Remembering God is almost as hard as God forgetting us
Remembering God can be difficult. Remembering God can be particularly difficult if we are not trying to remember God. I believe that we all experience God, though some of us may not name it that. Most simply put, God is love. If we remember love and imbue our life with these loving experiences, then we will be well on our way to living Godly lives. Every healthy relationship is reciprocal. While remembering God may be difficult at times, recalling occasionally that it is even more difficult for God to forget us can bring comfort and serve as an invitation to a deeper relationship. God’s call is better characterized by the woo of a lover — Love itself! — than a jilted lover in an unreciprical relationship, waiting by the proverbial phone for a call back.
I wish that traditional religion would harness this metaphor of lovers, the wooer and the wooed. I think this meets resistance because some people think that it may imply some type of equality of humans with God; though most religious conservatives don’t necessarily see a reciprocal equality in human sexual relationships as an ideal anyway. However, perhaps most importantly, institutional religion seems to have real issues with sex and sexuality. The story of the virgin birth is perhaps the pinnacle of this disconnect: God has sex without really having sex, or daring to imbue a human sex act with divineness. Then, Jesus is overwhelmingly seen as some asexual being. My view is that these narratives are massive barriers to Christianity embracing a healthy human sexuality. Jesus is purported to be fully God and fully human, yet the Christian narrative is notably silent on how Jesus manifests divinity as a human sexual being, except for not engaging in sexual acts. I don’t consider total, lifelong (in Jesus’ case until age 33 at his death) abstinence as a feasible model for the perpetuation of the human race, or as particularly helpful for most people’s lives on earth. Surely, there is a fuller picture that can be drawn. Intimate sexual human relationships strike me as fertile ground (time to pull out the big puns!) for experiencing deep love, which is the stuff of God. I pray for a way for Jesus to better redeem sexuality, which would go a long way to redeeming Christianity. And the Church said, “Woo!”
