It’s a scary world out there. I’ve wondered what God makes of it? Adam Gopnik’s wondered, too. He went on line to ask God. Writing in the New Yorker Magazine,
Gopnik says that he began his search by looking at “all the lesser things through
which he (God) is said to reveal himself.”
He types in several of the spiritual graces: hope, faith,
mercy and charity. Hope was a blank page, faith, a company slogan, and mercy, a
Catholic hospital network in Knoxville.
Charity turned out to be a site for collecting money for relief
enterprises. Virtues like truth and beauty also came up as businesses. Jesus.com turned up a quirky entrepreneur in
Virginia. Gopnik doesn’t type in the word love. I suppose, like Jesus.com,
love.com could turn up some unwelcome sites.
To learn what’s on God's
mind I’ve taken mostly traditional routes: prayer, meditation, reading
scriptures, church going. My search results are similar to Gopnik's: The answers
I get are often inscrutable. Still, I keep
searching. When searching, my computer often
admonishes me like fundamentalist preachers do; I’ve committed a fatal error,
I’m told. I am about to be terminated. It doesn’t make me want to keep looking.
Many people are
suspicious of institutions that say they represent God. They feel that the
usual church agenda is irrelevant or self-serving. One young woman, after discussing women’s
rights with a minister told me; “He just lectured me about how the apostles
were men." Old time religion was good
enough for Jonah, but not for an increasing number of seekers. Browsing the web
may get me information, like prayer can, but you still have to make sense of
it. Discernment does that. Discernment requires thinking outside the box, like
browsing the brain and the heart.
I like conversations about God. I don’t like ones inside the
box. The party line can be stultifying. Some religions resist new ways of addressing
my woes or even ways of understanding what inspires me. If it’s not written in the
Bible, they say, it doesn’t count.
Churches face thorny issues today: war’s legitimacy, religion’s complicity in
racial and gender inequality, child abuse, political manipulation to mention
some. Some
religions don’t like entertaining questions, only giving answers. How I can be
more loving is the toughest question for me. There’s no quick answer. I try muddling through.
God’s been discovered in the strangest places; a burning
bush, a still small voice, in dreams, in a child’s eyes, in adversity, in the
sound of thunder, and even in an empty grave. So why not the web? The fatal
error isn't where I search, but that I stop searching. The other fatal error is
in believing that only one site has the whole truth.
This time Gopnik decides to enter God.com. Is Gopnik thinking
God is in business? "Sorry,"
is the reply, "No Such Address...You may have found one of the millions of
links to Web sites that have gone out of business or moved without leaving a
forwarding address." Not encouraging.
Finally he types in God.org. The screen reads, “Coming soon–a site for
all." Now
that’s promising.
