Psalm 50:14-15 written by Asaph, Temple worship leader during King David’s time
 
Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and pay your vows to the Most High.
Call on me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

I want to give some thought to one of the most often invoked rituals in Christian and secular circles, namely giving of thanks. Thanksgiving, depending on the bible translation, is used about thirty-five times in the bible. The word “thanks” counts over a hundred times. Thank, thanked, thanking, thankful, thankfulness and thankworthy, all are used in some translation of the bible.

I am sure that it seems nearly blasphemous to some Christians to even give it a thought. However, just that is my intention. Say thanks, where does it come from? What does it mean when people and especially Christians say we are thankful?

Against all odds growing up in an atheistic family I learned about Jesus in school. Ten years old I closed him in my heart forever. As an adult I was confirmed and baptized in one service at an Ecumenical Church in a Dutch University town. My life has seen setbacks, health related, career and study related. I studied physics and mathematics. I was interested in scripture and the history behind the creation of the bible, the translations, the findings of the scrolls at the Dead Sea and Nag Hammadi. This whole package of information, philosophy and facts did not alienate me from Jesus and God. That in itself may seem inexplicable. In later years my husband and I joined the Episcopal Church. What science and humanities and social studies has to offer and in the past centuries has brought to us, I see as an expansion of our scope on life together on this earth and maybe beyond. Russell Cowburn, a Professor of Theoretical Physics in Cambridge, seems to have said: “Understanding science doesn’t make God smaller. It allows us to see his creative activity in more detail.” For me it was sheer relief that my relationship with God is allowed to be bigger than what we thought as unshakably written down and thus is even more beyond human understanding.

It is a trend these days to focus on gratitude. There are endless opportunities to pray or meditate with emphasis on positive feelings. Some psychologists see it as therapeutic to sample thankful feelings.

The ritual of thanksgiving is strongly related to the image that we have of what God is about. For me God as the source, the inspiration, the beginning as well as the end simply is there, in you, in the other, in the joy, the sadness and in the sharing of all our emotions.

I am convinced that sharing happiness as well as sorrow is more truthful and gives most important building blocks to make life worthwhile for oneself and for others.

The history of thanks

I love Zoos. Especially watching the apes how they play, groom each other and interact, is great fun. I find the chimpanzees most endearing. In the Apenheul in the Netherlands are living almost 300 primates. There is a research center studying these primates in the Apenheul and in the wild. This center attracts Primatologists from all over the world.

Primatology is the study of nonhuman primates. It is a diverse discipline, and primatologists can be found in biology, anthropology, psychology and other departments.

Frans De Waal is such a Primatologist at Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia USA. An abstract from the article “The Chimpanzee’s service economy: Food for grooming” shows that Chimpanzees have a cognitive ability for reciprocal exchange of social services, so are able to do some complicated thinking and planning to perform the act of sharing. It showed that individual Chimpanzees shared food more often with another Chimpanzee if that Chimpanzee had been grooming him or her before. That I find remarkable. ⁱⁱ

Moreover the following story illustrates that Chimpanzees might even be capable of feeling and communicating gratitude. This is what happened: “Two chimps had been shut out of their shelter by mistake during a cold rain storm. They were standing dejected, water streaming down their shivering bodies, when Professor Köhler chanced to pass.” Upon opening the door for the two chimps, explained psychologist, Dr. James Leuba in 1928 in Harper’s Magazine, “instead of scampering in without more ado, as many a child would have done, each of them delayed entering the warm shelter long enough to throw its arms around his benefactor in a frenzy of satisfaction.” “ Chimpanzees,” primatologist Frans de Waal points out, “do not normally hug their caretakers for no reason.” ⁱⁱⁱ

DNA based research says that Chimpanzees and Bonobos are our closest living biological relatives. The Chimps and we diverged 6 to 8 millions of years ago from a common ancestor who – as Charles Darwin already suspected in 1871 – lived most likely on the African continent.

Is social interaction of “give and take”, knowing how to groom and how to share in response then as old as we are and our relative the chimpanzee or did we both develop this skill during the last millions of years? I focused here on our closest relative but elephants also have high social skills. I would like to believe that this game of “give and take” is in different forms one of the oldest interactions in animals that live in groups and have these cognitive abilities.

