God and shovels

When winter comes I find I am drawn to questions about the meaning of life. Perhaps this is because the gardens die and the leaves drop and the birds leave. Whatever the reason, though, today's post is going to be spiritual in nature.

When you think about it, belief in God is the ultimate form of hero worship and generally goes something like this:

One day God will come swooping down bearing a flaming sword-of-justice and smite evil-doers and right all wrongs. There will be no more wars and no more famine and no more death and no more disease, the calves will all be fat and the fruit of the trees will all be low-hung. Then we, the survivors, will all hold hands and sing praises. Luckily, not a thing is required of us except to wait patiently and believe the miracle is just around the corner.

Since waiting is much easier than acting, and since it absolves us of responsibility (someone else will fix everything), and since waiting mires us festering in hell, the God-as-hero model strikes me as a counter-productive, revenge-seeker's fantasy. It seems better to admit that the world is full of problems because people are full of problems and that our world will become better when we become better people.

My opinion is that Heaven and Hell are one, and are defined by their populations, not by their locations. I believe that to go from one to the other requires a general improvement or worsening in the behaviors of men, expressed by our free-will choices. I believe that "enlightened" people go about making Heaven where they can and helping others do the same. The sound-bite becomes, "If you want to be surrounded by happy, nice people try being happy, nice people."

Periodically there are great teachers like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha who try to show us the way to a world of love, but they usually wind up crucified or shot, stabbed or jailed, because we refuse to believe that this ugly place, with it's unspeakable crimes and monuments of hatred, is our fault and our responsibility and our punishment/reward. We refuse to accept that we are the ones we have been waiting for, that our love (and our flaming blogs of justice?) and our time and our effort control our destinies.

In conjunction with refusing responsibility for our failures, we also fail to acknowledge the work of our hands which is good (like jug bands, or baseball, or Seinfeld, or fads, or ice cream, or Broadway, or pipe organs) and so we diminish ourselves yet again.

Perhaps a good expression of a way out of our hero dependence comes from the "What Would Jesus Do?" movement. This movement asks you, essentially, to be a hero to yourself, or as Shakespeare said, To thine own self be true

Shovelling snow is hard work and it seems whenever you turn around there is more snow falling. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming and futile, mad even, to struggle against the drifts which silently mock my efforts at order. If I wanted to I could close myself off to the world and wait for the springtime which is surely just around the corner, but I am fond of pizza and of my friends, so I bend and scrape and throw again and again until my path is clear.