Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen

My older daughter was here visiting.  Saturday night we will attend the ceremony marking her graduation from divinity school, as she prepares in middle age to take up the calling of a Christian ministry.  Despite my reservations about the existence of god and hence the validity of the foundations of the Christian Church I am deeply happy for her, since she has certainly blossomed into a calling in the years since she discovered the desire for this vocation.  We, as you can imagine, are talking a good deal about various ideas of god which I truly enjoy, having both started out life as a very devout, believing Episcopalian and having taught the subject of religion many times over the years.  She has the habit of attributing various and sundry attitudes, practices, and choices to the deity who now presides over her life, whilst I want to put all my chips down on the gambling table of life on the square played by reason or chance, or when I am feeling melodramatic, destiny.  My husband who sits nearby can only shake his head, being as he is a refugee from the years of irrationalities, mysticism and as he says nonsense that was the standard Catholic upbringing of his era.  He doesn't like to hear any conversation which allows for the premise that there may be a deity of any sort directing events.  My habit of mind is not so rational as his; I am an illogical and imagistic thinker, and so I have retained the story telling manner of exposition which accommodates less precise formulations that will seem "true" in another sense.  But as Pontius Pilate asked of the Christ "What is Truth?" when He announced that he had come as a sign of the truth.  I said to my daughter that the one text that is basic to me when I ever enter into any  discussion of what or what not may be true of the works and intentions of any god figure is Verse 38 from the Book of Job where Jaweh is said to thunder out at Job and Elihu as they try to parse the meaning of the misfortunes that have come to Job.
     "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
      "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?"
and proceeds to ask a majestic set of questions about the origins of the universe that in our perspective take us back before the Big Bang and into the Utter Unknowability of Things.  A great retort by god to those who would presume to understand the workings of the universe, and also what I always say to any tiresome religious zealot who determines to impose one or another ideas of behavior, values, or thought as being "God's Will."  I mean who are you to say so?  And that goes for the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and every one of those ministers of mega churches that dot the landscape of this country.