About our somewhat more recent ancestors, the Neanderthal people, archeologists found that they buried their dead with rituals. In one of their graves they found the remainder of a bunch of flowers that obviously had been given to the loved one that died. I am using the word loved, because how else would one explain giving flowers if not an expression of gratitude for his or her life?

At some point in pre-history humans were able to develop beside body language a spoken language. Speech gave a whole new dimension to the exchange game. No need for grooming if you can simply order a pizza for some coins. Written language went even further. We could make intricate contracts to donate, sell, rent or hire. Our human system of grooming and sharing became a very complicated scheme.

How to say thanks followed a similar path. Gratitude knows many forms of expression these days and local cultures show differences. For example how much corporal contact people are comfortable with. Some cultures might not like the hugging that the two chimpanzees did in the story before. Sometimes even making eye contact is improper. A simple handshake, a hug, bowing, kneeling, prostration, or just saying thank you, all these gestures are possible in saying thanks and everywhere on this planet we show our gratitude differently.

Children are taught to say thank you, as soon as they learn to speak. In a Dutch book from 1983 with the title “Hoe hoort het eigenlijk”^iv (translated “How should we behave”) about manners in society I found several tips about saying thanks. This book was a new version of the original by Amy Groskamp-Ten Have from 1939. It was made up to date for modern times. It is interesting that although the authors detect a change in manners in the Dutch society in 1983 the success of the book proves that etiquette still interested people then and new books on this matter prove that that is still the case. The authors introduce the book thus: Good manners and respect for each other really are building blocks for a good form of society. They prevent a lot of frustration and trouble.

Our society has made manners and showing gratitude into a fine art.

Showing gratitude became the norm

A norm is a rule that tells how to behave in interpersonal traffic. Our societies built a complex system of ethical norms. Showing gratitude, saying thanks became one of these norms.

Along the way of our evolution humans developed more skills to detect when it was important to thank each other, or for which services or gifts. It is not as simple as you scratch my back and I will share my ice cream with you.

It has become a trend among psychologists to see the act of showing gratitude as therapeutic. It leads to happiness, they say. They connect a whole list of benefits to keeping a gratitude journal, among others: better physical and psychological health, improvement in relationships, more self-esteem and good results at the workplace. Sampling only positive feelings gives me an unpleasant feeling. Oversimplification of life is a bad development. The claim that it leads to more empathy is ridiculous. Who are we to tell a person in deep mourning or with mountain high problems to stop lamenting and when and how often to be sad?  I was glad to find some sanity in an article written by Alfie Kohn in Psychology Today with the title: The Overselling of Gratitude ^v – Always being positive makes no more sense than always being negative.

I fully agree with this view, it is a hoax that it helps to see life only from the bright side through rose colored glasses, or make it into a success story where a coach motivates you to sample as many positive experiences as possible. That might be even unhealthy for the mind because the sorrow is swept under the carpet and not processed. It is much more realistic to share the good and the bad things, the sorrow as well as the joy. The element of competition is taken out. People will see the full picture of each other’s life and will start to feel less lonely. That is empathy. The sense of sharing grieve will help to cope with the bad things in life.

Alfie Kohn also detects that political conservatives may use gratitude as a tool to keep the poor and less well off in a state of content. Promoting that people shouldn’t grumble but count their blessings leads to a stoic attitude. It keeps these groups from protesting their condition and demanding changes. The CEO Bud Konheim said in 2014 that the poor should stop whining. It is grist to the mill of conservatives like him to promote selling gratitude as a solution to all one’s problems. In this sense showing gratitude can change from an exchange of reciprocal experienced feelings into a mandate to be thankful in general. Count your blessings becomes the new ethical norm.

Alfie Kohn: Is it possible to feel grateful while also speaking out against what’s wrong? Of course. But it’s worth asking about the uses to which gratitude is put, the questions it quiets, the interests it serves. We can appreciate a welcome development and thank those who make our lives more satisfying — and still offer a realistic appraisal of what isn’t worth celebrating. Perhaps instead of “count your blessings,” a better motto would be: A place for every feeling and every feeling (including gratitude) in its place.

