Who Speaks for God?

It is Sunday afternoon, and I have been reading The Christian Century for September 7. Coming to the reading with some uneasyness over the triumphalism of so many in religious life today, over-confident in themselves and their spirituality, I was especially refreshed by an article on writing titled, "Taking Pen in Hand." Its author, Parker Palmer. the founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal, is also a well-known and widely heralded author of many books, who reflects from a Christian point of view on a life-time of writing himself.

What I found especially engaging in this article was a refreshing sense of humility, one could almost say of passion not for success but for faithfulness in pursuing his craft. "When people of any religion insist that the treasure cannot be carried except in their earthen vessels," Palmer writes, "they get into serious trouble--with themselves, with others, with the world and, I suspect, with God."

There is a great paradox between the treasure we seek to illuminate in our writing and the earthen vessels we remain as supposed illuninators. Palmer writes: "If we become attached to the vessel in ways that obscure the treasure, we must discard the vessel and create one that reveals more than it conceals.

"If we fail or refuse to do that, we are failing to respect the treasure, which is not our possession to have and to hold; it is the love and the power that has and holds us" (italincs mine).

"Why believe in God," he concludes, "if the God we believe in is so small as to be contained and controlled within our finite words and forms? The aim of our writing about faith, and of our living in faith, is to let God be God: original, wild, and free, a creative impulse that drives our living and our writing but can never be contained within the limits of who we are or what we think and say and do."

A good lesson in humility for all of us who dare to write, as well as for anyone who dares to speak for God.