Certainty: Otto? Copernicus? Sharpe and Walgate?

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Hidden in the aggregation of books on my shelves (piled in boxes, stacked on the floor) is a copy of God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), by James Weldon Johnson. One of the sermons describes the creation of mankind. If I could find the book, I'd quote it with certainty. I can't. However, I know the gist of it. God is like a “mammy” (now don't go all PC, you conservatives who find “irony” in everything—it’s Johnson’s word) bending over her child. I love the image because it flies in the face of the theological certainty that God is “father” and can be only “father.”

(Note: May 23. I found the book. "This Great God, like a mammy bending over her baby, kneeled down in the dust toiling over a lump of clay till he shaped it in his own image." There, an androgynous God.)

I know questions about the “fatherhood” of God have been answered and argued and answered and argued again in Feminist Theology. I personally don’t care a fig about the gender of God. Perhaps it took an African American poet to break through that certainty back in 1927 because he knew what it means to be banged over the head with “certainty” until you can’t stand it any more.

The Father’s own Son, the one from Nazareth (being from Nazareth is comparable to being from Sagerton, Texas, by the way) used an image of God as mother: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem….How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Luke 13:34) I’m not breaking ground here. A feminist priest (the granddaughter of Rev. Jeannette Piccard, irregularly ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1974, breaking down one barrier to thinking about the numinous) helped me understand Jesus’ feminist (horrors!) saying in about 1980.

I shouldn’t write about these things because you will think I’m either some kind of radical or some kind of fossil encrusted in arguments past (depending on your personal flavor of certainty). Hear me out. You might well ask: if I’m not writing about the gender of God, what then?

This is my attempt to begin whatever I’m going to continue to write regarding Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum: ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus with my credo: I’m tired of ideas of the numinous that make God some kind of exaggerated super human. I thought we all agreed that, “Dethroning Earth from the center of the cosmos, Nicolas Copernicus asserted that we must not assume that we hold a privileged position in the cosmos” (Sharpe and Walgate). That may or may not be true, but at the very least we are certain that the sun does not revolve around our planet. And God is not one of the Incredibles.

A very small number of us humans (fewer than 1%) have a special window on the world that the rest of you might well pay attention to. We know for certain what even Sharpe and Walgate didn’t understand when they wrote, “Imposing our human sense of direction upon the cosmos is the last word in arrogance….it flatters us to see the heavens revolve around ourselves” (Sharpe and Walgate). That very small number of us humans who have temporal lobe epilepsy (or, perhaps, any kind of epilepsy—I can speak only from my experience) know for certain that imposing our human sense on anything is arrogance. Because human sense is so fragile, so uncertain, so fleetingly “real” that all it can do is what the hart does—long for the numinous. And I think those of you who “know” what’s real need a seizure or two to disabuse you of your certainty.

Sharpe, Kevin and Jonathan Walgate. "The Anthropic Principle: Life in the Universe." Zygon 37.4 (Dec2002): 938.