All that is in heaven and on earth

At some unknown point of the timeline our ancestors must have acknowledged that there was more besides nature around them. They knew how to hunt, to prepare food, then to plant and harvest, to make tools and finally to build structures and they developed social skills in their group. They could tackle many problems. However floods, storms, blizzards, droughts, mountains spewing fire and earthquakes of course must have frightened them. They had to cope with sickness and the mystery of death. They thought of spirits of ancestors, of bad or good spirits living in trees or animals. They believed in humanlike supernatural beings riding on the storm clouds making thunder and lightning, or living on mountains, in streams and the sea. They had big respect for them, reverence, in Latin religio, hence the word religion.

These humanlike supernatural beings could be male or female. In all languages appeared a word to describe such a being. In English we know them as gods. Often deities – a word derived from the Latin deus or Greek theos – received a personal name like: Gaia, mother earth, and Ouranos, the heaven, or Woden, Grim, Frige, Freia. The worship of multiple gods was most common. Think of ancient Greece for example where the people showed reverence for troves of gods and also half gods, which were a child from a god or goddess and a human.

Our Christian God, the God that those, who promised to follow Jesus, learned about through the gospels, did not have a name. That is to say, his name was a holy secret to the people of Israel. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…. In the Hebrew bible Moses receives four letters, the tetragrammaton, YHWH, Yahweh. Latin derived from those letters Jehovah, later scholars however brought back Yahweh. In Judaism it is still a practice to say Adonai which means Lord, instead of using a name.

To worship one God was not totally new. In Egypt the pharaoh Echnaton adored the God of the Sun which he introduced to his people. It did not last. After his death the priests and the people went their old ways of worshiping several gods. That was about 1350 years before Christ. The people in Israel under king Solomon and David, and the tribes inhabiting Judah and Israel after that were not monotheists from the start. It seems that they were more partial to the idea after they returned to Judah from their captivity in Babylon. In the old Testament the book of Judges describes that the Israelites worshiped at some point the gods Ba’al and Asherah, which was an evil act in the sight of the Lord. Ba’al is mentioned about 90 times in the bible in about 33 verses. This god seemed to have had control over many aspects of life, among others fertility, the seasons and wars and he protected sailors. He must have been a real competitor to the one Adonai. Therefore the people needed to be warned and be convinced that Adonai was more powerful and the only one for the tribes of Israel. The story of the prophet Elijah at mount Carmel is most illustrating, especially because of what the prophet says to the people: How long will you go limping with two different opinions? , he meant the uncertainty of the people whom to trust, Ba’al or Adonai. In the end of the story Elijah proves on the occasion of an offering of a bull that Adonai is more powerful than any other god by sending this all-consuming fire. This story is in the book of Kings which tells about the rulers from King David all the way to King Jehoiachin in Babylonian exile. It is a tale of good, bad and worse rulers just like we know during our lifetime. Above all it shows the reader the consequences of forsaking the one Lord of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Adonai with the secret name.

A God of love

Mark 12.32 – Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher, you have truly said, that ‘he is one, and besides him, there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ – this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” ^vi

The supernatural beings, spirits, gods, half gods, with their assumed abilities to let it rain, send storms, lightning, settle wars or make fields, cattle as well as humans fertile, proved to be hard to please. To say it bluntly, people must soon have found that getting along with one’s parents-in-law or asking a favor from the boss had more positive results than praying for one drop of rain. Still we kept trying. We projected the social system of our tribes on religion. By offering the fruits of our harvest, food or animals we were hoping to groom the gods so that they gave back to us anything we desired.

The worship of gods brought a new element of leadership in our societies. Elders or healers, male or female, wise men and women were often chosen as religious leaders. The people needed them to explain the supernatural signs, to prophesize, to lead them in worship, and to prescribe the rituals. They had an important role in society. These leaders could become so influential and persuasive that even horrific human sacrifices became a norm. The most well- known culture that practiced these sacrifices were the Incas who lived in the West of what is now South America. It actually happened in cultures all over the world and there are still “witch doctors” in eastern Africa who – although forbidden – fervor this ritual with albinos as victims. Societies with human sacrifices were often hierarchical. An article in Nature describes this hypothesis.^vii It is easy to believe that societies could suppress less fortunate by condemning them to be the sacrificial lambs. The ritual of human sacrifice was thus a tool to maintain social stratification. It seems that tribes worshiping Ba’al that followed these practices of human sacrifice were also living in the vicinity of Israel and Judah. The Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures, prohibited this kind of sacrifice and made it unlawful.

