“Your gods are not God.”

H,

The rule over idolatry has always fascinated me. There seems or seemed such a desperate plea in: “Love no other God but me.” In the old senseless way, we were told to love God with our soul but not our spirit or our mind. We were told to obey and not understand, to not want to but to choose to and to not engage our whole personality in worship, but to obey like drones. This misguided view of things left us prisoners to the things we were supposed to avoid. As Paul said, “I did not know sin and did not sin until the law told me, this is sin.” I paraphrase but you get my meaning.

So, we are caught in this terrible paradox: told to be without heart or mind in worship but then told that our will, our soul, must avoid everything with heart and mind in it. We cannot be whole, and we cannot ask why we are not whole. We cannot feel things deeply except the scriptures spell it out and we cannot ask why we cannot feel things outside the ambit of those old words that are not yet life because we have no heart in them in the first place. We are trapped by the “depth” of small men behind big pulpits and eternal ideas they cannot yet grasp.

These tin gods are not God, thank God. They sometimes mean well but are desperately wrong. They sometimes mean ill but are helplessly trapped themselves in the games they perpetuate.

We are meant to come to God with soul, with all our heart and with our mind. We are meant to question, like the Psalmist, or feel overwhelmed, like the Christ. It is expected we will fall flat on our faces, forget to worship, leave the narrow path or find it after hitting our heads against walls we created ourselves.

Never let anyone tell you that they know, exclusively, the way to God. They are just pilgrims. We are all pilgrims.  At best, we share experiences with open hearts and open hands. These men and women are just human. They are not God.