Category: God

Blessings

by pearlsofpauline, posted in Blessings, God

Dear God,

I am struggling with the concept of blessings. The word “blessings” is being tossed around like confetti, but I’m not comfortable with it.

First of all, if blessings exist, are they from you or the universe you created?

Second, if I am blessed, are others not blessed? And how do they feel if I talk about my many blessings? Third, if my children and grandchildren are a blessing, is Parkinson’s a curse?

And fourth, if blessings are from you, what makes us feel we can give them to others?  Do we have that much power?

I know for many of us, “Bless you” is just an expression, but I do wonder, especially when it seems to me that some of us are just lucky – lucky, for example, that we were born into a family where there was enough money for education and a culture around us that values it; lucky that we are good at sports; lucky  that we have high emotional intelligence and people like us.

Mette Ivie Harrison says:  “… when someone escapes a terrible car accident without a scratch, I am more likely to chalk this up to luck than I am to say that it was the hand of God. This does not mean that I would not be grateful if I survived an accident, only that I wouldn’t ascribe it to God’s choice to save me over the millions of other people who die in car accidents.

“Too many good people face terrible things for me to blithely say that I was blessed and they were not. Too many innocents are killed and too many wicked people spared for me to believe that God chooses the outcome of every event. I cannot accept that everything has a reason on this level. To insist that God oversees and approves all tragedies because He has a “plan” for all that pain seems to me to admit to a sadistic kind of father. I can’t look at the pain and suffering of those next to me and feel certain that they are “meant” to suffer and I am not. We are all meant to see each other’s needs and to help, regardless of either luck or blessing.” (“Mormon in progress,” “Huffpost” 6-11-17)

David Rokeach’s interpretation of a blessing makes sense to me: “The blessings we offer are indeed powerful but they are not magical. On our own, we do not have the power to cause that which we yearn for nor do we have the power to compel God by the force of our invocation (despite stories in both the Bible and Rabbinic sources of individuals who are seen as having such capacities). No, like our other prayers, blessings are aspirational; we express in word and gesture our deepest yearnings. A blessing is an expression of hope.” (Gates of Repentance New York: CCAR, 1978, pp. 13-14)

I believe in the power of prayer, and have felt my friends praying for me. And I feel that on occasion, you respond. And when you do, I think of that as a miracle (an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs), not a blessing (your favor and protection). And it is not because of me that it happens, but those who prayed for me. I did nothing to deserve it.

I’m liking the idea that a spoken blessing is “an expression of hope,” not a magical pronouncement, and that my good fortune is due to luck, but the prayers said for me may have gotten your attention.

So from now on, when someone says they are blessed, I will let it go. Perhaps they haven’t really thought about how it sounds to someone less-fortunate.  Or maybe they see things differently. And that is their right.

Thanks, God, for listening.

Pauline

Mother Nature — Who Is She, Really?

by pearlsofpauline, posted in Coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19, Death, God, Mother Nature, Nature

I HAVE SPENT A LOT OF TIME THINKING ABOUT MOTHER NATURE

I have spent a lot of time thinking about Mother Nature, especially lately, and wondering about the relationship between God and Nature. I’ve never blamed God for bad things, even when I had breast cancer. In fact, when I attended a support group and found out it was called Why Me? I thought, “Why not me?”

This COVID-19 pandemic gives one pause and makes me want to understand how the world works when one believes in a caring God.

Coronavirus Resource Center - Harvard Health
coronavirus

In his May 19th Opinion piece in The New York Times, Tom Friedman describes Mother Nature as “just chemistry, biology and physics… Mother Nature is not only all powerful, she’s also unfeeling. Unlike that merciful God that most humans worship, Mother Nature doesn’t keep score. She can inflict her virus on your grandmother on Monday and blow down your house with a tornado on Wednesday and come back on Friday and flood your basement. She can hit you in the spring, give you a warm hug in summer and hammer you in the fall.“As such, telling her that you’re fed up with being locked down — that it’s enough already! — doesn’t actually register with her.”

I recently listened to a sermon by an Episcopal priest in which the priest, in discussing the Trinity, compared God the Father to Mother Nature. Well, I can’t buy that. No, I believe in a God who created us and Mother Nature. I believe God cares, that telling God you’re fed up does register, and that helps me accept the current situation and turn to God for solace, even as the world is running amok.

C.S. Lewis, the British writer and lay theologian, in his 1948 essay entitled “On Living in an Atomic Age,” put it this way: “What, then, is Nature, and how do we come to be imprisoned in a system so alien to us? Oddly enough, the question becomes much less sinister the moment one realizes that Nature is not all. Mistaken for our mother, she is terrifying and even abominable. But if she is only our sister – if she and we have a common Creator – if she is our sparring partner – then the situation is quite tolerable.”

Of course, Lewis is talking hypothetically about the atomic bomb; we are living with a virus that is actually killing people all over the world by the thousands. So the situation is not “quite tolerable” for the many who are suffering and those who love them.

But still, if we listen to Lewis’s words and substitute COVID-19 for the atomic bomb, our situation can be seen in a new light: “Do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb (COVID-19) was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways… It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

“This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb (COVID-19), let that bomb (coronavirus) when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children… not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs (viruses). They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

C.S. Lewis on Pornography and Masturbation
C.S. Lewis

I am convinced that fear lowers your resistance. I’m also convinced that thinking and talking about bad things gives them power and contributes to that fear. I’m taking COVID-19 seriously. I’m wearing a face mask when it’s appropriate and I’m practicing social distancing. But I’m not going to let it dominate my mind. I’m going to continue to do “sensible and human things.”

And I hope and pray that you will, too.