But the tribes of Israel and Judah did other burned offerings on the altar, brought their sacrifices which were partly burned or cooked and eaten in communion, and practiced libation. For offerings and sacrifices they used all kind of kosher animals like a sheep or a dove. For oblations a liquid could be poured on an altar or any grain. Then the New Testament tells about the role of money in the process which takes a radical turn when Jesus and his followers go in the forecourt of the temple to throw out the money changers and merchants selling their offers. Trying to please a god followed the same path as human development, from simple grooming in exchange for food towards rituals with money as an intermediate.

With a big leap in time we land in the middle of the Reformation in western Europe. At the occasion of the 500 year celebration of the Protestant Reformation the National Geographic placed an article called “How Martin Luther Started a Religious Revolution”.^viii Young Martin Luther grew up as a Roman Catholic. After he had joined the order of the Augustinians, he was chosen in 1510 by his superiors to defend the strictly observing views of his monastery. No doubt that his legal education contributed to his skill to defend. Once in Rome Luther observed the corruption and lack of spirituality of the priests. He later described his visit: “Rome is a harlot . . . The Italians mocked us for being pious monks, for they hold Christians fools. They say six or seven masses in the time it takes me to say one, for they take money for it and I do not.” If one knows something about the Reformation, it is probable that his further acts are well known. Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses – although most likely not nailed to the door of Wittenberg’s All Saints’ Church as legend goes – were seen as radical and have led to the separation of Protestants away from the Catholic Church in Rome.

The money mentioned by Luther was paid for so called indulgences. Originally the idea was that a parishioner could confess to sins committed and the priest could then request certain penitential acts according to the severity of the sin. The penitence could be as light as repeating certain prayers or for more severe cases a pilgrimage to a holy place. However at the time of Martin Luther it had become a practice that the absolution from these sins, the indulgence, could be bought. It brought money into the coffers of the Roman Catholic church. It went so far that the indulgence could be a gift, in repentance for sins committed by family or friends. It is clear that it brought corruption to the church, as sin and absolution became a leverage for the church to squeeze money out of its parishioners.

How far away during this shortened history of offering and sacrifice are we Christians from that what the scribe acknowledged and said to Jesus: ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’…. Is this then the God of Love? The same one as speaking through Jesus that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself? The scribe said: ‘this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices’. Next I want to begin a search for an answer to these questions.

The God of storm, rain and lightning

In the search for answers there is for me no other way than to follow our evolution from primates into the humans that we have become in this time and age. It is of course possible to deny that what scientists have discovered and proven over time. However, as I have said in the introduction, isolating our religion from all that we know now, about the earth with all the flora, fauna and human kind living on it and from the universe as we have explored it, does not make our image of a god bigger, it diminishes it.

Most of our religions on earth exist thousands of years. The religious leaders that we have chosen over time, worked with the knowledge about nature and the universe of their time.

Ignorance about astronomy, geology, climatology and biology led to legend and lore. The stuff that dragons are made off. I think that we should never take texts out of context of culture and time. The religious leaders of that era could not have known the things that even children in Elementary School comprehend in our time. Our knowledge in astronomy and geology banned the picture of a heaven above us and the hell as an underworld beneath us.

Climatology with the help of physics and geology explained much about natural phenomena like storms, thunder, lightning, floods and earthquakes. And how would one combine a paradise for Adam and Eve with the evolution and the archeological finds that prove this science? Our knowledge has shed light into the darkest corners of our imagination and drives out the boogeymen. In my opinion should Christians read the texts in the bible with that in mind, but at the same time I am aware that it has repercussions for the image that Christians still have of their God.

I greatly admire the work of religious scholars who especially after the archeological finds of significant texts at the Dead Sea and Nag Hammadi, are researching the origins of the bible texts, the history of how the bible came together and how the texts were translated into the scripture as we know it. It helps us non-scholars at least not to take scripture at face value. It is a second reason to mull over that what the bible has handed us down over the ages. It also asks for a scrutiny of the image of God that is painted in the scripture. That is an important step before we can talk about thanksgiving and gratitude in religion.

