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Chapter Two

MAKING SENSE OF SCRIPTURE, SAINTS, AND SAVIORS

PEOPLE ASK: “Do I have to believe the Bible was written by God to be considered a ‘good’ person?” That’s like saying you have to borrow every book out of a library to prove that you love the library. Or asserting that scientists, who have done a great job over the centuries explaining what goes on in the universe, are all sinners and doomed to the netherworld.

The Bible was not written by God, but by men and women inspired by God. If you start with this rational view of the Bible, it will give you, here and there, a lot of meaningful insights and moral direction. And you won’t get stuck on some of its significant inconsistencies in terms of narratives, ideas, and chronology.

I have been touched by the compassionate examples of many people—nurses, musicians, fire fighters, schoolteachers, hospice workers—who didn’t know a lot of Bible yet exhibited a kind of goodness and dedication that was as biblical as it was unpretentious. I have also visited clergymen and temple presidents serving time in prison for corruption, embezzlement, and sexual criminality.

The Bible is an archive of disparate books, written at different times and by different authors living in different times and circumstances. When we let other people determine what we should take out of it, then we have made the librarians into priests and we have ceased to be learners. We have choked the creativity of this literature, muffled its poetry, and stifled its many daring stories of dissent, controversy, and even spiritual ambivalence.

We have taken ourselves out of the discussion and handed it over to a few ecclesiastics, many of whom don’t feel safe with it unless they are pounding you with the miracles and cataclysms that are colorful and safe and give these clerics dangerous power. What about the love stories, the sexual sonnets, the political cunnings, the family dysfunctions, the deep deceits, and pounding griefs? They are much more in tune with you and me and our little lives. You and I are less likely to witness a sea being parted than we are to win the lottery. The big marvels in some parts of scripture are diverting but they don’t deliver when it comes to managing our marriages, our kids, our employers, our money problems, or our health.

The Bible is only as alive as your take on it and you are invited to grapple with it, just as you are included in its complicated tapestry of life and death, triumph and trouble. Finding this section of it repugnant and that section of it rhapsodic is actually its purpose. Believing that it is an indisputable testimony is like asserting that life is completely predictable. You’ve been around long enough to know that’s not the case. It reduces the spiritual power of this long literature into a lunch menu and it trivializes our need to think, react, and argue with fate.

A lot of GIs carried bibles into World War II but, in the end, we beat the fascists and saved the free world with gasoline, guts, and a bit of luck. The bibles often gave our soldiers comfort, especially when they saw their friends being killed or they themselves were wounded and maimed. In the end, the Nazis didn’t surrender to our gods; they succumbed to our strategy and courage.

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 grim. Its army was limited in numbers and munitions, divided among many languages, and generally inexperienced with everything but the notion of Jews succumbing to great and powerful forces.

Among the four soldiers, my father was more or less a secularist who wrote poetry in his native Hebrew about romance and freedom and the dreams of a people hoping to have a safe haven at last. He identified with Jewish history more than its prayer books; that history was now an existential crisis for him and his army pals.

The other three, also young, homesick, and fearful, included one Orthodox Jew, one survivor of several Nazi death camps, and one Christian American—a veteran of World War II who had now volunteered for this tour because of what he had seen Europe do to its Jews. The night was long and a cold wind blew in from the Samarian Mountains. The four men were charged to stay awake and watch for enemy infiltrators. They were exceedingly vulnerable and made shoddy jokes along with small chatter as they rubbed their gloved hands over the campfire. They methodically checked their weapons, worried about an ambush at any moment.

They began talking about God.

What was God’s role in this terrible situation, my father asked out loud. Would God protect them and the precious little land they were attempting to defend? Was there even a God?

“What God?” The Holocaust survivor rang out with bitterness. “After what I saw in the camps, after I saw my parents murdered, people gassed, children thrown into sacks and beaten to death for sport, you think there is a God?”

There was an interlude of silence as the young men felt the cold begin to carve its way into their bone marrow. They added more wood to the struggling fire as the pious one began to softly sing psalms to himself. The three others looked at him as he hummed and formed ancient words that turned into little bursts of fog flying out of his mouth into the frigid midnight.

“What do you think?” My father asked the psalmist. “This one says there is no God while you shiver here praying to him.”

“Of course there is a God,” came the reply. “And in fact, God is so involved in this that really none of us will have anything to say about the outcome of this war, whether we live or die. It is up to God to decide if we are to have a Holy Land again. It’s already been preordained in heaven so there’s really nothing for us to worry about. We are just part of a higher purpose.”

The American cleared his throat. “I tend to agree with that, I must say. And it’s not like I go to church or anything. Not on any regular basis. I mean, sure, on Christmas Eve and such, but not all the time. But I do feel that God has something to do with this. After what happened in France and Italy and then in Germany, when I got there. Not just to the Jews, but also to my buddies and so many people I saw get killed or maimed. All the suffering. Maybe I’m here because after all of that I want to see some justice done. And that makes me feel that this Jewish story here, this reclaiming the land, is, well, biblical. I just want to see some evidence that God cares or something along those lines.”

“Maybe you just like war,” my father teased him. “Or you don’t have any friends back in Utah where you came from.” All of them laughed out loud, a cascade of nervous release and a fleeting sense of comfort in the shared predicament of mortality.

“It’s Idaho,” came the smiling rejoinder from the American. “And so what do you think about God?”

My father really did not know. He thought about it for a moment. “For some reason, when we sit here and talk about God in this situation we’re in, I’m thinking about and really missing my mother’s homemade honey pastry. I can practically smell the kitchen and the little cakes coming out of the oven, dripping with sweetness, and my mother smiling at us and telling us to wash our hands before having the treat. We did, of course, but then we always had to wash them again afterward because they were sticky with the honey. We licked our fingers before she made us wash our hands again.”

The four sat around, wistful and worried and hoping to get back home to their kitchens, their bedrooms, their little sanctuaries where no one could do them any harm. After a while, my father suggested they vote on the question: Is there a God or not?

Whenever my father told me this story, he would pause and chuckle at this point. He liked it, I think, that he was the one who put the question to a vote. I would look into his deep brown eyes and notice his thick black curly hair and feel so thankful that he came home from that campfire so long ago.

“What was the vote?” I’d ask, even years after I knew the answer.

“The vote was 4–0. There is a God, but we’d better get more rifles.”