I worry when somebody tells me the Bible is infallible and that people who don’t understand this are not included in “God’s plan.” Without curiosity or contention, the brain becomes a rusty tool. The heart falls into a pattern of hollowness. Every one of the big faiths asserts, in one way or another, that we are God’s partners. So why devolve into robots when the point of being a person is to discern, grow, create, and enjoy a few things before our brief time on Earth has come and gone?
I’m not surprised that many children and adults are looking for spiritual breakthroughs more than they are seeking liturgical formulas. Who wouldn’t prefer a song to a libretto? A prayer book is a guide, and it has sanctity. But every faith, East and West, basically asserts that when we are born, we acquire a soul, and when we die, the soul returns to its creator. Families and circumstances imprint a theology upon children; heaven is dealing directly in souls. The birth canal is not lined with religious billboards. The cemetery, though it has religious symbols carved into markers, is dug into the neutral earth even as mortality is completely unaffected by doctrine, status, or vanities. Yes, a lot of people want God more than they desire formulas; after centuries of religious conflict and now, as they endure a twenty-first century global war by and on terrorism, they’d just like to sit by the still waters and savor the spirit.
Here’s an irony: Vivid concepts of inclusion and realism lie quite openly in the old and later scrolls. These lyrical scrolls were scrawled by men and women who heard God, each in their own way and in the context of what they experienced or suffered. Some survived Egyptian bondage, others endured Babylonian exile, Roman oppression, Spanish inquisitions, and just wanted to make sense of the world. The writers included the early Christians who saw more insight in healing wounds than in hawking dietary laws. More often than not, they were responding to tyranny and making sense out of chaos. They were trying to defeat brutality with the power of ideas. These concepts are right there, in between the lines of tribalism and territoriality that sometimes skew the canonized texts.
These spiritual yearnings float above the thunder and lightning of the big miracles, the screaming mountains, the parting waters, and the ground opening up to swallow conspirators and sinners. These yearnings are still there in the morning after the smoke clears, the skies quiet down, and Earth sighs with relief. These sweet little truths are larger than liturgies; they are the products not of supremacy but of life’s longing for itself.
Everybody is included in “God’s plan,” and there is no written contract. There is simply life and the reality that we are often hurt, lonely, insecure, and in need of someone else’s friendship and love. What we don’t need is judgment.
In 2013, Pope Francis, who does not fancy a lot of perks but sees magic in children, publicly wondered, “Who am I to judge?” He was referring to the love shared between homosexual human beings and he may have been inspired by something from the old scripture. Remember, the Bible is a library and it contains widely diverse views. In Leviticus it says that if a man lies with another man, they shall both be put to death. But Leviticus also archaically instructs us to bring young bullocks to a mountain and burn them in sacrifice, to the point where “the aroma pleases God’s nostrils.” The fundamentalists who are parsing human love aren’t out in the fields lighting fires and offering calves to satisfy God.
Pope Francis is well acquainted with this stuff in Leviticus, but he likely also knows a poignant love story that is found later in the Bible: The romance involving the future messianic King David and Jonathan—the sensitive and brave son of the melancholy King Saul. These two lads shared something beautiful and undeniable: It’s right there within the same books with all those antiquated statutes about bullocks, blood rites, and the banishment of lepers from the camp. David and Jonathan frolic in the fields and convey clear filial messages to one another. (It’s in the Book of Samuel, a premier biblical prophet.) “Your father knows about us,” David apprehensively says to Jonathan. “Wherever your soul goes, that’s where I go,” replies Jonathan.
Later, when Jonathan is killed in battle, David mourns with as stirring a message as any in the Psalms that he ultimately wrote and that has consoled Jews and Christians for millennia. Remembering the times they had wept together and kissed one another (it’s verified in the text), David moans: “I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.”
Who could read this and not know that a benevolent God does not discriminate between human loves?
They may not have told you in Hebrew school or during Sunday Bible-study classes, but David gets a full treatment in the scripture. He evolves from this youthful gay love affair into a mighty king and warrior who was also a shameless, even malicious womanizer. He played the harp and he played the field. He had multiple wives and concubines and, in one notorious instance, sent the husband of one of his lovers into a hopeless battle so that the poor man could be conveniently killed. He was plagued by critics and enemies, and some of his own children broke his heart in rebellion and insurgence. He was a person, albeit a prominent one. But he was a person like you and me—flawed, conflicted, driven by both demons and passions.
Why does the tradition embrace this kind of man and why does Christianity anoint him as the ancestor of Jesus? Because he was real—just as life is so glaringly real. The same intuitive and passionate man who wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” is also the despicable old cad who has to have a young maiden brought to lie with him because he couldn’t keep himself warm.
If this seems inexplicable, it is because life itself is inexplicable. It is never “all good” or “all bad.” It is cancer to career to isolation to laughter. It is not the “all hell” or “all paradise” being poorly vended by the faiths today. It is nuanced, painful, lyrical, and it moves from defeat to compromise to a victory and then to a mistake and then a stroke of insight that amounts to bittersweet wisdom. I’ve seen such moments more often in a hospital room, in the cemetery, or under a wedding canopy than in a synagogue. I’ve heard people suddenly, gutturally, truly praying from their hearts more freely than when they were holding a prayer book and following a service outline.
The scripture was not written for angels; it was written for people. You can believe in it if you read between the lines and the edicts and the colorful miracles. You can believe in God, but you should not wait for God. Turn to God not to suddenly intervene and solve your problems—that’s the pretext of cults or religious coercion, and it puts dangerous people in charge of your spirit. Turn to God (however you define God) for the strength and resolve to face your challenges—it’s more of a sure thing. God is discovery; God is the result of your creativity and resolve. God is not some sort of divine bellhop.
Don’t read the scripture as a series of perfect letters. The Bible is like fine leather; the flaws in it reveal its true texture and quality. The writers and the characters struggled with a tantalizing combination of truths and fears and myths and uncertainties, and they were trying to make sense of both the harshness of life and the certitude of death. In other words, they were like you and me—in our balancing act, we do best as spiritual pragmatists. We balance faith with the facts. When we are wrestling with something, we go to the library or to the web and find the right text—grateful these humanly created sources are accessible.
WHEN I WAS STILL a child, my father told me a story about his experiences as a soldier during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948–49. My father was not even twenty years old, an infantry sergeant, who found himself one night around a campfire with three other sentries.
Immediately upon declaring its independence, the new state of Israel had been invaded by several neighboring Arab countries. A significant number of its fighters were emaciated Holocaust survivors who had somehow managed to gain access to the land. My father was one of the several thousand whose families had been born in what was the British mandate of Palestine.
The situation for Israel was decidedly