Dear Christian Lego Builder
One thing I learned at Highline Community is that people don't feel comfortable when you seem to be hiding your beliefs. That was never my intention, I just always thought it was enough that we were basically on the same mission. I’m just not in the habit of sharing or hiding my spiritual beliefs, but I share them when people ask. You might be someone who is interested in spirituality, so it could be interesting to reflect, to give you a sense of what was in my thoughts as I visited these churches.
Some time ago, I set aside my beliefs about God. I haven’t lost them, I know where they are. I haven’t disowned them. They just don't seem to fit where I was trying to put them. I'm looking through the lego box of beliefs to see if there's a better one.
I remember long hours of my childhood spent rummaging through a large bin of lego blocks. I can close my eyes and hear the sound and feel the pieces slip between my fingers. I scan the tumbling chaos in front of me for the piece I need. My brother works a few feet away and we regularly confer in our efforts and help each other look. The radio is tuned to 107.5 if-parents and 106.7 if-else.
In the box are blocks from a hundred different lego sets. At one point they stood together in all their glory, only to be cannibalized, to become something else. To honor the original spirit, every so often they are rebuilt. Pirate coves and race tracks and space ships and knights and castles. The set I think about the most was a forest hideout that had a rope bridge between two trees and a spooky ghost.
But haven't you ever wanted to build something that wasn't on the box? I set aside my beliefs about God, but I use some very similar pieces. I call them if-God beliefs.
I'll give you an example:
If God created people, then they created a creature that created legos. A creature that loves curiosity and beauty and truth. A creature that can take any one of an infinite number of paths and still end up closer to the truth. If God is the original lego spirit, they did not create us to only want what is on the box. Why make something beautiful and then make the beautiful part something they shouldn’t use?
If God created the universe, they wrote all truth in creation, first, before it went into a book. If God speaks to the human heart, it is through a whisper that we can never be sure is coming from inside or maybe deeper. If God conjured a creature in their own image that was flawed, it is because they wanted us to learn. They gave us room for growth, they see beauty in growth. If God gave us the freedom to see things differently, maybe it’s not so bad when we do. If God created us with a purpose, it is to care for and rejoice in creation, to echo divine love to all our fellow creatures. Maybe God created us to discover God, like a grand game of hide and seek among the cosmos.
If God is our heavenly father and he is like the best fathers that I know, he loves to play with his children. He knows that it is important to let us explore.
If Heaven is real, and if it is a heaven I wish to find, it is full of people who never heard the name of Jesus but knew him all the same.
These are the beliefs of my childhood. I didn’t modify them very much, I dusted them off after they were handed to me. They seem to me almost the same, except the if part. The if part comes from the spirit of humility, of uncertainty, an acknowledgement of my limited point of view. It is a limitation I share with all my fellow creatures, a limitation perhaps created within me on purpose, a limitation that perhaps serves a greater purpose.
If Jesus was God on earth, he saved his greatest disappointment for the ones who had lost their humility. Disappointing Jesus is, like, the worst feeling in the world, trust me. If God was born as a human child, he was born under a humble roof, not a palace. And so, he was unrecognized by many who were expecting a king, not a carpenter. He laid first in a humble manger of straw, and it was enough. All the creatures in the stable recognized him as their king. Humility and majesty in one.
Even ChatGPT gets it.
The if part is sincere, it reflects true uncertainty. The if part invites us to earnestly explore the alternative without shame or fear. Maybe we come from a long line of multicellular organisms with no creator, maybe there is nothing leading us by the hand toward truth and light, but closer we go. Maybe the hand we feel in ours is ours. That seems no less mystical, I won’t be asking for a receipt. Transcendence is transcendence.
The if part allows the statement to evaluate as true even when we don’t know a big part of it. It shows us a path forward that resonates from inside. It allows us to boldly step forward into uncertainty and feel something solid beneath.
I offer these thoughts with a spirit of compassion. Faith may be a container for darkness or pain or loss. It is sometimes within our faith that we hold a loved one, maybe someone we cannot hold any other way. It is not my wish that anyone should lose their faith. As therapists, we hope to nurture any source of strength, and faith can be mighty. It gets us through just about anything. But faith is antifragile, it needs to be tested to be strong. Let us be open to the idea that our faith is sturdy, and we may discover it is so.
Legos are like the sturdiest toy we have, individual blocks are near indestructible. They hold together well enough and even when they come apart, they can be rebuilt. They are always out there, just laying in wait for bare feet in the dark.
One last hypothetical: if God wished to speak to every human heart across time and place, they would use the language and ideas most natural to the people of that time and place. Between each time and place, the message and the names might be a little different, but the spirit of truth and love could be recognized in every people with the humility to listen. The belief systems that grow from the spirit of God would use different words but the messages would all rhyme. The people of all those different beliefs can all work together, and maybe do great things together, because they share a common mission. It would truly bring glory to the one who set it in motion.