I described before that the Christian God was a private and tribal god with a secret name adopted by the people that lived in Israel and Judah. With tribal I mean that this Adonai was exclusively there for the people of Israel. The Israelites and Judean didn’t share Adonai, on the contrary, according to scripture many enemies found out the hard way that this Adonai of the tribes of Israel and Judea was a force to reckon with. Just think of the Egyptians drowning in the closing waters of the Red Sea. Although most Christians are probably not aware of the picture that they have of God, it hasn’t changed much in official sense. The attributes that the doctrines of Catholic as well as Protestant churches give to God have hardly changed. God of Power, God of Might, Almighty, Merciful, Gracious, a Refuge and Strength, a Rock of Salvation. These are great words describing a super humanlike being. The people of the book, as Jews and Christians are called, were not allowed to make a material image of this deity, so words were the only way to make an image in the mind. No statues were erected like the neighboring nations preferred. Even calling his name was a secret. Moreover this God is a Ruler over all other gods. There is only this one, like it says in the Creed that most Christians say aloud in worship services all over the world.

Another matter is that God the great protector seems to be male. That was at some point in time a choice of the authors and editors of the bible books and not self-evident. Dr. Elaine H. Pagels one of the scholars who studied the ancient texts and is a professor of theology has written an essay called ‘What became of God the Mother?’^ix Elaine Pagels describes how the feminine once went together with the male image. Early Christian movements sampled under the name Gnosticism thought of the Divine as masculine-feminine—the “great male-female power.” However some Gnostics insist that the terms are meant only as metaphors—for, in reality, the divine is neither masculine nor feminine. A third group suggests that one can describe the Source of all things in either masculine or feminine terms, depending on which aspect one intends to stress. Other writings suggest that the Spirit is the maternal part of the Trinity and another calls her Wisdom, Sophia. The scripture from which this picture can be derived of a God that is both male and female, or just the Source of all Being, clearly was censored out of the bible books. None of this feminine influence won the hearts of the early church leaders.

So it may be that the other gods of the neighbors had statues, but the words in scripture make it clear that although Adonai is the only one for his tribe, he is above all other gods and delivers the same to his people. The Vikings as the Greek and Romans had several gods, male as well as female, who divided the tasks. The God that Christians adopted, performs all of the functions. If one lays his picture beside the old gods of the Vikings for example, one has to admit though that there is not much difference in the image. Both people were searching for survival in their evolution and their religious leaders gave them a reassurance in super- human-like beings, gods riding on the storm, living on mountains, or located somewhere above the clouds, speaking to them, performing miracles, making a deal with their people – as it says in the bible “a covenant” – and in rare instances showing themselves in some form.

God the Source of Life

Following the line of thinking that we human self-conscious beings are still in evolution, then certainly our intellectual development is part of that. We cannot ignore the fact that our findings and knowledge must influence the image of God and not only the image of God but also our perspective of the meaning of life.

I am aware that secular friends would have their answer ready by giving the advice to get rid of God altogether. I personally cannot agree with atheism though. If it is possible that the sayings, learnings, acts, death and somehow reappearance of a seemingly totally insignificant person from Nazareth, survived history to this day, he simply must have had an important impact on people one way or another. There are a few important parts of this message that has been handed down to us over time.

The image of God that shines through in Jesus example doesn’t picture as a super-humanlike being. Although in the books that made it in the New Testament with approval of the Council of Nicaea, Jesus seemed to have used the words God, Lord and Father, the tribal God of vengeance and punishment only serving his people has faded. It gave cause to the early followers of Jesus to spread the good news of God’s unworldly kingdom to all people including the gentiles. The apostle Paul the converted Roman citizen followed up on this appeal and spread this message far and wide.

We also see that compassion, empathy and love for one’s neighbor gets emphasis as opposed to brutal force, vengeance, punishment, being right and exclusion. Even in the most precarious situation Jesus condemns to take up the sword by Peter. He is willing to have conversations with anyone even outcasts, foreigners, women. So the God that shines through Jesus is – for us incomprehensible –- love, simple and pure love.

More important than all tradition Jesus deems much more important to care for others, to try to understand others, to spread this new vision of a different “kingdom”, an infinite life even after death to everyone and everywhere.

This is all reason for me to keep confessing that Jesus Christ is my way into that kingdom, that new life and death that is exciting, a life lived fully with all others around me, with nature around me and yes, including the good and the bad times.

