Works don’t work—but they do.

The paradox. We cannot manipulate God into favoring us. We cannot control God, we cannot bend the Transcendent Reality to our will, by what we do or do not do. Sacrifices and rituals and magic do not obligate the Spirit to bend to our will or to our desires. How many people in how many places and in how many times have learned this through experience? How many spell books have been thrown down in defeated disgust and frustration?

All of us, as children, grew through a phase of magical thinking. Although the incantations we wove were idiosyncratic the chant about avoiding stepping on sidewalk cracks, for fear of breaking our mothers’ backs, for my generation, in my culture, epitomizes them all.

We don’t wholly grow out of this. Aside from sports fans, who true believe that whether or not they watch their favorite team play on television will control the outcome of the game, our culture is riddled with superstition. It is often apparent when people talk about a God who intervenes in our lives on a daily basis that such theology can contain elements of magic and superstition.

Mine does. I believe that if I observe a "practice" or a "discipline" that the Holy Spirit will change me into the creature that God wants me to be, with the explicit promise of salvation here and now as well as there and then.

How is that different from someone who believes that he can make a volcano stop rumbling by throwing a virgin into its fire pit?

Isn’t the practice, the discipline, isn’t that a "work?" Isn’t it something I do for the same reason that some people make and save money? Aren’t we both doing what we think our experience teaches us, what our magic assures us, will "save us" from what we fear?

Aren’t I actually trying to manipulate the Transcendent Reality with my Bible reading and worship and my participation in the life of the meeting?

Perhaps, I tell myself, I am trying to manipulate myself, trying to bend myself to the will of God rather than the other way around. It’s what I tell myself, it’s what I believe. "Not my will, but yours…"

In the end, or at least what looks to me, today, to be the end, it’s about faith—faith in the works, faith that produces works. It’s faith that all this counter-intuitive stuff that the Spirit leads us into produces the works—the condition—to which we are exhorted in the Bible and other spiritual writings, exhorted by God/the Spirit as we walk our walk, avoiding the sidewalk cracks.

6:13:22 AM