18 Be not far away, O LORD; *
you are my strength; hasten to help me.19 Save me from the sword, *
my life from the power of the dog.Psalm 22
They say that animals can tell when an earthquake is coming. There’s a fundamental shift in whatever magnetic energy is also responsible for the way a dog spins around before it poops. We act like humans are smarter because we have this complicated language and opposable thumbs, but you can imagine that a dog might wonder why, if we’re so damn smart, we didn’t know to get out of the house before the ground gave way underneath it.
There’s lots of things to imagine, but a limited amount of building blocks to contribute to our imaginings. How can you think of something that doesn’t consist, at least in part, of something you have thought before? Or see, heard, touched, tasted or felt? There has to be something in the memory banks to provide the raw material of our dreams. How then can we imagine something wholly other, something like God?
St. Augustine seems to say that any idea we have of God is a gift from God. It’s like a piece of software that comes already loaded as soon as we get powered up. Some might say that we invented God out of this innate idea and the desire to expand on it. That doesn’t explain where the idea comes from though.
And it doesn’t explain where the idea is taking us. There is a promise inherent in the way we talk about God which gives meaning to our lives. The promise is that we are going somewhere, and all of this is going somewhere. There’s a purpose and a goal, even if it is obscured by that dark cloud rising from the desert’s floor. To believe in that goal is to imagine a place where the promise is fulfilled, a Promised Land if you will.
Deciding to own this belief and to act out of this belief is a grownup thing to do. When I was a child I talked a lot of trash about the cars I would race and the money I would win, but I ain’t a boy now. After 33 years, Jesus is not a boy either. He, as a human, has done his best to live the right way. Even Pelagius was right about his being the best of us. But the winds have changed, and the dogs understand that there is a moment when belief becomes action.
The action that Jesus takes, paradoxically, is in allowing something to happen rather than preventing or diverting it. Death, unless it is sudden, is usually like that. The work of dying is in allowing it to happen, not making it happen. Jesus has packed his bag and headed right straight into a storm that will blow away what is false and faithless and without love. Jesus takes this one eternal moment in his hand so that we might believe in a promised land.