That God is not sitting on a throne in heaven with Jesus on his right hand from where he is supposed to come again to judge the living and the dead, or that God cannot be described as in any of the three known Creeds, the Apostles Creed, the Nicene and the Athanasian Creed, does not hinder me in the least. I have read over time three books written by Bishop John Shelby Spong: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Why Christianity must Change or Die and A New Christianity for a New World. Much of the content of his writings speaks to me.

This: “God is the Source of Life who is worshiped when we live fully. God is the Source of Love who is worshiped when we love wastefully. God is the Ground of Being who is worshiped when we have the courage to be. Jesus is a God-Presence, a doorway, an open channel. The fullness of his life reveals the Source of Life, the wastefulness of his love reveals the Source of Love, and the being of his life reveals the Ground of All Being. That is why Jesus continues to stand at the heart of my religious life. That is also why I continue to call him “my Lord” and to call myself a Christian. But I am a Christian who can no longer live inside the exclusive claims of my traditional theistic past.”^x Bishop Spong’s eloquence makes up for the inadequacies of our spoken word to describe God. It allows the abstract to be much bigger than we can imagine and much closer than we ever longed for.

Thankless

If we live life fully including the sorrow and the joy, if we love wastefully, if we are in this life, we worship the Source of Life, Love and Being. That also means that we face all that happens in our lives and that of others, the happiness and the sadness. And while facing that reality we share our life, our being and our love with each other and with the Source. It is simple.

The human concept of making a deal vanishes before such an image of God. A tribal god makes a covenant with his people that says if you do my will, I won’t hurt you. If you stray, I will punish. I am exclusively your god, not a god for others. The Source of Life, Love and Being simply is. This Source is planted in all of us and all life, and shines through the infinite life and death of Jesus – for us clear to see. Without a covenant we are free to seek the Source, to follow Jesus and fulfill our longing to belong, to love and be loved, to live life to the fullest and lose our fear of death.

This Source is not a judge. Bishop Spong describes this so: “I can live without any sense of heaven as a place of reward or hell as a place of punishment. But I do believe that life is infinite, and I do believe that we are called to explore its depths and to drink deeply of its sweetness. I do believe that life is but a limited and finite image of full life, which is limitless and infinite. I do assert that one prepares for eternity not by being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.”

The concept of punishment and reward disappears. Heaven as reward and Hell, eternal Damnation, as punishment, Satan as the Angel of Evil, are ideas connected to a humanized image of a god and a devil who controls.

In the course of the twentieth Century the thoughts about Hell and all that have shifted a bit. Not many preachers and parishioners would talk about it, but that doesn’t mean that the basic concept is banished. God is still a god who needs sacrifices, offerings and thanksgiving to be pleased.

Godfried Jan Arnold Bomans was a Dutch and a prominent Dutch Catholic. Among his collection of stories about the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands during his lifetime – Beminde Gelovigen, transl. Dear Faithful – is a story about Saint Nicholas evening as he remembers it from his youth. He starts the story with a remarkable statement. Translated it says: “To those who are planning to write a book about the evolution of the sense of religion in the Netherlands, say during the past five hundred years, I can recommend a simple solution. They should look at the figure of Saint Nicholas. The ever changing depiction of him is a nice symbol of the religious perception, which each new generation sees as the right one. To give  an example: Saint Nicholas entering Harlingen by boat a few years ago, suddenly threw his sack over board. I clearly saw it happening on television.

Such a gesture is representative for the present situation in the church: penitence and fasting have been abolished, God has become gentle…Strict times make a strict Saint Nicholas.

When the Almighty is seen as more lenient, immediately softens the image of the Saint.”

This book was published in 1970.^xi

The psychological trick that we Christians play is this. God might be more lenient, more gentle

– not many Christians these days would really think that this God would annihilate one’s enemy, nor when really pressed would think that that family member who was a nuisance to all, is burning in hell – however we leave the options open on punishment, on reward, on leading our lives in positive directions or to “lead us into temptation”. The grooming of the Almighty has changed from offering animals, liquids or grains into abstract offering, into giving our thanks, showing our gratitude because God is good. God became the good father with whom we make a deal. An insecure deal because for some inexplicable reason we keep grooming while this almighty being sometimes seems to be very gracious and in other instances absolutely cruel. We even try to defend this cruelty by saying all that God does has a hidden meaning and it will come out in the end what the purpose was. Control is in the human genes and we project the power to control onto our god. In Genesis it says: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’”. It is a mistake to turn this around and state that thus God is a righteous judgmental father.

