My god, the door knob.

In twelve step programs, I am invited to put my trust in “a higher power,” (God as I understand him/her/it.)  The point is that I have to give my will and eventually, my life over to something or someone outside my control.  This is so I will stop relying on self to control the uncontrollable – the circumstances in my life, the weather, other people’s reactions to me, the next urge to use.  In 12 step programs, you walk out a spiritual path with the end result of giving your life over and surrendering your will. 

This was all fine with me as I had been slowly becoming a Christian over the past 20 years, starting first with a deepening relationship with the God I found in the pages of the bible.  But I learned one day that the higher power in 12 steps could be the group or the group consciousness, or, what really got me thinking, a doorknob.  It still works because the addict gives his choices and will over to something outside himself.  That simple act of giving up trying to control his life can deliver him from the deepest addictions and ingrained life patterns. But I thought about this for a while.  First I reflected on my own spirituality.  What if God was a doorknob?  What if I just chose to trust something outside myself and therefore stopped trying to play God over my life?  Hadn’t my life improved?  So there was power in this.  A great deal of power in this.  “Giving up control” alone can change your life, can release you from the overlord of addiction, can lead you to an incomprehensible peace. And I think the process of giving up control is the process by which Christians experience true transformation.

But I somehow fail to see how one could make a sane choice to turn one’s will over to a doorknob. After all, the idea of trust comes into play.  As Christians mature, they generally find that a trust in God grows in many ways: through answered prayers, breaking in of peace when they most need it, through their own hushed appreciation of the creation all around.  Even by the reassuring existence of the still small voice that wells up from inside their souls from what they perceive is an external source.  If all I believed in was a doorknob, is he capable of all of this?

So why do Christians have a tendency to make God a doorknob by limiting him?  Why do I do this? Why do I confine him to the God in pages of scripture?  Because isn’t the God in scripture the God I create as I struggle to interpret them with my own feeble human facilities? God through the cultural lens of the men, though they may have been divinely inspired, who wrote the scriptures? I think sometimes that he is only necessarily similar to the God other Christians believe in because we are starting from the same source – orthodox teachings and approved scripture.  And so we get nervous and insecure and we draw lines in the sand when someone else sees a different door knob. 

What is the path out of this thinking?  For me, it is a glance out my window to my go-to reminder: the tree in my back yard.  For me, the tree, the leaves, the grass beneath it, the roots below that are so complex and so incomparably intricately designed though a natural process of the progression of generations, that there must be some intelligence behind it.  The very process by which it came to be a tree, and not, a mushroom, or even a poorly fashioned tree, is so amazing as a law of nature that I cannot fathom that it came from anywhere but from an intelligent source. It is a creative force, a loving force, a force with a personality like the God I find in the pages of the bible.  A God like I see in the accounts of Jesus' life. And I believe that the God in the bible as I know it is the god inspired image of himself that he gave for men to write down because they had an experience of him – an experience like my experience of the tree.  This may sound crazy, but have you ever really considered the extent of the miracle of life?  Have you ever experienced the miracle of it? This should inspire humility.

But many Christians, without humility, draw lines around God and color them in poorly and profess that they know God, while others do not.  I think it is healthy to keep in mind that we see through a glass darkly.  I think that faith is only good and true and loving with a healthy dose of humility. Without humility, I cannot love. Without love, I am nothing.  In fact, without love, I am not just an odd person proclaiming to be a Christian, I am actually an agent that turns others away from it.  So what if God is just a doorknob for some people. Isn’t this the loving thing to do?  If he wants to show them something different, I think it is up to him. I can only share with them what works in my experience of him, knowing that my doorknob - my incomplete human guess at who God is - may be different than theirs.