Casting Your Own Shadow

Dear Boo and Bubble,

It’s Sunday morning and we awoke to temperatures in the 40’s.  Looks like tonight might be our first evening of fall with an anticipated low in the 30’s…..pretty remarkable for mid-September.  It’s also a little overcast and dreary which has me in a contemplative mood with the need to share something that’s been on my mind recently…..the observation, of late, on how dogma in religious institutions tend to get in the way of the ultimate commandment to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

To be honest with you, I struggle with organized religion because it seems to be a misnomer.  Every religion on the face of the earth appears to be fractured into so many splinters that what is professed from the pulpit of one denominational church isn’t even given credence in another of similar stripes.  The tenets of faith, which one would think should unite us, tend to cast us into disparate camps of contention, creating intractable differences that play out in every facet of our lives.  (It is often said one should never discuss religion or politics.  That’s sad to me two lumped together – indicative of how divisive both have become.)

As I’ve shared with you before, I am resolved to hang my religious hat on the nail of 1 John 4:8 – Whoever does not love, does not know God, for God is love.  (See post on November 16, 1024 entitled Cottrell, Needleman and Me.)  That keeps it simple for me.  If something is prohibiting me from loving my fellow man, I am compelled to root it out. 

On occasions like this, when my mind is centered on such matters, I often turn to the writings of your great, great, great, great grandfather Joseph Benson Cottrell just to see what he might have to say.  (He is, after all, the one who penned the comment “I knew a woman once who loved her church so much, she couldn’t love her neighbor.”) This morning, I found the following passage from his 1873 scrapbook entitled “Emerson.”  It was an article he wrote for the Central Methodist as a correspondent for the Louisville Methodist Conference.  His words resonated with me and helped me understand that, as in most everything, it is human frailty at the heart of the problem.

Much perplexity comes in our attempts to express in precise and definite terms and in logical order all that pertains to life and salvation.  God expresses this is a living order, and there is mutual dependence – reciprocal interplay and support – among the variant, yet organically unified, parts that make up the concrete fact.  But when we come to express – to explicate – to demonstrate – in words, what may only be expressed by the life itself, there is inevitably mere approximation.  What we say – our systems of philosophy and theology, are tentative.  They are essays of the human mind to re-speak what God has uttered; and if what we know of the divine life and the divine work be only as they are reported to us by man, we will be acquainted therewith very much as we are with one whose photographs we have had shown us by friends, and of whom we have heard them speak.  We are to come into the very measure of life and power – of duty and privilege – immediately, and not suppose that the pictures of flame may warm us – that pictures of food and of water may nourish and refresh us.

Yet, it is inevitable that each one will for himself formulate the faith.  He must cast the outline of his own form in shadow, as he stands in the light, and as he may only acquaint himself with himself formally thus, his knowledge of himself must ever be partial.  Why may men not learn to be modest and self-distrusting in view of this fact?  Why such dogmatism – such rigidity and inflexibility by such as assume to teach and govern?  Alas, for human weakness?  It is the occasion of arrogance rather than of humility.

Upon no subject is there such intolerance and bitterness as upon that which no man can know perfectly, viz: The Divine government, as it includes the facts and comprehends the forces incident to its administration over the agents whose obedience must be according to knowledge and choice, and not according to necessitating force.