In “No life, here – no joy, terror or tears” the later Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop Rowan Williams wrote: “Classical theology maintains that God is indeed different from the universe. To say this is to suggest a radical difference between one agent and another in the world. God is not an object or agent over against the world; God is the eternal activity of unconstrained love, an activity that activates all that is around God is more intimate to the world than we can imagine, as the source of activity or energy itself; and God is more different than we can imagine, beyond category and kind and definition.”^xii Sadly enough Bishop Williams was back

in 1998 very negative about theses that Bishop Spong brought forward to colleagues to discuss. Calling the theses “the sort of questions that might be asked by a bright 20th century sixth-former” is nasty and I am sure the Most Reverend Williams regretted this later in his heart. Of course Bishop Spong’s theses had a shock effect. However I think it was necessary to break the ease of prescribing worn-in doctrines. That which Rowan Williams wrote as a concept of God different from our universe seems progressive, but Williams still keeps the door open to a God who is in an unknown place and is acting directly in our lives. It is at least a big step forward from the Creeds that are being said in almost all Christian worship services. What about the word choice: the Almighty, for our salvation he came down from heaven, for our sake he was crucified, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, he shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and in another version: one Baptism for the remission of sins. It might be that church leaders dismiss my remarks also as questions of a maybe not so smart child, and that they for themselves secretly interpret the image of God as in the writing of Williams above. Why then do they not allow lay people also to take a little step forward? Why keep words from a council in Nicea in the year 325 after Christ?

Bishop Rowan Williams used as title: No life, here – no joy, terror or tears. I would say that indeed there is no life directly controlled by a god, no joy planted and tears sowed by a deity, and certainly no terror for the wrath of that god.

If we let this controlling image of a god go and see God as the Source of all Life, Love, and Being, the God manifested in the life, death and reappearance of Jesus, it opens the way for all of us to live our lives without fear, fully and without being afraid of death. Not because a tribal God of Israel willed his only Son to sacrifice himself so that the demand in the covenant would be fulfilled and we started with a clean slate. No it is because we long to follow Jesus, the divine presence, who promised to be with us in spirit in good times and in bad times. Just as God is with us, in us, in everything around us and always will be.

It is a trick to make people think that if we are more thankful, it will lead to more good things happening. Religious leaders will deny this and surely most of them are not consciously suggesting this. Especially now that it also has become a trend in the secular world to count your blessings, make a diary with all the good things that happened to you, it seems such a good idea. Nice if people are not complaining for a while. Again control raises its head.

Secular and religious leaders have a lot less to worry about if people are not grumbling.

I do not suggest that good things don’t happen or matter. Good and bad things happen to good people as well as bad people. God, the Source of all Being, Love and Life, is with us in all of this.

Our gratitude, our thanksgiving and our sorrow then turns into sharing our lives with each other and with God. Being in contact with this God is meditation rather than prayer. As pupils of Jesus we are aware of the joy in life when we as Lazarus turn to live life fully. As disciples we acknowledge the tragedy in life when we like Job or the by Babylonians imprisoned Israelites sink in deep sorrow. Our lives are full when we try to understand, to respect, to have compassion, and to give our love generously. It is full when we share everything, our fears, our longing, our sorrow and our joy.

A place for every feeling and every feeling in its place.

This essay came into being because I started thinking about the concept of thanksgiving and gratitude. It led to a new way of looking at religion and especially what most Christians still accept as an image of God.

The big question in the room is of course, what is God then? The answer then must be, I do not know.

I want to go back to the book written by Dr. Elaine Pagels, Beyond Believe.^xiii In it Heracleon, the disciple of an early Christian leader, Valentinus, explains the gospel story of Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman at the well. Valentinus as well as Heracleon belonged to a very diverse group of early Christians who later were sampled under the name Gnostics. Heracleon argues the following: When he [Jesus] tells the woman to “call her husband”, he is showing her that she already has a “partner” in divine being – that is, a relationship to God of which she is not yet aware. He directs her to call upon resources she already has been given, and to  discover her spiritual counterpart, her “fulfillment” (pleroma in Greek). Once she recognizes this as an essential part of her being, she may celebrate communion with God as the divine “marriage”.

