it was for some time a sign that he did exist.  

By the same token a bus or a flower was also a sign that he existed.  How she came by this vision of the pearl of great price I do not know.  Certainly it was with her before I met her.  It was just my luck that I happened to be with her when she was doing her ‘working out’.  To listen to her was exhilarating, like flying on one’s own;  to watch her was to be startled into seeing.  Evidence for Mister God?  Why, there was nowhere you could look where there wasn’t evidence for Mister God;  it was everywhere.  Everything was evidence of Mister God and it was at this point that things tended to get out of hand.

The evidence could be arranged in too many ways.  People who accepted one sort of arrangement were called by one particular name.  Arrange the evidence in a new way and you were called by a different name.  Anna reckoned that the number of possible arrangements of the available evidence might easily run into ‘squillions’ of names.  The problem was further complicated by the fact of synagogues, mosques, temples, churches, and all the other different places of worship, and scientific laboratories were not excluded from the list. 

By any reasonable standards of thinking and behaviour nobody could, with their hand on their heart, honestly say that these other people were not worshipping and loving God, even if they did call him by some other name like

‘Truth’.  She could not and would not say that Ali’s God was a lesser kind of God than the Mister God that she knew so well, nor was she able to say that her Mister God was greater or more important than Kathie’s God.  It didn’t make sense to talk about different Gods;  that kind of talk inevitably leads to madness.  No, for Anna it was all or nothing, there could be only one Mister God.  This being so, then the different places of worship, the different kinds of names given to those worshippers, the different kinds of ritual performed by these worshippers could be due to one thing, and to one thing only, the different arrangements of the evidence for Mister God.

To Reflect:

Evidence for Mister God?  Why, there was nowhere you could look where there wasn’t evidence for Mister God;  it was everywhere.  Everything was evidence of Mister God and it was at this point that things tended to get out of hand…..

You have to love Fynn.  Trying very hard to explain Anna’s view that you can’t put Mister God in a box, as that would mean you made Mister God smaller, he then wished Mister God could be put in a box as that would stop things getting out of hand and we end up losing control of Mister God….   It seems he and Job have much in common!

If Mister God is not everywhere.  If there is anywhere where God’s fingerprints are not found.  If there is any part of the creation, be it sentient or not, that does not contain some of the DNA of Mister God.  Then Mister God is a fraud and, having built a God shaped box, we have made an idol of our desires as surely as if we worshipped one of Isaiah’s blocks of wood. (Isaiah 44v18-20)

I like Anna’s idea that when a faithful person calls Mister God by a different name or worshipped in a different way it was just different arrangements of the evidence for Mister God.  This reminds me of the story of Emeth the Calormen at the end of The Last Battle.  A faithful worshipper of Tash he finds himself in Aslan’s own land expecting to be eaten but no…

Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him.  Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him.  But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome.  But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash.  He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me.

‘All the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me.’  

It sounds so simple really does it not?  Anna and CS Lewis, Mohandas Gandhi and Mother Theresa of Calcutta, and in our own parish of Playford Thomas Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano, lived out this truth.  When we find Mister God in our middle, and go on to find Mister God in the middle of everything, then we have to own up that there is nowhere and no one who does not have Mister God in their middle.  Sadly, and this is one of the reasons why Anna is occasionally tear filled and ‘full-up’, not everyone can see this.

The One Who Loves us Best wants to be known and loved by everyone and uses squillions of ways of making that love manifest but we, in our fear and a futile quest to control eternity are blind, sometimes wilfully, to that love and then everyone gets littler.

 

Please Note:  These reflections are also published on my blog: suffolkvicarhomes.com on Bluesky as @suffolkvicar.bsky.social, and on my public Facebook page  Suffolk Vicar – Rev Andrew Dotchin.  If you would like them as a daily email please send a request to revdotchin@gmail.com

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