This last week I was at a new friend's house. My husband and I had gone over after church to help with yard work, and since most of the yard work was muscle man duty, I stayed inside and chatted with my new friend. We got to talking about religion and God. We mostly discussed church.
We talked about my own personal connection to church and the necessity for those connections in my personal life. We talked about my husband, who has a much more private and intimate relationship with God, and who is so loving and supporting to go with me every week to a social event where God is less intimate and more communal. We talked about how my friend had attended a church when she was a kid and laughed about how the pastors had tried to convince her parents to baptize her when she was nine. She said something along the lines of how "religion is a great way to develop your morals."
That's the burr. This week I've been pondering that concept. Why did that strike me? It's not that the sentence is false. The Bible, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, the Shruti, Dhammapada and every other religious text are all books of morality. The Bible is definitely a book that outlines morality, but if that's all there is to it, what makes the Christian god any different than any other religious god or figure?
This is why that sentence truck me: if I believe that religion is good for is living a moral life and that's it, I don't need God. It's time to fess up. We all have a conscience. We all have a natural understanding of what is right or wrong, and we all have the choice to follow that leaning or not. We know when we choose not to follow our morals that there are consequences, whether externally or internally. If Christians are reading the Bible for the sake of bettering ourselves, we may as well give up on Christianity and follow our God given conscience. I know plenty of people who have done that.
Here's where it gets real. I believe that there is more to Christianity than being moral. There is more to all of this religion thing than being moral, which is scary when it comes right down to it. I am going to go off on a tangent for a moment here, but come with me and it will all tie back.
I want you to close your eyes and imagine this scenario for a moment. (Well, don't close your eyes really or you won't be able to read.) You are a child. You went into your parents room to look at your favorite decorative vase that is always on their night stand. You know you are not aloud to touch it, but it's beautiful. Ornate. Expensive, though money means little to you because you are not yet at an age where you have any wants or needs that are not provided for. You gently run your fingers over the red and orange flower pattern, and across the smooth baby blue glaze, completely oblivious to the cost of the fragile artwork. Your dad comes home from work, and as you hear the front door close, you start, your hand jerks, the vase falls and shatters. It is unrecoverable. You are devastated. You knew you were not aloud to touch the vase. You had been told over and over not to touch it, but you did anyways. And although your morals were present, you still disobeyed. And whether you get punished, or your parents choose to ignore your disobedience, the vase is still broken. There is no recovery.
Your dad walks into the room, looks at you and looks at the vase and is instantly aware of the situation. And he has a moment of deep sorrow. Because that beautiful piece of perfection can never be enjoyed again. And what's more, it was a family heirloom worth thousands of dollars that was to be passed down to you as an inheritance to be enjoyed by your future family, or sold as a downpayment on a house, or passed along to future generations. He is fully aware of your choice to disobey the words that he had told you over and over again, and that the consequences of your actions are beyond what you can even comprehend as a child. You have no concept of what thousands of dollars even means, or what harm to your future your actions have caused. He has every right to be angry with you, but more than anything, he is saddened by the fact that his intension for a beautiful piece of your life had just been shattered into a hundred pieces.
You see, having morals is important, but the truth is that none of us are very good at following them most of the time. No matter how hard we try, no matter how good we look, we all feel it on the inside, that our decisions do not reflect what we know is right nearly all of the time. Having morals is not enough to keep us from shattering our inheritance.
You brace yourself to be yelled at. You can feel the beating or grounding or whatever punishment that is about to happen. You imagine every possible scenario of what your dad could and should do to you, and cringe because you know that none of the situations that play out in your head are harsh enough punishment for what you just did. The look of disappointment on your dad's face is worse than you have ever seen. He silently crosses the room, grabs your hand without a word, and leads you out the door to the car. He points to the door as if to tell you to get in and buckle up. He starts the engine, and puts the car in reverse and heads down the road. "This is it" you think. "He is going to leave me in a field far away from here and I am going to have to learn how to survive on my own." He pulls into a parking space in downtown and instructs you to get out of the car and follow him. He takes your hand and leads you into a store right in front of the parking space. This is it. He is going to sell you to the shop owner to work as a slave for the rest of your life. He points to something on the highest shelf and asks the clerk, "Do you have anything better than that?". The clerk looks at him with confusion on his face, looks your dad up and down, and goes into the back. A few moments pass of suspense and you hear the clerk talking to the store owner. The owner emerges from the back, exchanges a few hushed words with your dad and goes back into the back. He emerges with something large and wrapped up in a box with thick packing. Your dad peaks into the box and asks you to wait in the car.
When he gets to the car, he places a large box in the back seat, and proceeds to drive home. When you get home, he sits you on the couch to talk. With a pained look in his eye, he reminds you that you were not permitted to touch the vase. He explains to you that the vase was worth a lot of money, that it was very old, and that you were the one who was going to inherit it someday. But now the vase is broken and is not worth a penny. He tells you that because you disobeyed his instructions, you will be grounded from TV for a month. And then he tells you that he forgives you. He tells you that he loves you, and in fact, he loves you so much that he got something for you. He points to the box.
You slowly pull back the corners of the box and carefully unwrap a heavy, smooth object. It is a vase. A vase that is even more beautiful than the one before, with a design that is more complex and marvelous than you ever thought was possible. Your dad tells you that he loves you so much that he bought you a new vase, a new inheritance. And that this vase is worth even more than the first one. He tells you that he loves you so much that he was willing to pay any price to see that you get the inheritance you were promised, even though you were the one who was responsible for its end. And then he cups you up into his big strong arms and tells you over and over how much he adores you.
Here is the point of me telling you this story: Developing morals is essential to living a happy life, but we still mess things up. We still choose to touch the vase and eventually end up knocking it over. People who live moral lives still get shattered inside. Sometimes we have our lives shattered by others because of their decisions. Religion has to be more than just a set of moral standards, because we don't always choose to follow them, and we don't have a choice when other people shatter our lives. No matter what, we all have a shattered inheritance in one way or another. But God adores me. He adores you. He loves us each so much that he bought a new inheritance for us, and it is even more beautiful than the old one, because it was purchased out of love instead of handed down out of birth right.
For me, this way of thinking brings new understanding to what it means to be a Christian. I mess up a lot. I broke my inheritance a long time ago, and God purchased me a new one. This knowledge informs my decisions and my life in a whole new way. I don't have to try to do better just because I know what is moral, I want to do better because my dad wrote a big check, out of pure affection for me, for an inheritance that I am proud to receive from a father who loves me so so much.