I once heard a Christian leader say, ‘yes well, the Gnostics, we don’t want to go there. Their writings are very confusing so better stick to the teachings of the orthodox church as they were handed down’. The early Christians were indeed very diverse in their views, it is true, if we look at the hidden texts that were found. However it seemed that these “Gnostics” were not overly bothered by this diversity of opinions. They included discussion.

Another leader from the time of Valentinus was Irenaeus. He was strongly opposed against the thoughts of “heretics” like Valentinus. Irenaeus was convinced that only religious leaders could explain and set out in doctrines what to make of the oral statements and writings that were handed down. Through circumstances, among which the conversion and following politics of emperor Constantine, the view of Irenaeus – to say it very simply – has won. The first doctrines were laid out by the first council of bishops in Nicaea.

Of course nobody can reconstruct the “what ifs” of history. What if Valentinus had become bishop of Rome instead of Pius the Confessor for example. Would Christianity have died out because of too much division? We will never know. But for this unity in belief, that “trickled down” from the church leaders, we allowed the feelings of guilt, original sin and the old fear of punishment into our lives. We held on to a human-like image of God, over time grown into a loving but strict father, not a mother or father and mother, to whom we have to offer and give thanks because He is the creator and He sacrificed his only Son to redeem our sins. By accepting the orthodox doctrines we sacrificed the chance to explore our personal fulfillment as individuals and to share those experiences with each other.

I do realize that without the doctrines of the church there are no ready answers to many questions. But that is all right. In my point of view it is better to leave a void to fill by everyone’s own need for fulfillment. I trust the Lord Jesus who offered us a path, a way of life.

Let us give thanks? Absolutely if it means the profound sharing of joy – for the concept of conscious and subconscious life and for the divine life of Jesus of which we received the good news. I am grateful for the chance to follow Jesus as my Lord and to find God by Him and with Him and in Him in communion, and for the lives of all the saints who found that fulfillment in the end.

Let us grieve? Certainly if it means sharing the sadness – for the bad things that happen, the imperfectness, the unfulfillment of our lives.

Sharing every aspect of our lives is the only way to learn together to grow towards that state, that we cannot yet grasp with our hearts and minds, which is called “the kingdom” of God.
 

References

ii New Revised Standard Version Bible

ii Elsevier, Evolution and Human Behavior Volume 18, Issue 6, November 1997, Pages 375-386

iii https://www.earthtouchnews.com/natural-world/animal-behaviour/will-fido-the-dog-feel-thankful-for-your- thanksgiving-leftovers/

iv Hoe hoort het eigenlijk? – Amy Groskamp-Ten Have. Geheel herzien door Maja Krans en Wia Post. 1983 H.J.W. Becht’s Uitgeversmaatschappij bv, Amsterdam.

v https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-homework-myth/201807/the-overselling-gratitude

vi New Revised Standard Version Bible

vii Nature volume 532, pages 228–231 (14 April 2016) -Joseph Watts, Oliver Sheehan, Quentin D. Atkinson, Joseph Bulbulia & Russell D. Gray

viii https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2017/09-10/history-martin-luther-religious- revolution/

ix What Became of God the Mother? Conflicting Images of God in Early Christianity – Elaine H.Pagels. Taken from Womanspirit Rising pp107-119. Ed. Carol P.Christ and Judith Plaskow. Harper & Row, 1979. Elaine H. Pagels received her Ph. D. from Harvard University and now teaches at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is author of The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis and The Gnostic Paul. Her articles have appeared in Harvard Theological Review, Journal for Biblical Literature, and Journal of the American Academy of Religion. This essay originally appeared in Signs (Vol. 2, no. 2), c 1976 by The University of Chicago, and is reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.

x A New Christianity for a New World – Chapter: Jesus beyond Incarnation – Author: John Shelby Spong – Harper San Francisco.

xi Het heerlijk avondje uit Beminde Gelovigen en jeugdherinneringen uit In de Kou– Godfried Bomans – Amboboeken Baarn.

xii“No life, here – no joy, terror or tears”: Bishop Spong and Archbishop Williams’ response June 10, 2010 – Anglican Ecumenical Society. At the time of writing Rowan Williams was Bishop of Monmouth. Transcribed and reproduced with permission from the 17 July 1998 edition of Church Times

xiii Beyond belief – the Secret Gospel of Thomas – Elaine Pagels – Vintage Books, a Division of Random House. Inc., New York.