Hunger for a Cosmic Friend

There was a movie playing in the theaters many years ago that began by showing an empty coke bottle dropping aimlessly from a plane into a tribe of primitive people. The movie was a comedy, ridiculing their attempts to discover the meaning of this event, what the gods were telling them by sending this strange object from the heavens where they reside. Primitive people lived lives filled with meaning, peopled with gods who spoke to them in the events of their day, creating myths to explain the deep mysteries that surrounded them.

We don’t live that way any more, most of us. Since the Enlightenment we have become a reasonable people living in a world of facts. Our culture gives lip service to faith in a God who loves us and is with us in all that we do, but it’s not a great source of comfort to the general population or the leaders of our civilized world. If a strange object fell from the skies can we imagine the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal puzzling over what God was trying to tell us?

Changes in the culture happen slowly. I can remember my mother tearfully telling me as a child that God was punishing us for our sins as the lightening flashed and the thunder crashed about us. And still today a goodly number of people believe that the poor deserve to be poor as God’s judgment on them, tracing back to the Old Testament teaching that wealth was a sign of God’s favor.

But most of us don’t live as though this is God’s world, or if it is, he left it long ago, after the big bang. It’s very difficult today for me to believe God cares about my glaucoma, or my friend Bob’s fast growing cancer.

So that’s what this blog is about. See the post after this for the dream of what God’s relationship to us might be, each of us, personally. Strange that we have to do something to attain this relationship. And stranger still that Mother Teresa, as we have learned lately, never did attain the comfort of God’s presence. But what we seek is certainly worth the effort, isn’t it?