In the context of ruminating together about events of the past year, a member of my writers group opined that “God has a plan for you for the future.” To my surprise, I responded with an expletive. Had it been another setting, I probably would have been much more careful in the way I engaged her, or I wouldn’t have responded at all. Afterword, our conversation weighed on me, and I found myself writing about my operative theology, a statement of how I do think our creator relates to us and to me.
I have the weight of nearly 40 years as a hospital chaplain for many people who thought the way my colleague does, that God has a plan for us that includes both tragedies and “better plans.” I have never ever tried to argue someone out of their theology, but try my best to help them in the process of wending their way through the intersection of their theology and the situations in which they find themselves. Personally, however, I cannot ever believe that God plans what happens to me, or even that God sat nearby as I tried to survive and to help my son survive the years of his psychiatric hospitalizations, as I grieved the fallout from other tragedies in my life, in my sorrow at the death of my foster daughter, victim of reverse racism. My foundational belief is that God resides in me from the moment God blew the breath of life into Adam. To say that God has a plan for me is, in my way of thinking and praying, to envision God as outside and above me. In these days, God treasures my joy at the pleasure of my student over newly discovered vocabulary words. I playfully reason that God needs a laugh today when a good joke makes its way through the lunch line outside our dining room. God takes pleasure in my wonder at my grandchildren’s growing maturity, and God learns about irritation when I think they should be writing thank you notes for Christmas gifts. And when I sit each afternoon with my zoomed contemplative prayer group, God teaches me that it is enough simply to rest.
My operative theology is a work in progress. Covid isolation has given me space to finally cut my ties with Catholicism. As I finally float free from that, I find myself thinking that all of our beliefs and denominations are myths that people since the creation stories have built to explain what is essentially a mystery: who are we, how did we get here, and what more? I watched the recent various launchings into space and wonder how other beings explain their existence? I read Native American stories and Buddhist myths and Aztec sagas, and concluded that any story I tell myself about God’s relationship to and with me is nothing more than my anxiety about my finiteness. For myself, any image I have about God is only my attempt to comfort myself in the face of the Unknowable, the Unfathomable, the Absolute unlimited action of Love. In my old age, that is enough.