O Come, O Come Emmanuel Verse 4

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse's stem

From every foe deliver them

That trust the mighty power to save

And give them victory over the grave.

Rejoice!  Rejoice!  Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

 Now here, finally, I recognize the God I see in the gospels.  It's still grand stuff, but the victory over the grave -- not temporal powers or any evil doings in the world itself.  That is much more what I want to see in God.

I phrase it that way in a kind of honesty.  Father Michael Jamail recently gave a homily that (like so many of his homilies) has stayed with me.  He warned against turning your own idea of God into a false idol.  Of becoming so convinced that you understand the infinite power, wisdom, glory, and love of God well enough that you create a false idol that bears his name and titles.

It's a dangerous trap, and one against which even the most faithful must carefully guard.

It's related, I think, to what a friend of mine discussed at dinner this evening.  He expressed his frustration at the preference for strong rhetoric and argumental strategy over actual truth.  And he said that everyone's default state is to think about how the world should work, decide what the truth is, then bend the world and facts and essentially anything necessary around that decision you have made.

In the brilliant Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which has been a challenge and a spur to my faith in many ways, the newly reimagined Harry gives Draco a motto to initiate him into the realm of the true scientist (long story):  "If magic is disappearing out of the world, then I want to believe that magic is disappearing out of the world.  If magic is NOT disappearing out of the world, then I want to believe that magic is NOT disappearing out of the world.  What is true is already true."

What is true is already true.  Thinking it is so, knowing it is so, doesn't change that.

God is already God.  Us deciding what He should be doesn't make Him any less who He already was.

And yet, how often are we afraid to look?  The Tudors is creeping in again, reminding me of how many centuries the Church feared ordinary men reading the Bible for fear of heresy.  It sounds ridiculous -- to draw heresy out of the Bible.  But a heresy, at its root, is an alternate interpretation.  We don't call atheism or other religions heresy, after all.  The indifferent Catholic is not called a heretic.  That title is reserved for people of our own faith, who have thought long on the question, who have studied the same holy works as us, and have the audacity to come to different conclusions.

To see another face of God than the one we have seen and decided was all that there is.

The arrogance is perhaps more ours than theirs, when we cry heresy in all of its forms.